Alternative Realities

Carl Plantinga

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780813599830
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

From their very inception, movies have served two seemingly contradictory purposes. On one hand, they transport us to fantastical worlds and display mind-boggling special effects. On the other, they can document actual events and immerse us in scenarios that feel so realistic, we might forget we are watching a work of fiction. Alternative Realities explores how these distinctions between cinematic fantasy and filmic realism are more porous than we might think. Through a close analysis of CGI-heavy blockbusters like Wonder Woman and Guardians of the Galaxy, it considers how even popular fantasies are grounded in emotional and social realities. Conversely, it examines how mockumentaries like This is Spinal Tap satirically call attention to the highly stylized techniques documentarians use to depict reality. Alternative Realities takes us on a journey through many different genres of film, from the dream-like and subjective realities depicted in movies like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Memento, to the astonishing twists of movies like Shutter Island and The Matrix, which leave viewers in a state of epistemic uncertainty. Ultimately, it shows us how the power of cinema comes from the unique way it fuses together the objective and the subjective, the fantastical and the everyday.

1

REALISM AND THE IMAGINATION

When August and Louis Lumière held their first screening of projected motion pictures in 1895 in Paris, they had little idea of the potential of the movie medium. In fact, the brothers saw the movies as a mere novelty and withdrew from the business in 1905. During their time in the fledgling movie industry, however, the brothers’ employees screened their brief films around the world and to great acclaim. Audiences were enthralled by the novelty—photographic pictures that seemed to move! that bore the stamp of reality! Most of these films were recordings of family life, urban scenes, ceremonies and parades, and similar everyday events. They were often filmed in one take from a single vantage point and with an unmoving camera. Among these 1895 movies are Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, The Baby’s Snack, The Sea (Bathing in the Sea), and The Blacksmiths.

Still photography had been around since the early nineteenth century, so audiences were familiar with “the pencil of nature,” as the pioneer photographer and inventor William Henry Fox Talbot called it. The novelty of moving pictures, of course, was the movement. The movies not only offered photographic pictures that seemed realistic and reliable but also made them move, as though one were witnessing life itself parade by on the screen. Audiences could see children jumping into the sea for a swim, babies being fed, snowball fights, and ostriches marching through the streets of Paris. Like the still camera, the motion-picture camera was a machine and thus seemingly capable of capturing and recording reality, to a certain extent, without the subjective input of the cinematographer. Making a moving photographic image is in part a mechanical process. The cinematographer need only set the camera up and point it, find the correct exposure, focus the lens, run the unexposed film through the camera, process the exposed film, and—voila!—you have a realist moving photographic image. The fact that the image is produced by a machine has been seen by many critics and theorists to be a key to the supposed realism of photography and the movies and to mark the chief differentiating factor between photography and painting. In the popular mind, moving pictures became associated with realism, authenticity, and reliability.

The supposed ties between movies and reality, however, caused many people to be suspicious of the capacity of the medium to create art. A mere recording device, the motion-picture camera might be useful to produce documentary imitations of the visual world, but what about the creativity and human imagination that the arts call for? How could one engage in world making, in the creation of alternative realities, when one merely used a device that mechanically recorded what was in front of it? Any art in a finished film, the thought went, was already present in front of the camera, not a result of the camera itself or any creative imagination on the part of the filmmaker.

Some observers spoke of the movies as “canned theater,” the idea being that movies were simply stage plays recorded in the movie medium. A few intellectuals like the Harvard University psychologist and philosopher Hugo Munsterberg had sympathy and enthusiasm for the movies but were ashamed to be seen in a movie theater (Andrew 14). Early critics writing about film were eager to demonstrate that film could be a unique and important art form, and Munsterberg in 1916 produced the first important book of film theory, The Film: A Psychological Study. In that book, he wrote of a new narrative medium coming into its own, something more than the mere filming of preexistent stage plays.

Early film theory is often divided into the “formalist” and “realist” positions, with the formalists writing earlier in film history than the realist theorists, but we can also speak of a third way, the “revelationist” position, as will be discussed shortly. The formalists were interested in carving out a unique niche for the movies as a serious and distinct art form. Thus, they needed to demonstrate that movies deserved a place among the established art forms and that movies were more than the mere recording or slavish imitation of reality. Rudolph Arnheim, a central representative of that tradition, held that movies must depart from the mere imitation of reality or duplication of normal perception, because only that would make expression possible. The creative, imaginative expression of the artist would occur only when filmmakers departed from the duplication of reality. Thus, Arnheim favored the silent film because its very limitations as a recording medium (lack of sound and color) enabled it to be expressive. For Arnheim, each technological development that brought the movies closer to the recording of quotidian reality also moved the medium further from art and imaginative expression. Arnheim bemoaned the coming of color and sound, seeing these developments as catering to the masses who demanded ever-increasing realism and who cared little for artistic expression (Arnheim; Andrew 27–41; Carroll, Philosophical 17–91).

