Film as reality

Which of the following

illustrations is closer to
reality?
Mummy Complex
 Woman Baking Bread, by Jean-Franois Millet, 1854

Resemblance

Verisimilitude David, Michelangelo, 1504

 photography is clearly the most important
event in the history of the plastic arts.
Simultaneously a liberation and an
accomplishment,
it has freed Western painting, once and for all,
from its obsession with realism and allowed it to
recover its aesthetic autonomy.

Haystacks, Monet, 1891

Quarry Bibmus, Czanne, 1900

Cinematic Realism
Deep Focus/ depth of field
Long Take
Italian Neo-realism
Post-War Italy
Roberto Rossellini, Germany Year Zero, 1948
 On Location Shooting
Social issues
 Everyday-ness

Looser film plot

Vittorio De Sica, Bicycle Thieves, 1948

Post-synchronization
Non-professional actors

Ultimate expression of neo-realism@

The faithful reproduction of reality is not art. We are
repeated told that it consists in selection and interpretation.
That is why up to now the realist tends in cinema, as in
other arts, consisted simply in introducing a greater
measure of reality into the work: but this additional
measure of reality was still only an effective way of serving
an abstract purpose, whether dramatic, moral, or
ideological. In France, naturalism goes hand in hand with
the multiplication of novels and plays thse. The
originality of Italian neorealism as compared with the chief
schools of realism that preceded it and with the Soviet
cinema, lies in never making reality the servant of some
priori point of view