Realism in Classical American Film
Hollywood Narrative
Film as Illusion
‘The old experience of the movie-goer, who sees
the world outside as an extension of the film he has
just left (because the latter is intent upon
reproducing the world of everyday perceptions), is
now the producer’s guideline. The more intensely
and flawlessly his techniques duplicate empirical
objects, the easier it is today for the illusion to
prevail that the outside world is the straightforward
continuation of that presented on the screen. This
purpose has been furthered by mechanical
reproduction since the lighting was taken over by
the sound film.’ Theodor V. Adorno and Max
Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 126
Film as Illusion
FILM IS ILLUSION OF WHAT?
• Illusion that what you are watching is a ‘real’
world. ‘… spectators experience the
diagetic world as environment.’ Noël Burch
(diegetic = in a story)
• Film as combination of ‘imaginary signifiers’
Christian Metz
(imaginary = the state in which you cannot
distinguish between the real and the invented >
Lacanian psychoanalysis
(signifier = sign)
Film as Illusion
• Woody Allen’s Purple Rose of Cairo (1985)
• Extreme exposition that film could work as
illusion
Film as Illusion
CLASSICAL AMERICAN FILM AS
ILLUSIONIST FILM
• American cinema developed its techniques
and styles in order to dupe the spectator to
take a narrative and images for reality;
• Or to increase its reality and truth effects.
• The spectator is willing to accept illusion or
demand it in film.
American Classics as Realist Films
• (Classical) Hollywood products between
1917and 1960 are considered as a type of realist
films.
• Why 1917 and 1960?
• By 1917 most American fiction adopted
fundamentally similar narrative strategies;
PROSIBILITY
American Classics as Realist Film
The studio mode of production had been
organized around the division of labour,
hierarchical managerial system, factory-like
system of filmmaking
CONTINUATION of the established
uniformity in narrative and visual styles
Classical American Film as Realist Film
• The 1960s - the end of Hollywood’s traditions
• Studios moved to the production of television
programmes → The breakdown of studio
system (stars turning free agents; producers
becoming independent; the death of B-movies
and decrease in demand for studio directors and
staff)
American Classics as Realist Films
• Challenge from international art cinema, e.g.
Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Italian
neorealists and French directors of Nouvelle
Vague
DIVERSIFICATION in contents and styles
American Classics as Realist Films
TECHNIQUES, STYLES AND STRATEGIES
EMPLOYED TO CREATE AN ILLUSION
OF REALITY IN AMERICAN CINEMA
A) A story is the first key element.
B) Uniformity is a basic attribute of the visual
style.
Classical American Film as Realist Film
C) The American cinema in this period
purports to be realistic in an Aristotelian
sense - true to the probable.
D) It strives to conceal its artifice through
visual uniformity and ‘invisible’ storytelling.
E) It should be comprehensible and
unambiguous.
American Classics as Realist Films
F) It should possess a fundamental emotional
appeal which transcends class and nature.
PROBABLE, CREDIBLE, NATURAL
AND REAL
American Classics as Realist Films
• Best Years of Our
Lives (1946) directed
by William Wyler
• About three exservicemen who try to
cope with their lives
after returning from
the WWII.
American Classics as Realist Film
•
•
•
•
•
Story is the primary element of the film
Uniform film style
Probable story
Stylistic understatement
Unambiguous,
Comprehensible
• Emotional appeal to
everyone
Narrative
• Narrative – a long tale made of the
arrangement of shorter stories which tell
fictional or non-fictional events.
• Narration – an act of narrating, telling a
narrative
• Narrator - the one who tells a narrative
(generally by voice-over in the case of
cinema)
• Narratology - study on narrative, narration
and narrator.
Realist Narrative
• The most important component of Classical
American Films is ‘narrative’ (story).
• The bottom line - their narratives are
constructed in such a way that they give the
viewer an impression that he/she is watching
something plausible and probable - that is, ‘real’
– render ‘reality’ and ‘truth’ effects in story.
• The first concern plausibility
Realist Narrative
• Various techniques employed to achieve
plausibility
• However - paradox -, these techniques must be
‘invisible’ and unobtrusive so that the viewer
barely notices them and can concentrate on
following narrative.
• When narrative techniques become
conspicuously visible and obtrusive, the film
becomes more formalist than realist
Realist Narrative
• Narration ‘techniques’ and ‘devices’ employed to
create illusion of reality but must be kept
invisible are:
• CHRONOLOGICALITY and CAUSALITY
• CHRONOLOGICALITY - events occur in a 1-23 order (occasional flashbacks - the only
permissible narrative manipulation)
Realist Narrative
• Most of the films made during the classic period of
American film (1917-60)
• Chronological story telling with some unobtrusive
flashbacks
• John Huston’s classic film noir, The Maltese
Falcon (1941) – chronological storytelling
Formalist Narrative Formalistic Narrative
• Christopher Nolan’s
Memento (2000)
• The entire story is told
in backward ( from the
present to the past).
