film's extraordinary power to imitate reality has made realism a central feature of cinema aesthetics. (156)
the realist text - in whatever of teh many modes of realism it exists - has a distinctive, even unique, epistemic status: it represents things as they are, it claims to tell the truth. The importance of realism is a direct consequence of its epistemic status, as Brecht recognised when he called it a major political, philosophical and practical issue. For all political positions and programmes are premised on a conception of social reality (156)
Any realist work, therefore, and none more so than films, with their remarkable power (156) to effect belief in their constructions, has political ramifications. Cinema provides a sustained assertion, or a variety of assertions, as to the way things are - socially, politically, economically, internationally, and so on. (157)
The fundamental difficulty was the problem of truth. Since the realist text advances a traim claim in saying how things really stand, and since truth claims cannot be established by the text that makes them but can only be true in relation to something else, then an analysis of realism entails making reference to a beyond-the-text. Thus any complete account of the functioning of realism would have to consider not just its textual practices but the social practices in which these are situated. A theory of the text alone was insufficient: what was needed was a more general theory of how truths and notions of reality are established in society. (157)
three principle approaches adopted in relation to realism, it being understood that in practice the three were by no means so clearly separated. They are the mediation thesis, Marxism, and structuralism. (157)
the concept of mediation proved to be more problematic than had been supposed. It seemed simple enough: mediation was the process whereby a pre-given reality was transformed by the act of filming into a filmed representation of that reality, which would at best offer a perspective and at worst a distortion. The problem was, however, locating the pre-given reality. (160)
it has nowhere been established that film is incapable of stating truths, least of all by the mediation thesis. (161)
- Robert Lapsley and Michael Westlake. 2006. Chap. 6 "Realism" 156-180 in Film Theory: An Introduction. 2nd ed. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.
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