HDC Weekly Debate: Is realism a part of entertainment through films?
 

Aren't we, as the willing and paying public, consciously promoting escapist entertainment for a couple hours in the films we watch? Or does a part of us, unknowingly or unwillingly, look for realism in the silver screen?

The thought stuck in my head all day and when I came home, I looked through some sites but still can't find a satisfying answer for this question. Maybe some of you might be more helping/illuminating than the countless references Google keeps throwing up.

What is cinema exactly?

Escapist entertainment? Stark realism?

Aren't we paying to watch something for one and half hours to escape reality and feel lighter? Better? More cheerful? Forgetting the hassles of day-to-day life? Don't we cheer for Schwarzenegger when he pulls out a gun and plenty of outlandish one-liners to dispose off the bad guys?

Or realism in cinema is more engrossing? Does it make people more depressed because they can relate to what's happening on the screen? A Truffaut or Bunuel makes us contemplative? Stuff like The Wrestler or Gran Torino or Million Dollar Baby, even Schindler's List...is that cinema?

Which side of the scale is more heavier - entertainment, or realism?

No poll for this one. I just need to find an answer.

I think it depends on ones mood.

There is no definitive answer. Your quest is defeated. Some prefer to escape, some prefer to engage.

No film is realistic, though, despite how naturalistic it may appear. Film telescopes time or condenses it, through editing and shot selection. A characters gets in a car and drives away from the house. Cut to the next shot and they're pulling up to the office. Or, as in the climax of The Good, the Bad & the Ugly, we see an instant played out in all three men's faces.

Film is magic, but it's not real.

True. And that takes the debate to an entirely new direction, with entertainment and realism being two sides of the same cinematic coin. And that is not what I am after.


Very true, but not the answer I am after.

Does realism in cinema provide some sort of entertainment? Or, does entertainment become more enjoyable when its rooted in realism?

What do we exactly pay for - escapist stuff, or realism-driven/dipped stuff?

Or both, like Newb pointed out?

Isn't the definition of cinema synonymous with entertainment?


...maybe I am contradicting myself or not explaining myself well enough.

When you ask a question you don't always get the answer you want.

I don't agree with the definitions. There is no such thing as realism in cinema. It doesn't exist.

And I gave pretty much the same answer as newb- I said we pay for both, though I separeted the two not by mood, but by personality type.

It doesn't? I say it does.

And I hope someone else agrees with me on this.

The only way to get realism in a film would be to set up a camera, start filming people who don't know they're being filmed, never make any cuts or shot changes- just one long take. That would be realistic. Anything else is something different.

I think, primarily, we are investing our time and money into film because we want to engage with it and be stimulated or challenged, on some level, by it. What we enage with or enjoy about a film might be represented through the desire for escapism or the honesty realism attempts to provide. Either way though, they are a means to and ends, we just want to enjoy what we watch, how you find that enjoyment is, for the most part, subjective and intangible.

What you would have just filmed was reality, but realism is vitally important to certain roles, as an audience, we would never beable to connect with the stories and characters without some form of realism behind them.

I go to movies for the experience, to have done one thing rather than another. I could make that choice to be engaged or to just go along for a fantastic ride. Depends on what entertains me- like what newb was saying.

Yeah, I think Newb nailed it. But if I want 100% realism I'll watch a documentary, but even then you have to watch your facts.

I think V is looking for something a little deeper. I'm just not sure what that is.

Probably, maybe if this was a sit down with a case of beer and a few friends situation I could be a bit more profound. :p

Beer always makes us smarter.

It made Bud wiser. ;)

Except that poor guy being water boarded in your sig.

That's no way to water board a guy, you have to pour the beer around his face but not let him drink it, the guy in newb's sig is having a blast!

V, is it reality that we are trying to escape? That sounds like a rare scenerio to me, though I'm sure it is the case sometimes. I'm on my third whiskie drink, mixed for effect not flavor, so I'm getting good and deep, hang on.

Movies contain "magic', the same stuff NE was talking about. And that magic can make crazy things happen, things that you may have never considered possible, or still consider impossible. But one thing we can not forget about reality, about realism, is that truth is stranger than fiction (you may have heard that one before). At the movies however, we are safe and dry and fed, and can enjoy watching things happen to others, because we know an editor somewhere won't make us wait too long till it finally happens(in some cases). So yes, we all escape our own realities, our day to days (which may be boring compared to others) and enjoy a good story with adamant motion for our eyes to see. (Before movies and stage and puppets, people just repeated good stories. Stories that touch and teach and help us to escape when we need to, just like a Catholic Priest-Hay-yo!)

Shit I'm losing track. So I think we experience just as much reality at the movies as we do outside the theater, it just happens alot faster inside.