• Leonard, as a result of a
blow received on his
head in an assault on
him, he has no short
term memory.
Formalist Narrative
• He is looking for the real killer of his wife, with
the assistant of a Polaroid camera and tattooing on
himself the important facts he finds. Each scene
the viewer watches is one earlier than the last one.
(In normal storytelling, the scene you have just
seen is the one later than the last)
Realist Narrative
• CAUSALITY - actions are joined together
as a series of CAUSES and EFFECTS
• ‘Plot is a careful and logical working out of
the laws of cause and effect. The mere
sequence of events will not make a plot.
Emphasis must be laid upon causality,
and the action - reaction of the human will.’
Francis Patterson, ‘Manual for Aspiring
Screenwriters’, 1920
Realistic Narrative
e.g. A storm isolates a group of characters:
•
•
•
•
a war separate lovers;
a lack of care kills tropical fish;
a cheat leads to a divorce;
a betrayal prompts a revenge
• In The Maltese Falcon, Marlow starts an
investigation after his client requests it.
Formalist Narrative
• Mulholland Drive (2001) - divided into two main
sections: the first, which could be interpreted as a
dream (1 hour 56 minutes), and the second, the
final 25 minutes, which might be made of real
events. Important events in the first section are
repeated in the second section, but with significant
differences.
Formalist Narrative
• Different characters repeat the same actions, and
these different characters are played by the same
actors. Furthermore, the important events in the
first part are mysterious, but those in the second
half are more mundane repetitions of those in the
first part.
Formalist Narrative
• There is not much logic of cause and effect in the
actions in the first part. The lack of causality is
compensated by the repetition, which gives the
film more textual coherence.
Realistic Narrative
• COINCIDENCE
• According to the Hollywood narrative
‘formula’, coincidence should be confined
to the initial situation.
• The later in a film a coincidence occurs, the
weaker it is - the loss of credibility.
Realist Narrative
• A woman and a man separated in Paris and many
years later she suddenly walks into the bar he runs
in Casablanca. “Of all the gin joints in all the
towns in all the world, she walks into mine.”
• She did not know who owns the bar. Coincidence
happens in the earlier part of the film.
Realist Narrative
• A case in which a
coincidence takes
place in the middle of
a film. People in a
local community
discussing about the
birds’ attack on school
children.
• Alfred Hitchcock’s
The Birds (1963)
Realist Narrative
• An action must have a MOTIVATION
• One must have a good reason for what one
does.
• When an action is unmotivated, it would
lose its credulity
Realist Narrative
‘In order that the motion picture may convey
the illusion of reality that audiences demand,
the scenario writer stresses motivation - that is,
he makes clear a character’s reason for doing
whatever he does that is important.’ Frances
Marion, Scenario Writing, 1938
Formalist Narrative
• An example completely ignoring the
(realist) narrative formulae developed in
classical American films
• Chronologicality, Causality, Motivation
Formalist Narrative
• Surrealist film by
Louis Bunuel
designed by
Salvatore Dali
• Un Chien Andalou
(1929)
Illusion of Reality in Realist Narrative
• The film drama is:
‘… LIFE WITH THE DULL BITS CUT OUT’
(Alfred Hitchcock)
Illusion of Reality in Realist Narrative
• Classical realist narrative is NOT retelling of
what happens in reality as it does because it
extracts from the world of its characters almost
only elements which are relevant to its progress.
• The realist narrative in classical American films,
which is achieved through various techniques
and devices, is the one which gives the viewer
truth effects, but is not exactly real.
Purer Form of Realist Narrative
• Purer form of realism in narrative is found
in non-diegetic elements.
• Diegetic - being relevant to the progress of
a story
• Non-diegetic - being irrelevant to the
progress of an imaginary story
Purer Form of Narrative
Siegmund Kracauer finds an inverted
relation between those images that further
the story and those ‘retain a degree of
independence of the intrigue and thus
succeed in summoning physical reality.’
Purer Form of Narrative
Roland Barthes characterizes literary
reference to objects that have no discernible
narrative function except to give a material,
worldly weight to the description as ‘reality
effect’.
Purer Form of Narrative
• A purer form of film
realism is found in an
incidental or contingent
element in narrative. ‘…
in the middle of the chase
the little boy suddenly
needs to piss. So he
does.’ (André Bazin)
• Vittorio de Sica’s Ladri
di biciclette (1948)
Realism in Classical American Film
• Do ‘artless’ arts in American films in the
classical period still dupe you to take narratives
and images for reality?
• Do those films that the cinema audience in the
early half of the twentieth century took realistic
or ‘mistook’ as an extension of their reality
continue to have the same effect on you now?
• If not, why do you think they do not?