1. Realism in Popular Cinema
Real-ization of True Stories

2. Table of Contents 1) Realism and Popular Film Genres
2) Film Real-ization

3. Realism and Popular Film Genres
Realist filming strategies used in various cinematic genres.
Techniques and styles associated with film realism -- natural ingredients of certain genres:
Historical drama, biographical film, political thriller, e.g.

4. Realism and Popular Film Genres
Realist techniques and styles are also employed in other genres:
Melodrama, gangster film, and Western
Especially when they are in need of renovation and rejuvenation.

5. Realism and Popular Film Genres
Revisionist Westerns
Sam Pekinpah’s Patt Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973)
Graphic reality
Arthur Penn’s Missouri Breaks (1976)
All (cowboy/ sheriff) mannerisms are stripped off.

6. Realism and Popular Film Genres
Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves (1990)
Better understanding of Indians, the Sioux tribe, and diatribe against the white self-righteousness.
Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992)
Retired ‘killer’ fails to reform himself. Blurring the lines between heroism and villainy, and good and evil.

7. Realism and Popular Film Genres
To regenerate the cultural status of the genre in their realistic treatment of the subject in their own way
Pat Garrett and Missouri Breaks draw on realist techniques associated with European art cinema.
Dances with Wolves and Unforgiven refer to the aspects of the historical past that the genre ignored

8. Film Real-ization
Real-ization of a true story, a past event, and a historical fact.
Realist filming techniques and realist narrative techniques are the most often used for such real-ization films.
Historical drama, bio-pic (biographical pictures), political thrillers
REALIST AND TRUTH EFFECTS THAT THEY ACHIEVE VARY A GREAT DEAL from film to film.

9. Film Real-lization
Spectacular real-ization in James Cameron’s Titanic (1998)
An ‘authentic’ mise-en-scène based on contemporary and historical verisimilitude.
The opening sequence of the film has the appearance of a glossy documentary until flashback sequences

10. Film Real-ization
The story of this epic disaster is retold using the ostensibly ‘true’ story of a (fictionalized) survivor.
It is dissolved into a conventional narrative of disruption, heroic action and resolution.

11. Film Real-ization
The film which turned a historical event into a fiction.
Real-ization of a fiction in Fred Zinneman’s The Day of the Jackal (1973)
A British assassin hired to kill President Charles De Gaulle.
Complete historical accuracy

12. Film Real-ization
Totally convincing recreation of France in the 1960s and the military parade of President Charles de Gaulle, combining actual newsreel and restaged images.
Documentary-like observation of the assassin and the assassination attempt in grainy photography.

13. Film Real-ization
The film is adapted from Frederic Forsyth thriller fiction based on a thorough research on the political situation in France in the 1960s. The film managed to make a fiction look as if it were a historical event.

14. Film Real-ization
Timely and topical real-ization in Alan J. Pakura’s All the President’s Men (1976)
The most meticulous reenacting of the Watergate investigation by the two Washington post journalists.

15. Film Real-ization
The film focuses not on the scandal itself but the two journalists, with many omissions. It touches only on a part of the entire reality called ‘Watergate scandal.’

16. Film Realization Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991)
The film recreates the investigation instigated by the officially discredited New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison.

17. Film Real-ization A range of realist forms of depiction
News footage and photographs culled from neswpaper and TV reports
Recreated vérité documentary

18. Both real and recreated TV news and documentary footage shot on 16 mm, home movies shot on 8 mm., models, diagrams, press photos, and reconstructed photos woven together.
They are displayed in a courtroom.
Film Real-ization

19. Film Real-ization Controversies
Fictionalization rather than real-ization of history
Distortion of the past
Mixing of factual materials with re-enactment sequences
Rapid editing style
Aggressive delivering of messages
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