A pelican named Thel ([info]thelican) wrote,
@ 2009-03-22 09:11:00
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Entry tags:neo-realism, realisms

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Because it encapsulates some of my enduring doubts about realisms in general (and, more immediately, that A.O. Scott article): "About Neo-Neo-Realism".


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"Tell all the Truth but tell it slant," etc.
[info]thelican
2009-03-22 02:27 pm UTC (link)
And I especially like this part of Brody's mild rebuttal:

"The reason there wasn’t even more American neorealism in Hollywood is that another form of realism—method acting—was coming to the studios. It conjured a degree and an intensity of psychological reality far greater than any to be found elsewhere at the time in world cinema, by opening up characters’ sex lives, hidden desires, deep emotional wounds—nothing less than the acknowledgment of the dignity of the individual over the limits of the social category."

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[info]thelican
2009-03-22 02:37 pm UTC (link)
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/goingson/2008/12/against-wendy-a.html

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[info]rhododactylus
2009-03-22 06:59 pm UTC (link)
Most Neo-Neo-Realist films seem constructed to appeal to the conceptual sympathies of the audience rather than providing a compelling experience, and -- because I do not like art that operates solely at the meta-level -- they tend to leave me cold.

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[info]thelican
2009-03-22 07:13 pm UTC (link)
My feeling exactly. Clearly, I return to this complain a lot, but damnit if I don't need my compelling experience in the art itself.

Wendy and Lucy (which prompted a lot of this recent discussion) just made me feel ill, largely because it presents just a lot of very bleak documentary realism. Were it not for my own current bleak circumstances (you know, that thing about killing a family of five I mentioned in the restaurant), my response may have been only boredom.

Yeah, so, I might not necessarily disagree with much of Scott's assessment of these films, I find little satisfaction in the experience of them.

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[info]dominika_kretek
2009-03-22 07:43 pm UTC (link)
Realism is a device! Why is it so hard to make people understand this? In film it is even more of a device, precisely because it can seem so transparent. Usually (in our culture, at least) realism is a device for arrogating authority to itself, if nothing else. Often nothing else.

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[info]thelican
2009-03-22 08:09 pm UTC (link)
Oh, I don't think that either rhododactylus or I is saying that it's not a device.

It just happens to be a device which, as an experience in itself, doesn't usually move me. (But here I'm talking especially about neo-neo-realism.) I'm pretty aware that this is my own bias, and if anything, I talk way too much about my preference for being effectively dominated by a much more contrived kind of art. I prefer transformation to transparency, but I'm not really begrudging anyone her preference - more like figuring out the whys and hows.

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[info]dominika_kretek
2009-03-22 09:15 pm UTC (link)
Whoops! I was mostly agreeing with you. Sorry if I came off too strident. Mainly I was inveighing against, not so much the critics, but the kinds of approaches to film that are targeted by films like Wendy and Lucy (which I haven't seen, but let's assume that the critics you linked to have characterized it well).

As an artist whose work is not especially realist but who is not opposed to realism per se, I get pretty exercised about it because so often critical response assumes that what I do is always in some way self-indulgent while implicitly granting realist work moral seriousness, political relevance, and the authority of tradition simply for being realist.

With film this tendency is maybe even more tempting and more transparent, because of how tempting it is to believe that the camera is showing you things as they "really are." The particular realist practices of neorealism and now this "neoneorealism" seem to be at least in part a surrender to that tempting belief, and to the extent that they use realism to arrogate authority, they encourage audiences to surrender as well. Now it may be an improvement if you're reacting against films that operate in the world of pat fantasy and spectacle, but at this late date I think realist films have to take active steps to counter that tendency in audiences, especially among relatively well-off audiences, because they have been well trained to believe in media more than in reality.

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[info]thelican
2009-03-22 10:00 pm UTC (link)
Ah, got it. Your greater sense of agreement sort of occurred to me after I looked again at your final sentence - the "Often nothing else" striking me as pretty much my feeling.

And I'm glad that you've pointed out what can be most irksome to artists and audiences whose preference for a more stylized sensibility - as opposed to the kind of documentary realism that's considered much more morally significant - is that such a sensibility is indeed way too often dismissed or even attacked as self-indulgent.

I think the larger problem, maybe, is that more nuanced metaphor is just a tougher sell because it requires more interpretive work.

I'm curious, though: what kind of steps do you think realist filmmakers should take to counter the audience's faith in supposedly transparent media?

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[info]grashupfer
2009-03-22 08:08 pm UTC (link)
Are there [m]any realist novels you like?

I've been reading a lot of them lately. I started tackling books from a list I found online of James Woods' favorite novels from 1945 to 1994 (the year the list appeared). I might post something about it soon.

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[info]thelican
2009-03-22 09:39 pm UTC (link)
Hmm. I think this is one of those terms on whose definitions we need to agree before we proceed apace! If we're defining the realist novel as its more narrowly and traditionally conceived, mostly inhabiting the last half of the nineteenth century in the US, and happening a bit earlier in most of Europe, then I'll have to say that I like lots of them okay because they're historically interesting. So, while Sister Carrie does not knock me out of the park with its metaphorical language or its psychological depth, when reading it, I just generally felt kind of content and interested in the everyday attitudes and details it presents. Less true of Wharton's novels, which again, don't send me, but which I kind of enjoy because of her pretty sophisticated sense of irony. I like The House of Mirth, but it doesn't really excite me.

That said, there's lots of realism/naturalism I haven't read (yet!). Based solely on how Walter Benn Michaels writes about him, I'd like to read some Frank Norris. And I've never read William Dean Howells or Upton Sinclair. Or Zola. I'm pretty inexperienced, really, when it comes down to the realist/naturalist novel.

Once we get talking about the term in its more elasticky sense, then it really depends. If you're cross-listing it with the Victorian novel and/or extending it to post-WWII stuff, it really, really depends on pretty discrete, individual cases for me.

Which books are you thinking of? I'd love to read your post, too.

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[info]grashupfer
2009-03-22 11:12 pm UTC (link)
Yes, the danger of too much apace. I should have started by asking you about your wonderfully plural realisms. I think I gather your doubts by reading the comments string.

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[info]thelican
2009-03-23 04:03 pm UTC (link)
But I'm always shouting about those doubts, amn't I? (Feels like it, at least.)

I'm sensing that you mean "realist" as more of a stylistic descriptor than a historical category. Yes? If I limit my definition of literary realism to a kind of prose that eliminates most metaphorical language and aims for dry documentation of the workaday, then I often have trouble enjoying it. But if we extend it...? You tell me your definition.

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