Text

E-book Realist Cinema as World Cinema : Non-cinema, Intermedial Passages, Total Cinema

---

Penilaian

---

This book is about f ilms and f ilmmakers committed to reality. For them, the world is not a mere construct or discourse, but made of people, animals, plants and objects that physically exist, thrive, suffer and die. They feel part of, and responsible for, this material world and want to change it for the better. ‘Realism’, this book argues, is what def ines these f ilms’ mode of production and binds them together across world cinema history and geography.The idea that ‘realism’ could serve as the common denominator across the vast range of productions usually labelled as ‘world cinema’ is widespread and seemingly uncontroversial. Thomas Elsaesser (2009: 3), for example, starts his insightful essay ‘World Cinema: Realism, Evidence, Presence’ by declaring: ‘European art/auteur cinema (and by extension, world cinema) has always def ined itself against Hollywood on the basis of its greater realism’. The potted history contained in this formula suggests that world cinema started in Europe, more precisely with Italian neorealism in the 1940s, which, on the basis of a documentary approach to the real, offered fertile ground for the development of art and auteur cinema. Turning its back on the Nazi-fascist propaganda machine as much as on Hollywood fantasy, this new realist strand unveiled on screen the gritty reality of a poverty-stricken, devastated Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War. As we know, the raw aesthetics and revelatory power of this foundational movement inspired a f lurry of subsequent (social-)realist schools in the world, such as Indian independent cinema in the 1950s, Brazilian Cinema Novo in the 1960s, African post-independence cinemas in the 1970s, the New Iranian Cinema in the 1980s, Danish Dogme 95 in the 1990s and many other new waves and new cinemas, remaining inf luential up to today. Neorealism was moreover the touchstone of André Bazin’s concept of cinematic realism, the world’s most foundational and enduring f ilm theory ever written, albeit in the form of short magazine articles – 2,600 of them, in the count of Bazin specialist Dudley Andrew (2010: 13) – left behind after his death at a mere 40 years of age. As is well known, the f ilm medium, for Bazin (1967), is intrinsically real-ist thanks to the ‘ontology of the photographic image’, that is, the medium’s recording property, which establishes a material bond with its referent in the objective world, a process later equated by Peter Wollen (1998: 86) to ‘indexicality’ as def ined by Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic theory. Bazin was moreover, and most importantly to my own approach, the f irst to locate realism at the point of production, by extolling, in neorealism (Rossellini, Visconti, De Sica), the regular use of real locations, non-professional actors (as well as actors stripped of their acting personas) and the combination of long takes and long shots that preserve the space-time integrity of the prof ilmic event.

---

Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

-

No. Panggil

778.53 NAG r

Penerbit

Amsterdam : Amsterdam University Press., 2020

Deskripsi Fisik

304 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

978946298751

Klasifikasi

778.53

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

-

Subjek

Cinematography

Info Detail Spesifik

-

Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

-

Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

Komentar

---

Anda harus masuk sebelum memberikan komentar