Arnheim failed to grasp an essential characteristic of the technologies that make movies possible. Although the coming of sound and color to the medium may increase the sense of realism afforded by movies in some regards (to be explored shortly), they also enlarged and diversified the expressive possibilities available to filmmakers. The use of various color film stocks, for example, may have allowed the world of a film to look more like the colorful visual world we are used to. Yet color film stocks can also be used creatively. In Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz (1939), for example, the filmmakers used both black-and-white and rich Technicolor film stocks to present a stark contrast between the mundane but comforting world of Kansas (sepia-toned black and white) and the fantastical Oz, featuring (in Technicolor) a yellow brick road, colorfully clad Munchkins, and an Emerald City with a pretentious but ultimately kind-hearted wizard. In Spike Lee’s vibrant Do the Right Thing (1988), the “corner men” (Paul Benjamin, Frankie Faison, and Robin Harris) sit on old kitchen chairs in the neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant and comment on everything going on around them. They are positioned in front of a bright-red, nearly featureless flat wall, the color of which pops out and creates a space for them that seems to be outside the film’s fictional world. Michelangelo Antonioni takes the decaying industrial landscapes of Red Desert (1964) and makes images that are reminiscent of modernist paintings by employing large blocks of color and intriguing color combinations.

In the predigital age, filmmakers often manipulated color not only through the choice of film stock but also through exposure, settings, costume, makeup, gels, and lighting. Think of the green face of the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz, for example, or the complementary color scheme (red and green) used in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). Filmmakers working in the digital age have even greater technical and creative resources at their disposal. Joel and Ethan Coen’s O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000) was one of the first productions for which digital color grading became central to its aesthetic, such grading having been used to transform the lush greens of the South in the summer into a muted palette consisting of various sepia tones and suggestive of the look of an old postcard. Today digital color grading (in conjunction with traditional analog techniques) allows for numerous creative uses of color, from the monochromatic palette of Zhang Yimou’s Hero (2002), in which each scene features a dominant color scheme, to the pastel aesthetic of Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) to triadic color schemes and those experimenting with various gradations of lightness and saturation. Another expressive color technique is the selective saturation effect, where everything is in black and white (or some monochromatic variation) except for a “focal object” that gets a vivid color. Nearly all of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) is photographed in black and white, but in the midst of this monochromatic world, Oscar Schindler (Liam Neeson) sees a little girl in a red coat that awakens him to the evils of the Holocaust and symbolizes the shedding of blood. None of these uses of color is wholly naturalistic (though they sometimes seem so to the viewer); all are the creative expression of the filmmakers.

Even naturalistic uses of the medium can function as creative expression. Movies are a dynamic and eclectic medium, capable of expressing ideas and impressions through numerous channels simultaneously. Thus, a particular shot may feature naturalistic color, for example, and remain an expression of the filmmakers due to the way that the shot is edited into the scene, uses sound, features expressive costumes or sets, or contains meaningful dialogue. One common technique of horror films is to combine naturalistic and nonnaturalistic elements. For example, characters may be camping out in a forest, with the visual elements of the scene presented naturalistically. They begin to hear increasingly bizarre, unidentifiable sounds emanating from the darkness, gradually disclosing a frightening world that the characters had never envisioned. The monster itself in a horror film is often some kind of impossible being. Films need to create a sense of reality that we call verisimilitude. But verisimilitude, as we shall see, allows for all kinds of fantastical, expressive, and imaginative elements. Arnheim thought that the popular imagination and new representational technologies would demand ever-increasing realism that would stifle creative expression. The fact that today the most popular movie genres are animated fantasy, science fiction, and superhero movies makes these fears seem quite misplaced. The realism of the movies does not necessarily overshadow creative expression and can even be put to the service of expression and fantasy.

THE REALISTS AND THE REVELATIONISTS

Opposed to the formalists were the realists. Realists believed that what is special and important about movies is their relationship to the real world. Siegfried Kracauer, who has often been identified as a realist, believed that film was essentially a photographic medium. He writes that film “is an extension of photography and therefore shares with this medium a marked affinity for the visible world around us. Films come into their own when they record and reveal physical reality” (xlix). From this comes the special power of the medium and its capacity to powerfully move viewers and teach them something. For Kracauer, realist theory had an ethical dimension. He believed that movies had the capacity to reconnect people with the physical reality around them and to deepen their relation to their native habitat, the Earth (li).

André Bazin is by far the most influential realist theorist. For Bazin as for Kracauer, the realism of the movie medium begins with its connection with photography. In “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” (in What Is Cinema, vol. 1), Bazin likens a photograph to a fingerprint, footprint, the shadow cast by a sundial, or an embalmed body. All register a trace of the reality that they signify. Like footprints and fossils, the photograph is related by causality to its referent (what it stands for or represents), because it is created by a mechanical device, the camera, which eliminates at least some aspects of human subjectivity (12). As Bazin writes, the “objective nature of photography confers on it a quality of credibility absent from all other picture-making” (13). This is why photographs can be used in a court of law in ways that verbal testimony or paintings are not.

Why is this important? For Bazin, this meant that the movies and photography became the ultimate realist media. This is both an ontological and a psychological claim; the mechanical nature of moving-image photography granted the movies the power to connect viewers with nature in a psychologically powerful way. Bazin even went so far as to claim that the invention of photography allowed painting to become more expressive and abstract, since painting was freed from its previous “obsession” with re-creating the world through realist representation.

