Realism and Expressionism in Film
Introduction There are many different types of films; directors use these conventions because they work well for the story they are telling. For instance, Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy is a fantasy because only this completely unrealistic storytelling method can account for elves, dwarves, dragons and the other creatures in the tale. This paper examines two of these types of films, realism and expressionism. Discussion Very generally speaking, realism attempts to portray the world as it really is; expressionism is a subjective view of it. Realistic films “attempt to reproduce the surface of reality with a minimum of distortion” (Delahoyde). Of course, since the film is a film, and not reality, no matter how “gritty” or “edgy” or “real” the filmmaker tries to make it, it is still a carefully crafted work of art (Delahoyde). That is, no matter how real it seems, a film is a strip of celluloid, or other medium, running through a sprocket in front of a light source. It can never be truly real. But realism does strive to show the world as it is, without “skewing” it to the director’s vision. In that sense, realists are interested in “what’s being shown, the content, rather than the created effect, the form” (Delahoyde). Legendary French film critic Andre Bazin is known for “his defense of cinematic realism”; he put filmmakers as different as Orson Welles, Renoir and Rossellini, among others, together as “realists,” saying that what they “had in common was a desire to put cinema at the service of what … [he] called a fundamental faith in reality” (Realism: Theories of realism, 2007). For
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