Abstract
In order for film to provide useful insights into the nature of existential-ism, the movies discussed must be reliably realistic. This may be asking too much of films that are fictional narratives, however. Whether it is or not depends heavily on what you think ‘realism’ means; ‘real’ and its derivates are terribly vague and given to quite disparate uses. The concept is nevertheless widely used in film analysis, and in the previous chapter I have begun to situate my use of the term in the tradition of film theory. While not disagreeing with Bazin about the importance of the photographic medium to reveal the world to us, the important reality pertinent to a study of existentialism is the experience we assume of the characters, and that is often best conveyed through various stylistic techniques that Münsterberg was among the first to describe. So the emphasis on the inner world is just as important as an emphasis on the outer world, as long as it’s understood that our intent is always to reveal experience.
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Notes
Seymour Chatman, Antonioni: Or, The Surface of the World (Berkley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 2.
Michelangelo Antonioni and Marga Cottino-Jones, The Architecture of Vision: Writings and Interviews on Cinema, ed. Carlo Di Carlo and Giorgio Tinazzi (New York: Marsilio Publishers, 1996), p. 188.
Karl Marx, Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 83.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage Books. 1989). pp. xxii–xxxi.
Peter Brunette, The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 34.
William Arrowsmith, Antonioni: The Poet of Images (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 75.
I’ve alluded to this already in Part I. The general criticism stems from the Cartesian emphasis on consciousness that marks phenomenology in general. Alternate views see the self as inherently social and the product of intersubjective activity. The American pragmatists advocated this perspective, and more recently Jürgen Habermas has critiqued the ‘philosophy of consciousness’ generally for its inability to appreciate the social dimension of the self. See Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), pp. 53–76.
William Pamerleau, ‘Making a Meaningful Life: Rereading Beauvoir’, Philosophy in the Contemporary World 6, nos. 3–4 (Fall–Winter 1999): 79–83.
David Bordwell, ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice’, in Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 722.
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© 2009 William C. Pamerleau
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Pamerleau, W.C. (2009). Film Realism and Narrative Identity. In: Existentialist Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230235465_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230235465_4
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