Realism

Abstract

If we aim to enable students to assess critically the workings of the real world by our teaching about the media, then the concept of realism needs to be addressed. In a sense it is inaccurate to write or think about the concept of realism, for there are and have been many different ways of conceptualising how the ‘real’ might be constituted. Media artefacts can be analysed in terms of two kinds of relationships. The first is a mimetic one which any media artefact purports to have with the world it represents. Was London really the way Dickens depicted it in Bleak House, or was the BBC serialised adaptation more faithful to an historical ‘reality’? How far do schools match their portrayal in David Leland’s television drama Birth of a Nation (Central, 19 June 1983)? Do the media really tell it how it is? Mimesis between artefact and world has provided not only the central problem for art and literary criticism since the sixteenth century, but has also been what most artists have striven for and the yardstick by which audiences have measured artistic achievement.

‘Cinema is not the reflection of reality, but the reality of that reflection’ — Jean-Luc Godard