Bazin claims cinema satisfies our obsession with realism.

Realism has been the ‘holy grail’ of artists and artisans since the dawn of thought. Our obsession with Realism drives us to create that which mimics the things we see around us. Striving to be closer to God we try to emulate that which we perceive to be most like His creations. As time has gone on sculptures and paintings have become more and more physically accurate, however we are also struggling to balance that which is spiritual with the world we perceive around us. This leaves us with the question ‘what is realism, the spiritual, aesthetic or our true psychologically perceived world?’ Here I hope to look briefly at the ‘plastic arts’ but focus mainly on photography and cinema to see if they can satisfy the battle between these elements and our desire to create realism through the arts.

In the early days of what Bazin calls ‘the plastic arts’, painting was used to capture a ‘real’ image on canvas for all eternity, although the painting is, as Goddard calls

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Man’s desire to create could be said to stem from our wanting to be more like God. Human beings live in the knowledge that ‘nobody’s perfect’. As children, those of us with religious backgrounds are taught that only Christ or Mohammed or whichever religious figure we learn of is the supreme being and that only he can reach perfection. Everybody would love to be perfect, and we draw a connection between being perfect and being more like God and therefore we often have what is known as a ‘God Complex’. In attempting to create realism in art, an artist is trying to recreate God’s creations and bring themselves closer to the perfection that we desire. Once photography became true to colour and motion, re-creation was no longer enough. Cinematographers desire to create new and different worlds or stories and people’s willingness to be drawn into them demonstrates how man finds it no longer enough to match God, but feels a desperate need to better him. Even in the early days of cinema, Georges Méliè was creating fantastical feats of cinema, the most famous of these is Le Voyage dans la lune (1902) in which we see a space rocket crash into the moon. Méliè was one of the pioneers of pre-digital special effects technology and although he was not appreciated until late in his life, he brought cinema a new meaning other than just using it to record reality as the Lumières did.

Bazin mentions ‘our obsession with realism’ and as discussed, it seems at least on a level that he is quite correct, that man does indeed have a spiritual obsession with the recreation of the world around him and yet also with the editing and re-representation of that world to suit his needs. Most of this analysis deals with realism and unreality on film, but a brief look at still photography is also essential. The realism of photography has been played with and de-credited since the early 1920s. The earliest recorded doctoring of photographs to re-present reality in the media took place in the Evening Graphic, a trashy American newspaper from the 1920s. They would create photos when they were unable to obtain them, they called these falsified photos ‘composographs’. People would see the photographic images and believe what they saw because the lens couldn’t lie… could it? This early falsification of photos to accompany petty news stories lead on to more historically important doctoring of photos such as the removal of Tibor Samuelli from the background of a photo of Vladimir Lenin so as to ‘remove any connection to the internationalisation of the Bolshevik revolution’. Propaganda through photographic manipulation is rife throughout international politics of the mid 20th century. The realism of photographs in the media has always been questionable and remains so today with The Sunday Sport tabloid printing pictures of aliens or even a famous picture of a London Bus that was apparently stranded in the South Pole. This can also be said of America’s National Enquirer.

The fantasy of cinema is accepted as real if the level of ‘realism’ is acceptable. Modern cinema heralds directors such as Steven Spielberg and George Lucas to be some of the greatest fantasy film-makers of all time. This is not just because they tell great stories but because of the reality they create in the midst’s of fantasy. To take Jurassic Park for example (Steven Spielberg, 1993, staying the biggest grossing film of all time for many years), the situation in the film is made real by the suggestion of its possibility in reality. The writer, Michael Crichton, suggests that Dinosaurs can be cloned from a sample of their blood preserved forever in a mosquito trapped in amber and due to the average audience member not having a degree in bio-chemistry, we accept what we are told as possible drawing on what little knowledge of cloning we have ac

Some topics in this essay:
André Bazin’s, David Attenborough, Michael Crichton, André Bazin, Matrix Wachowski’s, Gogh Monet, Matrix Bazin, According Gunning, Clockwork Orange, Night Mail, obsession realism’, level realism, ‘photography cinema, modern cinema, essence obsession realism’, digital effects, post office, ‘god complex’, accepted audience, cinema …, reality created, … obsession realism’, gunning ‘cinema attractions’, aesthetic level realism, satisfy … obsession,