"Aren't we, as the willing and paying public, consciously promoting escapist entertainment for a couple hours in the films we watch? Or does a part of us, unknowingly or unwillingly, look for realism in the silver screen?" (V)

I guess I'm saying the latter

Hooray for booze!

It doesn't.

As a filmmaker I can tell you that people are often shooting for "realism" but shooting in locaions or using non-actors, but there is nothing realistic about filmmaking. Everything is fake, including the rain.

Actual rain almost never shows up on film, so even if it is really raining outside, you need to augment it with a rain machine in order for it to play on film.

I keep rereading your question V, it seems like your asking if it's one or the other. Like your asking if cinema can be narrowed down into a finite catagory. 'Cinematography', The art or technique of movie photography, including both the shooting and development of the film(dictionary). So why we go to see it isn't as important as it's there. However, I still can't shake the fact that people don't like stories that they can not connect to in a realistic sence. Even if the only way to get something to show up on film is fake, it represents, and apears very real on film (when Roderick wants it to of course). And that's what's important, not what's left when you take the magic away.

It's not one or the other and it's both at the same time and nothing at all.

sometimes escapism and sometimes realism because for humans we are trying so hard to find the missing pieces and right now: it's not raising children we are not sure we are raising right and it's not the job 99% of people hate getting up in the morning for so we can buy things that break in two weeks and didn't need in the first place and it's not the people that surround us filling our lives with more nonsense and unwanted drama....

when you walk into a movie about war, we walk out with knowledge... on so many levels. same is true on any real subject a movie tackles, I found out more from Schindlers List than any information about the holocaust taught to me in school-with the added benefit of the emotional aspect...of finding tremendous EMPATHY lacking by reading about it in a textbook.

We watch fantasy and horror and comedy to escape and sometimes find a little piece of that adventure our hearts desire. The way life SHOULD be...life should be funny and slapstick and romantic and FUN!
Fantasy especially...I want my fucking life to be a fucking adventure, I do not want to toil all fucking day and fall asleep exhausted and then get up and the first thing that hits me is DREAD.
I want love and desire that lights my hair on fire and flying fucking horses to starbucks for some magic coffee beans that grows all sorts of wonderful shit and taking my kid to the park and finding a nest of fucking faeries and walk into my fucking closet and OMG there's a fucking DOOR into another world!





I forget what my point was...

Haha- that was fucking brilliant, Nova.

Plenty of excellent replies, guys, especially the ones by MT and Nova.

But I was not referring to this - "if realism exists in filmmaking." Excluding docs, filmmaking is one giant cooker of imagination. I know that too.

And there is a huge difference between realism and reality. Realism is simulating reality in the visual arts - be it films, painting, sculpture etc. To quote a guy from another forum -

There's a good article on this too - http://www.filmreference.com/encyclo...M-HISTORY.html

But thats a different line altogether, and we won't go there.

I am referring to something else - escapist entertainment vs realism.

I'm going with entertainment. I mean c'mon, it's the movies, we go to be entertained. If realism were the key factor in selling movie tickets, the Fox Network would've made a Survivor movie by now. Please Jesus, don't let Fox make a Survivor movie. (I am not suggesting Survivor is real)

No. Realism is gay. Your question is gay.

At the same time, realism "sells" fantasy. Realistic details are what made the "Star Wars" world believable--all that dust and grime and worn-out spaceships and robots. It allows you to suspend disbelief. In a sense, it is a most important part of any good fantasy.

All those lens flares and camera-shake and handheld camera effects, which have been incorporated for so many years into visual effects shots, are mainly there to give the impression that "this stuff is really happening" and there just happened to be a guy with a camera filming it. That sense that what you are seeing on the screen "really happened" and that the movie is proof of that--well, that has always been a subtle selling point in narrative cinema, all the way back to the split screen matte shots of "The Great Train Robbery" (1903).

Part of "escaping into the fantasy," I believe, is seeing enough of the earmarks of reality there to stop questioning that fantasy, and just accept it...you might say that in the movies, fantasy and reality are two sides of the same coin.

Excellent.

That explains a lot of unanswered stuff for me. Thanks, crabby.

And I think it's relative. For instance, you wouldn't go into Alice in Wonderland expecting it to be beleivable but at the same time you want the characters to be somewhat realistic in their characterization and continuity of that. Continuity and Realism go hand in hand.

And dude...WHAT THE FUCK? Where's the Banana are happy or Hoochie Poochie. You never make that much sense.

Oh, uh, uh..........well.........I guess that, you might say, that in the movies, banana are happy ? ? ?

*stands and applauds* Does it get more real that? Does it have to?