Unlike the filmakers of the Surrealist movement, who rejected realism and attempted to transcend the real to reach a superior state, the Realists believed that the form of filmmaking that could best communicate their message was realism.
Whereas other cinema would offer its audience an escape, Realism made its viewers confront social issues unflinchingly.
It could be argued that early cinema first displayed Realism when documentary films of far off exotic locations were shown to audiences. Research has shown that before 1906 actuality films outnumbered fictional films (Gunning 1990, p. 56). However, unlike the films of Italian Neorealism and British Social Realism, the importance lay not in displaying their technology, and less in the realism of what was being shown.
The Neorealist movement was essentially a rebellion against the totalitarian control that was being exercised in Italy; film critics had a lack of creative control as they had been prevented from discussing politics in the Cinema magazine, as the editor was Vittorio Mussolini, son of Benito Mussolini.
It was felt by these critics that filmmakers should be look to the influences of realist writers, and to French poetic realism to create an alternative to the telefono bianco films that they despised, that would effectively convey their message and deal poetically with the social issues that were affecting them.
Neorealism is hard to define because there does not seem to be any unanimous assent on what it is; in fact it seems that a definition of Neorealism is not desired by the filmmakers and critics of the genre, who would like us to believe that Neorealism has rejected conventions. Bazin said that Neorealism was a cinema of ‘fact’ (Bondanella, p. 31), a bold statement.
Fellini remarked that ‘Neorealism is a way of seeing reality without prejudice, without conventions coming between it and myself – facing it without preconceptions, looking at it in an honest way – whatever reality is, not just social reality but all that there is within a man’ (Bondanella 1998, p. 32)
However, it could be argued that Fellini is being idealistic when he states that Neorealism is without conventions, and that .
Certainly Neorealism has general characteristics throughout its films that have been established through the movement’s conceptualisation of realism, the most striking being the subjects the films dealt with.
Because the films of Italian Neorealism all dealt with the topics of the war, the Resistance, poverty, unemployment, the Partisan struggle and social injustice, despite being admittedly actual problems, they could not help but become generic.
There is a contrast between what Fellini says and what Armes and Bazin and note – they admit that Neorealism is ‘a cinema quite involved with artifice and had established its own cinematic conventions’ (Bondanella 1998, p. 33)
If we consider this notion then we have to acknowledge that Neorealism could not help but become a genre, and in being that films that fell into this catergory had to conform, making it disputable whether they had achieved true realism.
However, this does not mean that Neorealists had not found an effective way of articulating the real through a mixture of traditional realism and artistic intention.
As Rossellini said himself, realism is ‘simply the artistic form of the truth.’ (Bondanella 1998, p. 32).
Ironically, it is through some of the conventions of Neorealism that its dedication to the real can be asserted. For example, the use of non-professional actors that was almost universal in Italian Neorealism meant that the films seemed to be less contrived and took an air of pretence that Hollywood films suffered from away. In De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief the two main characters of father and son were both non professionals, which in Peter Bondanella’s opinion resulted in their performances being that which could have not have been ‘surpassed by even the most experience of theatrical actors’ (Bondanella 1998, p. 56). André Bazin said of the film that it was the ‘only valid Communist film of the whole past decade’ (Bondanella 1998, p. 58).
The less obvious filmic techniques of Neorealism, for example long shots and unobtrusive editing, also lend themselves efficiently to the cause, by not distracting us with formal aesthetics the films achieved a documentary like feel, especially in the case of Rossellini’s Rome, Open City.
The rejection of traditional cinematic conventions through not only non-professional actors and documentary effects but also on-location shooting, social content, historical actuality, political commitment, and a respect for actual duration being reflected in the screen time all makes an effective argument for Neorealisms adherence to real life and opposition to the manipulation mainstream film encountered in the cutting room.
Despite this though, even in Rome, Open City the balance between realism and artistic interpretation is noticeable. Although unobtrusive editing and long shots are utilized, there are also sequences which remind its audience that they are watching a film.
For example, Rossellini cuts back and forth between Don Pietro’s search for the weapons and descent through the building and the fascist officer’s ascent through the same building, creating suspense and drawing our attention to the construction of the scene through the cinematic device used.
Rossellini creates a narrative incorporating fact and fiction, and the Italian Neorealists certainly didn’t deny the importance the artistic elements of their films, and it could be argued that it was their willingness to have fiction and fact, illusion and reality go hand in hand that made their films so effective.
Unlike the Hollywood mainstream films the Neorealists were attempting to provide an antidote to, their films didn’t conform to sterotypical narratives, being more realistic than to hope for ‘happy ever afters’.
However, a reoccurring theme through the films that seemed to signify hope and a better future for Italy was that of the children of the country, and this perhaps at least offered the prospect of a happy ending one day.
The impact of Italian Neorealism has been undeniable, not only in Italy but in films throughout the world and especially in French New Wave cinema.
