- ISSN: 1474-2756
- E-ISSN: 2040-0578
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f Introduction: ‘New Perspectives in Film and Realism’
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Authors:
Christos Dermentzopoulos1
and Eleftheria Rania Kosmidou2
- Source: New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film, Volume 22, Issue New Perspectives in Film and Realism, Part 1, Jun 2024, p. 3 - 11
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- 23 Oct 2025
Abstract
Since the invention of cinema, and after more than a century of cinematic practice, the issue of film realism seems to remain an ambiguous one and has been debated from cinema’s outset. As our Special Issue ‘New Perspectives in Film and Realism’ aims to show, we believe that in the age of artificial intelligence (AI) and the dominance of the digital, the question of realism in cinema as an understanding of the world, as a representation and imposition, and as a mode of reception and consumption remains paramount. Like photography, film is considered capable of capturing a very strong sense of the ‘real’, which is to say a realistic depiction of reality. However, films, and art in general, recreate the world, meaning that any ‘realistic’ representation will always remain an interpretation. Certainly then, there are many forms of realism, and therefore, many forms of ‘realistic’ representations. If we agree that there is no single method or blueprint for cinematic impressions of reality, then any ‘realistic’ depiction remains a set of aesthetic conventions that refer to different schools, movements and genres. In line with the above statement, but also expanding upon it, the central premise of this two-part Special Issue, is that the notion that realism represents the world as it is remains false since the various cinematic conventions of realism constitute in themselves an interpretive, mediated framework of reality, since films are the products, both aesthetically and economically, as well as politically and ideologically, of the world. Realism in film in this Special Issue is discussed in areas such as: magic realism as a cosmopolitan borderland; Latin American films and capitalist realism; mestizaje and its impure aesthetics as contemporary cinematic realism; and the complication of the realism/fantasy divide in documentaries.
