Real to Reel: Why Media Representations of Reality Are Not ‘Windows On The World’

•  Can there be a common, accepted standard, a currency of realism or truth
• John Ellis who at the start of Visible Fictions begins to theorise realism and sketches out four spectator expectations of a text that correspond to different and possibly conflicting notions of realism:
• surface accuracy; it should conform to notions of what we expect to happen; it should explain itself adequately to us as audience; it should conform to particular notions of psychology and character motivation
• the forms of texts (e.g. mise-en-scène, cinematography, sound, editing, performance) and their conventions (how they are conventionally used) such as genre and narrative
• institutions: the producers of texts working in particular industrial conditions
• audiences: a wide term comprising targeted audiences as well as individual spectators
• representations/messages and values/ideology: the meanings of texts and how they represent us and the world.
• What’s the text about?
• How does it hang together?
• Why have its producers made it like that?
• What makes it work for us as individual spectators?
• Why is it relevant for us and for today?
• What’s it saying to us?
• Realism is not a given reflection of the world but rather a construction that must, often laboriously, be worked at
• But it is when filmed drama apes the techniques, say, of newsreel footage that we need to be especially on our guard against attributing the realist effect to the depicted events themselves, lazily assuming that documenting reality is simply showing it like it actually happened. So when a film like The Killing Fields (Roland Joffe, 1984) takes its cue from the techniques of 1940s Italian neo-realism, for example, and pitches the spectator into a violent, bloody melee on the streets of Phnom Penh with people, vehicles and body parts seeming haphazardly to fill the frame, we need to remind ourselves that this is an event as carefully arranged for the camera as the still, artfully composed tableau that served as the film’s poster.
• there is not just one single ’real world’ realism, but many constructed ones – depending on the criteria of the seven codes introduced below
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