The Real Deal
In a nice bit of synchronicity, the Pacific Film Archive opens its series, Moments of Truth: Italian Cinema Classics, the same week that roundtables on the critic André Bazin get underway in Paris and New Haven. Bazin, who died 50 years ago, was the great proponent of neorealism and is as responsible as anyone for the movement’s long shadow. In a fascinating tribute to the French critic in the current Film Comment, Dudley Andrew shows how Bazin fostered linkages that extend far beyond the French New Wave: “Most at stake for all the Chinese at the Shanghai conference was Bazin’s ‘realist aesthetic.’ He was evidently crucial just after the Cultural Revolution when filmmakers tentatively began to step, if not outside the studio, at least outside the models that had been imposed on them for quite some time.” Beyond zeitgeist, Bazin’s writing is a wellspring in wait for nascent film cultures.
I’ve been playing around with the not entirely reputable strand of realism in the Hollywood cycle of late 40s police procedurals marketed as “semi-documentaries,” so in turning back to the Italian classics for an abbreviated piece I wrote for the Guardian I was still carrying some residual queasiness about an essentialist usage of “realism.” As soon as realism is as the expense of something else, after all, it takes on an ideological shade.
One way out of this bind, perhaps, is to consider realism as an effect (Barthes’s “The Reality Effect) rather than a structural certainty.
The Italian films may not have exclusive claims on the truth, but their sense of liberation is still palpable. Looking back on Bazin’s writing on the films–itself remarkably free–I wonder whether we can distinguish between film realism as a historical effect and a sensory one. What would Bazin make of the move towards more extreme representations of the real–whether the triumph of the slow or the Muybridge-esque plunge into the mechanics of motion of your typical HD sports broadcast (or, for that matter, Zidane)? Though the two tendencies are, in many ways, diametrically opposed, they nonetheless both exhibit an almost obsessive fixation on duration and extending vision. Bazin admired Gregg Toland’s deep-focus compositions in Citizen Kane for the way they do not predetermine the eye’s movement, but this critical distance should not be confused for a realistic approximation of seeing; as with Muybridge’s horse, the camera outperforms its organic model. James Naremore, in The Magic World of Orson Welles, considers the way Welles encouraged Toland to consciously heighten this effect by letting deep-space curve into distortion: “Most directors operate on the principle that the motion picture image should approximate some kind of human perception; the virtue of Welles’s films, however, is that they work in a different direction, creating what the Russian formalist critic Victor Shklovsky would call a poetic ‘defamiliarization.’” Such is Zidane.
Perhaps it is important to remember, however, that many of the Italian originals did not invoke realism as an aesthetic ends in itself, but to position their films as sites of dialog, byways of cultural thought. This activist stance links the films to German philosopher Jürgen Habermas concept as the “public sphere” (a theory of rationalist democracy latter taken up by scholar-filmmaker Alexander Kluge). I can think of no better example of a film fiction embedding itself in this public sphere than Francesco Rosi’s Hands Over the City (100 embroiling minutes of development politics in Naples; not so much a narrative as a series of terrific, scene-chewing arguments), and I’m looking forward to seeing the director’s chronicle of bullfighting (pre-HD, but here we are back to sports), The Moments of Truth, when it plays the Pacific Film Archive.
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