Post-Script: The ‘Counter-Realism’ Code of Institutional Constraint

This chapter reflects on the 'counter-realism' code of institutional constraint. In terms of audience understandings, the 'counter-realist' code of institutional constraint is engaged, for example, when spectators assure themselves that a lead character cannot die before the last reel — precisely because they are played by a highly paid star. For producers, the code implies that the profit principle militates in favour of rounded stories with feel-good endings and against films where film makers forsake the safe and familiar and take audiences into new territory. The 'true story' genre seems to provide a firm basis for debating the effects of 'institutional constraint' on realism and truth. The chapter then considers a pair of 'true story' films: In The Name Of The Father (Jim Sheridan, 1993) and Erin Brokovich (Steven Soderbergh, 2000).

Introduction

What happens exactly when we watch feature films or TV dramas? What determines whether we see the occasion as an ‘appointment to view’ or look for the remote control to switch over to something else? Many of our responses to moving image fiction texts make mention of ‘realism’ or ‘truth’. We might say to ourselves, or to others around us, ‘It’s so real!’ or, ‘It’s unbelievable!’ But what are we responding to, and how exactly is our notion of reality or truth to be understood? Even a superficial glossing of internet user comments as well as classroom interaction with films and TV throw up a multitude of different, conflicting coinages of realism. Can there be a common, accepted standard, a currency of realism or truth?...

Social Realism continued: some key re-inventions

This chapter assesses a range of highly diverse examples of 'social realism' — each offers new ways of expressing 'how things really are'. It considers social realism in the films of Shane Meadows, Clio Barnard, Andrea Arnold, and Steve McQueen. The chapter then explores the social realism in Larry Clark's Kids (1995). An altogether more iconoclastic, youth-centric social realism emerged in the mid-1990s in America with the work of Clark, a new wave asserting itself against the calcified norms of mainstream Hollywood. Kids charted its own distinctive realist territory when it exposed the precocious amoral sexual habits of urban American youth towards the end of the century. The chapter also looks at social realism in La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995), City of God (Fernando Mereilles, 2002), and Elephant (Gus Van Sant, 2003). Common to all three is a spirit of stylistic innovation intended to roll back accreted convention and reveal a heightened, rediscovered realism.