For Bazin, this supposed realism that grounds the movies means that filmmakers ought to respect reality by using techniques and styles that put viewers into a relationship with the movie that is somewhat like their relationship to the outside world. Thus, Bazin favored the long-take aesthetic, consisting of durationally long shots with camera movement, over the montage style of the Soviets or the classical cutting of Hollywood. For Bazin, the elegant camera movements and composition-in-depth of directors like Orson Welles, Jean Renoir, and William Wyler constituted a mature style of film-making that respected the viewer’s capacity to explore the reality represented in the shot. Bazin writes in “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema” that depth of focus “brings the spectator into a relation with the image closer to that which he enjoys with reality” and requires “a more active mental attitude on the part of the spectator” (What Is Cinema?, vol. 1, 35–36). Deep-focus composition can also preserve “ambiguity of expression,” he writes, whereas the montage style “presupposes . . . the unity of meaning of the dramatic event” (36).

At the same time, Bazin also favored narrative techniques that incorporated indirection, ambiguity, and ellipsis, arguing that such realist storytelling managed to respect the ambiguity of reality and allowed the viewer a certain amount of freedom of interpretation and filling in of narrative gaps. Bazin wrote glowingly of Italian neorealism, a film movement that emerged after World War II that used actual locations and a mixture of professional and unprofessional actors. In many neorealist films, Bazin writes, a “complex train of action is reduced to three or four brief fragments, in themselves already elliptical enough in comparison with the reality they are unfolding.” In making sense of these fragments, Bazin claims, the “mind has to leap from one event to the other as one leaps from stone to stone in crossing a river” (What Is Cinema?, vol. 2, 35). Making sense of a realist film is much like making sense of the world around us. We need to be active and sort through ambiguous information, make hypotheses about missing events, and so on.

Aside from the formalists and realists, Malcolm Turvey has identified what he calls the “revelationist” tradition, an approach to the medium that seems to draw from elements of both formalist and realist theory in its approach to how film ought to be conceptualized vis-à-vis reality (“Balázs”; Doubting). For Turvey, theorists such as Jean Epstein, Dziga Vertov, Bela Balázs, and Siegfried Kracauer should be seen as neither formalists (or “modernists,” as he terms it) nor realists. Like the realists, the revelationists take the capacity of the motion-picture medium to reproduce reality to be a valuable one. Unlike Bazin, however, the revelationists do not believe that human vision can be trusted. As Turvey notes, the revelationists “view those stylistic techniques that depart from everyday sight as most likely to reveal reality as it really is” (“Balázs” 88). Bela Balázs insisted that human beings are very bad at noticing details and that for this reason film techniques like the close-up take on a special importance in filmmaking. Remember that for Bazin, close-ups break up reality, and for that reason he favored the long take, which tended to be also a more panoramic sort of long shot. As Balázs puts it, “a good film with its closeups reveals the most hidden parts in our polyphonous life, and teaches us to see the intricate visual details of life” (qtd. in “Balázs” 85). The revelationist tradition thus effected a kind of compromise between realist and formalist film theories.

FORMS OF REALISM

A next step would be to define our terms. What is realism, and what are the various sorts of realism in movies? Verisimilitude, as introduced earlier, is the subjective impression that a movie, scene, setting, character, or story is real or believable. To most moviemakers, verisimilitude is absolutely vital, as it is considered to be a precondition for the spectator’s absorption into and enjoyment of the movie. The characters must act in ways that seem real; the perception of bad acting will often cause disdain for the movie and increase the psychological distance of the spectator. The world of the movie need not be just like ours. It can have flying cars, spiders the size of houses, or even characters with superpowers. In Black Panther (2018), we are asked to believe in a fictional world in which the nation of Wakanda is the most technologically sophisticated nation on Earth but where (in a decidedly less sophisticated fashion) the succession of political rulers is determined not by voting or political intrigue but by ritual combat. But believe it we do. The world created need not be familiar to our own world in every way. But it must seem consistent and believable while we watch.

Movies are also especially prone to what can be called “dating,” whereby their dialogue or special effects seem outdated and “cheesy.” Most everything about filmmaking is in a constant state of change, as technologies, stylistic techniques, and story conventions are in continuous flux. Students sometimes have trouble enjoying “old” movies because the black-and-white film stock, acting styles, special effects, or idiomatic speech of the past seem naïve or clumsy. For these students, old films may lack verisimilitude. We often judge the products of the past by the conventions of the present, failing to understand that these contemporary “realist” conventions that go unnoticed today may strike future audiences as quaint or even laughable.

“Ontological realism” is completely different from verisimilitude, despite many critics seeming to blur the two terms, as Bazin arguably seems to do. Whereas verisimilitude describes a perception of “realness,” ontological realism describes an actual relationship between a movie and the real world. Ontology, a branch of philosophy,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Realism and the Imagination
• 2. Fantasy and Reality
• 3. Subjective Realities
• 4. Ruptured Realities
• 5. Documentary: Art of the Real?
• Acknowledgments
• Further Reading
• Works Cited
• Index
• About the Author