World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism

by Lúcia Nagib

Overview

World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism is a highly original study. Traditional views of cinematic realism usually draw on the so-called classical cinema and its allegiance to narrative mimesis, but Nagib challenges this, drawing instead on the filmmaker's commitment to truth and to the film medium's material bond with the real.

Starting from the premise that world cinema's creative peaks are governed by an ethics of realism, Nagib conducts comparative case studies picked from world new waves, such as the Japanese New Wave, the French nouvelle vague, the Cinema Novo, the New German Cinema, the Russo-Cuban Revolutionary Cinema, the Portuguese self-performing auteur and the Inuit Indigenous Cinema. Drawing upon Badiou and Rancière, World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism revisits and reformulates several fundamental concepts in film studies, such as illusionism, identification, apparatus, alienation effects, presentation and representation. Its groundbreaking scholarship takes film theory in a bold new direction.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781441165831
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	01/20/2011
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Lúcia Nagib is Professor of Film and Director of the Centre for Film Aesthetics and Cultures (CFAC) at the University of Reading. Her research has focused, among other subjects, on polycentric approaches to world cinema, new waves and new cinemas, cinematic realism and intermediality. She is the author of World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism (Continuum, 2011), Brazil on Screen: Cinema Novo, New Cinema, Utopia (I.B. Tauris, 2007), The Brazilian Film Revival: Interviews with 90 Filmmakers of the 90s (Editora 34, 2002), Born of the Ashes: The Auteur and the Individual in Oshima's Films (Edusp, 1995), Around the Japanese Nouvelle Vague (Editora da Unicamp, 1993) and Werner Herzog: Film as Reality (EstaçãoLiberdade, 1991). She is the editor of Impure Cinema: Intermedial and Intercultural Approaches to Film (with Anne Jerslev, 2013), Theorizing World Cinema (with Chris Perriam and Rajinder Dudrah, I.B. Tauris, 2011), Realism and the Audiovisual Media (with Cecília Mello, Palgrave, 2009), The New Brazilian Cinema (I.B. Tauris, 2003), Master Mizoguchi (Navegar, 1990) and Ozu (Marco Zero, 1990).

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Acknowledgements xiii

Introduction 1

Realism, Presentation, Representation 3

Presentational Ethics 8

Part I Physical Cinema

Chapter 1 The End of the Other 19

Physical Realism 23

The Missing Other 32

Atanarjuat, The Fast Runner 34

Yaaba 42

God and the Devil in the Land of the Sun (Black God, White Devil) 51

The 400 Blows 64

Chapter 2 The Immaterial Difference: Werner Herzog Revisited 74

The Excessive Body 74

Literal Difference 82

Physical Difference 93

Representational Difference 103

Part II The Reality of the Medium

Chapter 3 Conceptual Realism in Land in Trance and I Am Cuba 125

Allegorical Real 131

Reality as Process: Trance in Land in Trance 138

Trance, Sexuality and the Christian Myth in I Am Cuba 143

Mimesis of the Principle 148

Concluding Remarks 155

Chapter 4 The Work of Art in Progress: An Analysis of Delicate Crime 157

Part III The Ethics of Desire

Chapter 5 The Realm of the Senses, the Ethical Imperative and the Politics of Pleasure 177

Originality, Beauty and the Porn Genre 181

The Eroticized Nation 187

Sex in Red and White: Double Suicide 193

Anti-realism and Artistic Real 198

The Participative Voyeur and the Eroticized Apparatus 203

Part IV The Production of Reality

Chapter 6 Hara and Kobayashi's 'Private Documentaries' 219

Historical Time 220

Phenomenological Time 226

Active Subjects 231

Chapter 7 The Self-Performing Auteur: Ethics in João César Monteiro 236

Ethics of the Impossible Real 238

God's Autobiography 246

The History Man 255

Notes 262

Bibliography 267

Index 279

Editorial Reviews

"The Ethics of Realism" may be too tame a title for the rambunctious scholarship this book contains. Lucia Nagib has a sharp eye for what, through her lens, become stupefying motifs and moments within films that she just as sharply cuts out of the vast herd of movies. You can sense her pleasure at relaying to us the cinematic power she has found in cast-off 'failures' like I am Cuba or that she resuscitates in films we thought we knew, such as "The 400 Blows". Ultimately tying these to historical struggles of filmmakers and the societies they worked within, she does in fact make good on her title. This is a truly high-minded argument for cinema as the conscience of the past century. The films Nagib illuminates made and kept promises to the world they came from. This book honors the importance, not just the beauty of cinematic art.

Dudley Andrew, R. Selden Rose Professor of Film and Comparative Literature, Yale University

Lucia Nagib's book "World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism" injects new vitality and energy into some important but familiar debates in film theory. In the first instance, her surprising selection of films challenges existing concepts of world cinema. More radically, however, these films have a unifying aesthetic out of which Nagib's own approach to realism comes into focus. These are films that privilege rawness and physicality, that place extreme demands on performers and producers, and inescapably work with the reality of event as well as the recording function of the medium itself. Nagib's grounding for the aesthetic of realism is based on an ethical commitment to the living, temporal, spatial and dramatic exchange between the camera as mechanism and the extreme event it is filming. Nagib has successfully turned the theoretical kaleidoscope, reconfiguring the crucial concept of realism, its significance for film theory, into new, exciting, sometimes shocking, patterns of thought and perception.

Laura Mulvey, Department of History of Art and Screen Media, Birkbeck, University of London

Lucia Nagib's book World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism injects new vitality and energy into some important but familiar debates in film theory. In the first instance, her surprising selection of films challenges existing concepts of world cinema. More radically, however, these films have a unifying aesthetic out of which Nagib's own approach to realism comes into focus. These are films that privilege rawness and physicality, that place extreme demands on performers and producers, and inescapably work with the reality of event as well as the recording function of the medium itself. Nagib's grounding for the aesthetic of realism is based on an ethical commitment to the living, temporal, spatial and dramatic exchange between the camera as mechanism and the extreme event it is filming. Nagib has successfully turned the theoretical kaleidoscope, reconfiguring the crucial concept of realism, its significance for film theory, into new, exciting, sometimes shocking, patterns of thought and perception. Laura Mulvey, Department of History of Art and Screen Media, Birkbeck, University of London

From the Publisher