New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics

FROM REALISM TO INTERTEXTUALITY 189
1971:13). The realist novels of writers like Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert and
George Eliot brought intensely individualized, seriously conceived
characters into typical contemporary social situations. The realist impulse
was accompanied by a social dimension in the form of an implicit teleology
of democratization which facilitated the emergence of “more extensive and
socially inferior human groups to the position of subject matter for
problematic-existential representation” (Auerbach 1953:491).
CINEMATIC REALISM
Without involving ourselves in the intellectual morass usually triggered by
attempts at a rigorous definition of the term “realism,” we can posit
several broad tendencies within the debate around CINEMATIC REALISM.
Some definitions of cinematic realism have to do with the aspiration of an
author or school to create an innovatory representation, seen as a
corrective to dominant canons or to antecedent literary or cinematic
decorum. This corrective can be stylistic—as in the French New Wave
attack on the artificiality of the “tradition of quality”—or social—Italian
neo-realism aiming to show post-war Italy its true face—or both at once—
Brazilian Cinema Novo revolutionizing both the social thematics and the
cinematic procedures of antecedent cinema. Other definitions of realism
bear on the question of verisimilitude, the putative adequation of a fiction
to deeply ingrained and widely disseminated cultural models of “believable
stories” and “coherent characterization.” Related definitions have to do
with a text’s degree of conformity to generic codes; the crusty conservative
father who resists his show-crazed daughter’s entrance into show-business
can “realistically” be expected, in a backstage musical, to applaud her
apotheosis at the end of the film. Another related definition of realism
involves readerly or spectatorial belief, a realism of subjective response,
rooted less in mimetic accuracy than in a strong desire to believe on the
spectator’s part. Psychoanalytically inflected theorists such as Baudry and
Metz, as we have seen, stressed the metapsychological aspects of this
desire, whereby the combination of verisimilar cinematic
representationalism and a fantasyinducing spectatorial situation conspire to
project the spectator into a dream-like state where interior hallucination is
confused with real perception. A purely Formalist definition of realism,
finally, would emphasize the conventional nature of all fictional codes, and
would posit realism simply as a constellation of stylistic devices, a set of
conventions that at a given moment in the history of an art, manages,
through the fine-tuning of illusionistic technique, to crystallize a strong
feeling of authenticity.
The semiotic interrogation of the issue of cinematic realism takes places
against the backdrop of those critical views which posited the cinema as
essentially or intrinsically realist. The mechanical means of