The Grierson Testament, 1969–71

From 1969 to 1971, documentary film movement pioneer and founder John Grierson spent his sunset years at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. During that time, the Canadian Radio and Television Commission invited him to Ottawa to advise on the state of television policy and Canadian communications in general. Typically, Grierson cut a wide swathe through the subject, and provided a stimulating analysis of the state of Canada’s public institutions of television, film production, and realist filmmaking. Three volumes of transcripts of his audiotaped sessions stand as his final testament. Using this source, this chapter develops an overview of his position on the industry, on government-sponsored film, and on prospects for expanding realist images in what he acerbically called a developing world of consumerism and inane television. Typically, Grierson’s comments were filled with intelligence, experience, and acumen, while he also seemed to be wrestling with various contradictions and ideas derived from 19th century idealist philosophy. Perhaps Grierson was, as some have said, a curious combination of irreconcilable opposites. These transcripts reveal a visionary who had made things happen, whether as a bull in a china shop or as a fencer whose rapier intelligence demolished or convinced those with whom he engaged. With his death in 1972, this material stands as his last testament.

The Rhetoric of Madness in Realist Film Theory

This chapter explores the rhetoric of madness and mental illness informing realist film theories. Hugo Münsterberg, author of the first work of film theory, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study, considered the following several features—reminiscent of the symptomatic language of dissociative identity disorder—essential to cinema: decentralization (the ability to assume alternate points of view), mobility (the ability to invert the past and the present, the real and the virtual), and derealization and disembodiment (characteristic of film reception). Epstein’s revelationist aesthetic and Balázs’s anthropomorphic film theory are both informed by animistic beliefs, translating into the realm of the aesthetic the symptoms of various types of delusional and anxiety disorders characterized by the inability to distinguish the living from the non-living. In Kracauer’s Theory of Film affective states commonly perceived as symptomatic of madness or mental illness—detachment from reality, ennui, melancholy, distraction, and disinterestedness/apathy—are posited as necessary to film’s ‘redemption of physical reality’. This chapter explores these and other formulations, focusing on Kracuer’s Theory of Film.

Displaced Vision: The Politics of Realism in Kracauer and Kluge1

This chapter focuses on some of the key intersections between the theories of cinematic realism developed by Siegfried Kracauer and Alexander Kluge. While, on the surface, their definitions of realism may appear very different, on closer view it is clear that both theorists are concerned with the role that a realist film practice can play in displacing the spectator’s vision and, in the process, facilitating a mode of perception that is not inflected by the ‘ideas’ and ‘value judgements’ that shape and delimit our experience of the present. Focusing on Kracauer’s Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality and on Kluge’s essays on the political promise of an “antagonistic” realist aesthetic, this chapter explores the role that a realist film practice can play in reanimating the viewer’s capacity to conceive of the possibilities of the future outside the parameters of the status quo.

The ‘Naturalist’ Treatment of Film in The Specificity of the Aesthetic (Georg Lukács, 1963) and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 1962; Caspar Wrede, 1970)

The distinction between progressive ‘narration’ and reactionary ‘description’, that is, between realism and naturalism, is one that Georg Lukács often made in his critical writings on literature, and is encapsulated in his 1936 essay ‘Narrate or Describe?’. This distinction, appearing in such an uncompromising essay, has also provided critics with reason to dismiss Lukács’ position on naturalism, and also on modernism, given that Lukács argued elsewhere that twentieth-century modernism was a regressive outcome of the alienating tendencies found within nineteenth-century naturalism. However, this chapter argues that the ‘Narrate or Describe?’ essay was related to the context of the 1930s, and that Lukács’ position on naturalism and modernism began to change from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s. A key work here was Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962). Lukács then revised his understanding of naturalism, and this found expression in his The Specificity of the Aesthetic (the Aesthetic) (1963). This chapter explores the account of filmic naturalism in the Aesthetic, and then compare that with Lukács’ response to Solzhenitsyn’s work, before applying both to an analysis of the 1970 film One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

The Moving-image Redemption of Orality and Lukács’s Early Writing on the Cinema

This paper analyzes the early film writing of Georg Lukács, particularly ‘Thoughts Towards an Aesthetic of the Cinema’ (‘Gedanken zu einer Ästhetic des Kino’, 1913), from the perspective of the oral mode of communication and expression, or, orality. It considers that the essence of the orality lies with the embodied engagement of human beings, basing on Walter J. Ong’s ideas of the orality-literacy hypothesis. With such understanding, it argues that the moving image can be the technological redemption of the orality, and suggests that the visual revival of the orality depends on but beyond the optical perception, necessarily involving the spectatorial embodiment. Lukács’s understandings towards the primitive moving-images imply that the revived orality in the visual can reside in two aspects: the mimetic representation of the moving image, and the intersubjective engagement between the two-dimensional screen world and the three-dimensional real world in the cinema experience. Additionally, this paper elucidates such hypothesis of the moving-image redemption of orality with a case study on a digital documentary Life in a Day (dir. Kevin Macdonald, 2011, 95 min.), for the purpose of suggesting the relevance of Lukács’s early thoughts to the recent digital culture and scholarly-discussions on the cinematic ‘affect’.

