(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Hermann Kappelhoff:
The Politics and Poetics of Cinematic Realism
Colombia University Press, 2015
"Realism" is a term that winds around everywhere, which is difficult to delineate, and which often confuses as much as it clarifies. The word often refers to a portrayal's allegiance to the reality that precedes the portrayal, but the meaning is entirely dependent on the context in which it is used – does one speak of individual or collective reality, physical or emotional, rational or irrational? Even if one were to clarify this, the term never seems to come completely beyond a certain semantic whims. The word "realism" has an ambiguity that makes it difficult to use.
But the unclearness of the term can also give it a special value. Recognizing that "realism" is something volatile, something historically and culturally situated, which is constantly up for debate, discussion and interpretation, the term can be used to critically discuss reality rather than just maintaining and conceptualizing a status quo.
Realism and idealism. When talking about "realism" in the context of art, one can talk about a lot of wonder. However, a traditional point of departure has been the dichotomy of realism – idealism. Simplified and roughly explained, we can say that where an idealistic art expresses reality the way the artist wants it to be, a realistic art depicts reality as it is.
But this distinction has been challenged by several artists and art theorists. For the French philosopher Jacques Rancière, a modern understanding of art (aesthetics) marks a shift from an understanding of art as representation (the regime of representation) to a conceptualization of art as a creative activity: Art produces reality as much as it reflects a reality; art is not merely a reflection or illustration of (what a community understands as) reality, but a problematization of reality itself. This is linked to modernity on a more general level; a movement from a more or less stable worldview to an idea of reality as something changeable and historically conditioned.
Examination. In the book The Politics and Poetics of Cinematic Realism (2015), the film professor Hermann Kappelhoff takes as his point of departure this understanding of art, and sees film as a particularly fruitful art that can "reposition" us in our relationship to reality. The "realistic" thing about films here is not about their resemblance to life, but about how they examine reality; For Kappelhoff, realism denotes the dynamic space of experience that arises between the reality of a viewer and the reality of a film, between politics and poetics – a space that allows films and viewers to "constantly create new worlds". In other words, realism is used here in the light of an aesthetic discussion and reassessment (poetics) of the limits and possibilities of reality (politics).
Kappelhoff is inspired by the American philosopher Richard Rorty, who also proposed a significant connection between politics and poetics. For a democracy to become not only a technocratic organization, but a viable unity, it must, according to Rorty, contain a genuine "we-feeling", a living solidarity. This solidarity can not be based on timeless norms and legal human rights, but is something that must be constantly stimulated and developed under various historical circumstances. And art can, by constantly inventing new ways of expressing and describing ourselves, unity, and not least the unknown, constantly continue to expand our own sensitivity, receptivity to what we do not know, and the limits of solidarity.
The "realistic" thing about movies is not about them resembling life (a prior reality), but about how they examine reality.
The unknown through the known. For both Rancière and Rorty (via Kappelhoff), art and politics are activities that create and mark boundaries and fields of opportunity for thinking, sensing and action. Kappelhoff's project is to relate this to how film has a distinctive ability as an art form by being able to show something unknown (something we have not thought, sensed, lived) in a form that grows straight out of something known (the recognizable world we see transfigured in film). As the author writes, films can be seen as "proposals for community that are certainly not our own, but which are represented in forms of expression that originate directly from the reality of our own world of life". Kappelhoff links this to a historical experience, and filmmakers who in the post-war period have questioned how we organize society: "The history of film has created spaces where our world is visible as a world of completely different communities."
Kappelhoff analyzes and discusses films and thoughts from filmmakers such as Eisenstein, Fassbinder, Visconti, Friedkin and Almodóvar. The chapters are relatively detached from each other, and could have been independent essays – this is not necessarily a weakness, but it would not have hurt with a clearer bridge construction between them, or a summary chapter that joined the perspectives. Moreover, the "rapid" movement from one thinker to another sometimes seems to go beyond precision or nuance, as when the author discusses André Bazin.
Bazin's Perception Centers. Bazin is one of the foremost thinkers when it comes to the discussion of cinematic realism. Like many others, Kappelhoff presents a simplified understanding of Bazin's ideas. The author understands Bazin as one who sees realism in the light of a "subjectless discourse", a realism that "is not based on any intentionality of an author, but on a modality of aesthetic experience that depends on the cinematic image itself". This interpretation draws up a false dichotomy; for Bazin, a "realistic" filmmaker is one who situates its intentionality in the openness of the film image to the openness of the world.
Dudley Andrew has written about how Bazin had his own ability to imagine life from other "perception centers". In his understanding of the film's realism, Bazin argued that filmmakers could just open us up to other ways of looking at the world. Kappelhoff's perspective (and stimulating text) is probably closer to Bazin than he himself presents it; in both, the film's realistic poetics lies most fundamentally in how film "repositions" us in our relationship with the world – and how film does this using a "language of reality" (to quote Pasolini) that gives us the unknown as a revelation in the middle. in the known.
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