realism

[ Category - Film ]

This is the school of thought that film should focus on the ontological (the nature of being i.e. real life) properties of cinema.

If we paint a picture of someone, we know don't think of the painting as being that person. But when we take a photo, we feel like the photo is that person.

Concepts:

Indexicality

Photos and film act as an index into the world. For a particular photo or video to have been taken, that person really needed to be there at that time.

Interesting use of the word index.

I guess you could say realism is like an array access into the real world.

Duration

Unlike photography, which is also indexical, film is also can show an index through time, because it has duration.

Like a full git history of a data field.

Viewed in this perspective, the cinema is objectivity in time. The film is no longer content to preserve the object, enshrouded as it were in an instant, as the bodies of insects are preserved intact, out of the distant past, in amber. The film delivers baroque art from its convulsive catalepsy. Now, for the first time, the image of things is likewise the image of their duration, change mummified as it were "("Ontology of the Photographic Image")"

Reminds me of the words of the actor in the movie Camera.

Finally Dziga Vertov's man with a movie camera is realist in the sense that it uses the kino-eye, but not real in the sense that there's a lot of editing going on, which the realists were not a huge fan of.