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Having been routinely dismissed as naive illusionism by materialist and neo-formalist critics alike, cinematic realism is long overdue for re-examination. This ambitious volume approaches realism from a new perspective—not as a mimetic problem involving art’s representation of reality, but as what Ivone Margulies calls a dynamic “aesthetic that effectively enacts cultural and social tensions” (14). Corporeality, contingency, and indexicality replace verisimilitude, referentiality, and iconicity as key categories for studying realist films and analyzing the way they record the sheer uniqueness and unpredictability of the “barely grasped instant” (11). Incidental occurrences that would otherwise escape notice become memorable and even unforgettable in the guise of infinitely repeatable images that retrospectively make chance events appear inevitable.

Many of the volume’s essays hark back half a century to André Bazin’s seminal writings on realism. Reflecting on Bazin’s insight into viewers’ “investment” in filmed images of reality, Philip Rosen finds the “root of any true realism” to be largely a matter of “imagination, fantasy, [and] the illogical” (54). Indeed, one of the volume’s recurring themes is the relevance of subjectivity and aesthetics to realist film. When cinematic artifice is not concealed by reality effects but revealed and even celebrated as staged “rites,” it actually contributes to the filmmaker’s documentary project, deepening its social and cultural significance. Thus, Margulies suggests that “reenactment films” teach their lessons not by reproducing traumatic or turbulent events, but by exposing viewers’ unrealistic “back to the future” fantasies of returning to the past in order to change it. Brigitte Peucker considers another type of filmic reenactment—recreations of Vermeer’s hyper-realist paintings as animated tableaux vivants in Greenaway’s and Wenders’s films. James F. Lastra accounts for the absurdity of a goat’s obviously staged fatal “fall” in Buñuel’s Las Hurdes, claiming that it undercuts the film’s pretense of documentary realism. And Noa Steimatsky notes how Pasolini’s adaptation of Saint Matthew’s Gospel required counter-realist measures like shifting the location from the Holy Land to Italy, and adopting a medieval “aesthetic of frontality.” (The folly of a literalist rendering of the Gospels is evident in Mel Gibson’s latest project, The Passion.) Not surprisingly, analyses of filmmakers as different as Dreyer and Mike Leigh result in opposite conclusions. While Richard Porton shows Leigh’s well-known “naturalism” to be highly artificial and indebted as much to Beckett’s spare modernism as to Brecht’s didactic realism, James Schamus challenges the view of Dreyer as a modernist director of avant-garde “art” films, arguing that his [End Page 290] exhaustive researches into historical figures like Joan of Arc reveal him rather to be a practitioner of “textual realism.”

The essays concerned with the realist sub-genre of ethnographic film offer particularly striking insights into the heightened reality of death rituals. Thus, Lastra describes the goat’s slaughter in Las Hurdes as a “ritual sacrifice” (186), and Catherine Russell discusses the significance of the “once-only events” of animal sacrifices in Maya Deren’s footage of Haitian possession rituals (283). The theme of death is already announced in the two new translations that open the volume: “Death Every Afternoon,” Bazin’s 1958 meditation on the solemn ritual of death in Pierre Braunberger’s documentary The Bullfight, and “The Screen of Fantasy,” Serge Daney’s Bazinian reflection on realist film’s reliance on the unedited frame to depict “the shared space” of a “real or simulated . . . ‘life and death struggle’” between animal and animal, animal and man, or man and man (36).

Margulies is clearly onto something in suggesting that fatal human/animal confrontations—especially those involving risk (Braunberger’s dying bull) or sacrifice (Buñuel’s slain goat)—underscore “the centrality of images of death in discussions of realism and cinema” (15). Readers can supply their own examples, from the unexpected fatalities occurring in the filmed tiger hunt in Pirandello’s 1915 novel Si gira to the use of fake animals to simulate danger and death in pseudo...