André Bazin, or the Ambiguity of Reality

André Bazin, a teacher and a film critic, was intent on making his students and readers realize that the cinema offered them a unique tool to discover the world. After his premature death at the age of 50, his friends collected some of his articles, republishing them in a variety of formats. However, the variable nature of this series of montages sometimes provoked misinterpretations. For example, a sentence on the “irresistible realism” of film was considered a proof that, for him, cinematic images copied reality. However, this chapter will argue that Bazin’s conception of both film and reality was far more elaborate and sophisticated than that. Bazin argued that there are so many things around us that we cannot see them all, we thus only ever know a small portion of the surrounding reality. Human beings have long drawn portraits and landscapes in order to observe at leisure what interests them. Unlike drawings, biased by the artist’s feelings, photography is “objective” since it is merely the effect of a chemical reaction and, beside its target, for instance a person, it registers, unwillingly, aspects of the surroundings such as they are. Film is as unbiased as photography and in addition gives faithful motion reproduction. While watching a long sequence taken in distant shot we may become aware of people, actions, situations appearing in the background and that we wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. Thanks to its realism a film can help us to gain a less narrow vision of reality.

Realism is to Think Historically: Overlapping Elements in Lukácsian and Brechtian Theories of Realism

The Brecht and Lukács debate constitutes one of the most important theoretical disputes in the history of Marxist criticism. Generally, Lukács is seen as an outmoded orthodox Marxist scholar, while Brecht is viewed as a champion of political modernism who managed to flee from the shackles of Marxist Orthodoxy and renew our understanding of politics and representation. Nonetheless, there are a number of overlapping elements in Brechtian and Lukácsian theories of realism. Telling in this respect is that in their definition of realism both theorists endorse Friedrich Engels’ assertion that realism is ‘the reproduction of typical people under typical circumstances’. This chapter analyses common elements in Brechtian and Lukácsian cinematic realism. The chapter is divided into two parts. In the first part, the chapter explores intersecting elements in Brecht and Lukacs’ critical writings on cinema, whilst, in the second part, the chapter explores case studies of films by Miklos Jancso and András Kovács. Both filmmakers have been previously discussed through a Brechtian lens, while Lukács also considered their films to be models of cinematic realism. In focusing both on the theoretical and practical paradigms of Brechtian and Lukácsian cinematic realism, this chapter sets out to rethink the Brecht and Lukács debate, and identify the common features in their understanding of politics and representation.

Multiple Indexicality and Multiple Realism in André Bazin

This chapter proposes a new theorization of André Bazin’s realism in two directions in which the medium-specific notion of photographic indexicality can be deconstructed and reframed in view of Bazin’s own work and post-Bazinian film history. First, aesthetically, iconic index as full representation: it is more accurate that his ontology of the image is less about indexicality per se than about the indexical effect which can also be created in hyperreal or surreal iconicity. The Bazinian total cinema has evolved in this regard, enhancing the spatiotemporal unity in long-take/deep-focus, and even eliminating the boundary between screen and theater spaces through digital/3D technology. Second, philosophically, imperfect index as partial revelation: Bazin’s realism in a more documentary mode often leads us from actual reality to the virtual Real, the unrepresentable abyss of ontological otherness that is only indirectly, impossibly indicated. This underworld of his realism is a fertile theoretical ground of (French) revelationism that has evolved from Epstein to Daney, from Deleuze to Nancy, Derrida, and Žižek. This chapter explores these two contradictory trends of Bazin’s persistent inspiration, and will also analyze relevant films, including post-Bazinian world cinema and contemporary digital cinema.

‘Montage, My Fine Care’: Realism, Surrealism and Postmodernism after Bazin

The title of this chapter takes its cue from one of Jean-Luc Godard’s well-known articles, published in Cahiers du cinéma in 1956, which engaged with Bazin’s conception of cinematic realism in an attempt to effect a generational break with the past by proposing a revised understanding of montage, not simply as an integral part of mise-en-scène, but as a form of deliberate authorial statement and, in that sense, as a practical extension of the New Wave ideology or politique des auteurs. In highlighting Bazin’s formative influence on the New Wave directors (in particular, his relationship to Truffaut and Godard), this chapter also focuses on the revived interest in early avant-garde experimentation (as evidenced, for instance, by Godard’s use of silent era shot transitions, image/sound disjunction and quotations from Surrealist poets in A bout de souffle), as well as the emergence of postmodern strategies and notions of rhythm, movement and time in French cinema (again present in the early work of Jean-Luc Godard), which prefigured Deleuze’s re-appraisal of montage as part of his theory of the movement-image and the time-image.

John Grierson: From the Poster Movement to the Informational State

Much critical writing on the British 'documentary film movement' has tended to examine Grierson's legacy in terms of issues of 'realism', politics and ideology. In contrast, this chapter focuses on Grierson's career as an art critic during the inter-war period, placing a particular focus on his interest in sculpture, and the ‘new sculpture’ movement. The chapter contrast and compare Grierson’s writings on film with his writings on the new sculpture movement, and, by doing so, emphasise a very different lineage of Grierson's thought to that which is generally held. Thus, rather than reaching back into Grierson's biography over the 1910s-1920s to frame his thinking on film in terms of the School of Social Sciences in Chicago, this chapter reframes Grierson’s thinking on films within the terms in which he evaluated the art of the inter-war years, that is, within the terms of a broadly Ruskinite social mission.