World Cinema: Realism, Evidence, Presence

European art/auteur cinema (and by extension, world cinema) has always defined itself against Hollywood on the basis of its greater realism. Whether one thinks of Italian neorealism, the French nouvelle vague’s semi-documentary cin ma vérité , or Ingmar Bergman’s clinically probing psychological realism: our notions of non-Hollywood filmmaking are generally tied to some version of a realist aesthetics. Denmark’s Dogma movement or the New Iranian Cinema, for instance, were hailed as welcome returns to the precepts of neorealism, and many other emerging national cinemas, notably from Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia, are f ted at festivals for their quasi-documentary, ethnographic engagement with the slow rhythms of the everyday, with the lives of ordinary people, with the disappearing natural environment, the wasted desolation of the shanty towns and urban slums, or the ennui and anomie of the newly affluent Asian middle classes. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.