British Social Realism was heavily influenced by both French New Wave and Italian Neorealism, and like the latter was partly developed out of a struggle to develop an authentic national cinema to combat the dominance of the Hollywood cinema industry. Therefore, like with Italian Neorealism, its filmmakers believed a movement away from the escapism of Hollywood towards realism with which marginalised and unrepresented masses could relate.
However, the distinction between escapism and realism is not so easily reduced to a distinction between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’.
British New Wave has many characteristics, like Italian Neorealism, that make it possible for us to argue the realism of the movement. One would be the typage, the casting of non-professional actors who were physically appropriate for the roles, often with regional actors, had before this been quite unheard of in British cinema.
The use of townscape and lanscape shots in real locations, also seem to suggest they are telling real stories, in real historical locations.
However, the films of the movement were quite focused on the individual, which has led to some critics saying they cannot be representative of a larger struggle.
It could be argued though, that the relationships between the dominant community and our protagonists, often unlikeable ‘angry young men’, can be representing the masses plight on a personal, more humanistic level. Higson highlights how, in a contrast to the earlier films of a decade before where the police force itself is the centre of the community, in the later films, for example The Lonelieness of the Long Distance Runner the ‘petty criminal has become the hero, while the police and borstal staff, as the offical representatives or at least managers of the community, are constructed as threats to the integrity of the individual’ (Higson, 1986 p. 92). This could be construed as reflecting the social feeling at the time, a metaphor for the working class feeling that authority had given them no voice, and an alienation in both psychological and sociological terms.
Another trait present in British New Wave that I have also commented on regarding Italian Neorealism is the desire for a poetic cinema, a poetic realism that would translate their issues in an artistic way. Although British New Wave certainly developed from earlier documentary filmmaking, they sought to do things in a completely different, new cinematic language.
It could be argued that documentaries are the closest cinematic form of realism we can achieve.
Alan Lovell claimed that ‘the importance of the documentary lies not in the quality of individual films but in the impact it had in general on the British cinema’ (Lovell and Hillier 1972, p.35).
It could be argued that this has, as Andrew Higson puts it ‘produced a film culture which has been profoundly mistrustful of anything other that a particular de-dramatised naturalistic form: ‘style’ becomes something which gets in the way of the message of the film’ (Higson 1986, p. 76)
In the past prohibition against cinematic realism by those who felt it compromised their art form had thwarted the development of documentary film making.
The emergence of documentary filmmaking allowed audiences to view a world that had previously been off limits.
André Bazin, said that ‘The reality that the cinema produces at will and organizes is the same worldly reality of which we are a part.’ (Gaines 2007, p. 44)
He argued for ‘objective reality’ and ‘true continuity’ in documentaries, but can we ever really be objective?
A film-maker will always have a intention and no matter whether they try to show the world as it is, they will always do so subjectively by choosing what to show and what not to show, and so we have to be aware as an audience that a documentary that looks the same as the world before the camera has still been cut or produced out of material subject to other factors, such as a film-makers bias towards one side.
The reason it is important for us to realise this is because unlike when we watch a fictional film and are aware of a subjective filmmaker who has intent, we may accept documentaries at face value and base our views on the content we see and hear within them.
Documentary seeks to manipulate reality as means to an end, but reality is a moving target, and this may mean that documentary can never truely hold a mirror up to the world.
As much as the film maker may want the camera to show the importance of the everyday in a way which is merely observational, it could be argued that it cannot help but be analytical.
Radical film maker and author Danny Schecter expressed a concern that documentary realism could reinforce a policy you do not approve of, because subjects are left to speak uncoached, however Gaines believes that if we take a long enough view on everyday life ‘the truth will out’. (Gaines 2007, p. 51)
Gaines believes that a same world sensation is necessary and that we need to return to the form of documentary that uses the world to transform the world, which motivates people into doing something, similar to the Soviet tradition when cinema provoked revolutionary bodies.
Documentary making as Peter Wyeth and Don Mcpherson state, has ‘set the very terms in which film-making is thought about in Britain’ (Higson 1986, p. 73), and this is still evident in British cinema today. Gritty social realism is the identity our national cinema has, and some contemporary examples of this are Dirty Pretty Things and the films of Paul Greengrass.
In conclusion I would argue that realism has been conceptualised and articulated into countless forms by filmmakers that seek to replicate reality, but that we will never be able to ascertain which does so most effectively as reality itself is a subjective concept that can never be consistantly defined.
Bibliography
- Bondanella, Peter (1998) ‘The Masters of Neorealism: De Sica, Visconti and Rossellini’ in Italian Cinema from Neorealism to the Present, New York: Continuum
- Gaines, Jane M. (2007) ‘The Production of Outrage: the Radical Documentary Tradition’, The Journal of Cinema and Media 48.2 36-55
- Higson, Andrew (1986) ‘Britains Outstanding Contribution to the Film’: The Documentary-Realist Tradition in Charles Barr (ed) in All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years Of British Cinema, London: BFI
- Lovell, Alan and Hillier, Jim (1972) Studies in Documentary, London, Secker & Warburg/BFI, p. 35
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment