Gritty Social Realism is Not a Dirty Concept
Using the word “social realism” to describe a film is a bit like calling a piece of music tuneful or soulful. Isn’t the search to recreate what’s “real” about ourselves and our society self-evident in film-making – in art in general? Don’t we expect realistic social representation and commentary to be a pretty integral part of what we watch when we go to the movies?…
Uhhh… on second thought, perhaps not. We in the U.S seem, as of late anyway, to be pretty obsessed with watching “reality” TV, including the recent offshoot of has-been or never-been “celebrities” assembling a television show lineup of attention starved “regular people” prostituting themselves for the promise of the privilege of fake-dating (although potentially, anyway, reallyfucking) them, or working for them, or hanging out with them. Perhaps this fact alone, combined maybe with the reality that Ashton Kutcher-Moore keeps getting to star in movies (when he’s not tweeting about taking a shit, of course), might be enough evidence to confirm that our collective taste buds are, much like Gaylord Focker, The Hollywood Ten, or Ryan Seacrest – under suspicion.
Art, of course, doesn’t have to literally be realistic in order to be meaningful to someone. As we speak, there are any number of marauding nerd armies skulking around Holiday Inn lobbies across the country who find their truth in Star Trek; Lord of the Rings; Watchmen, or whatever fantasy material this years Comic-Con attendees deem as chic. Obviously, one person’s drop cloth is another’s Jackson Pollock. All the power to them. Art is like religion or sexuality – you go with what floats your boat. Just ask a Furry or a Jehovah’s witness (but trust me, not at the same time… long story). As Phillip Baker Hall’s character Floyd Gandolfini said in Boogie Nights, “I like simple pleasures - like butter in my ass and lollipops in my mouth… That’s me – call me crazy, call me a pervert, but that’s what I like.”
So then… perhaps the essential goal of any art form – beyond the rather obvious and un-loftydesire to entertain of course – is, or should be, an attainment of some form of truth, regardless of the medium or means by which it is delivered or achieved. Maybe, if one wanted to put a positive spin on the now fully cemented reality era of television, one might say that the viewing audience had their fill of worn-out multi-camera sitcoms and false-feeling melodramas (posing as drama) and wanted to see “real” people behaving in “real” (read, “embarrassing”) ways. Of course, this begs other questions - like why we don’t just watch documentaries, and why we need a bunch of contrived set-ups to enjoy our “real” people along with our Pizza Hut cheesy crust or Hot Pockets, but that’s for another show. Hell, let’s be positive – perhaps what we’re looking at with this modern day reality freak show parade is some twisted form of truth seeking? (Okay, I don’t believe it either, but…)
As a movie-theater-going audience, our choices, however, seem to be getting increasingly narrow. It’s a little like the old chicken and egg thing – is it our bad taste that cuts out or limits the quality, or do the film and television studios keep going for the lowest common denominator, spending more and more on individual films and making less of them on aggregate, thus limiting our choices, marketing the hell out of what they want us to see, and ultimately leading us like sheep to the slaughter? With art-house movie theaters having largely disappeared, except in our most urbane cities (thank god then for Landmark), most of us see our movies at the cineplex/multiplex or on DVD (personally, Netflix happens to be my life, but that too is an entirely different sob story…).
We live in a country with a multi-billion dollar film industry run by major mega-media conglomerates employing accountants, lawyers, and advertising people they call “movie executives,” who function as the de facto gatekeepers for what gets made (or “green-lit” for those who watch Entourage). These “suits” (as Billy Walsh, the HBO shows fucked-up angry director would call them) know, on the whole, know less about cinema than Simon Cowell knows about music – that is, everything and nothing. They can quote statistics about the Red Bull consumption habits of tween moviegoers between the ages of twelve and thirteen and a half, and can probably tell you what What Happens in Vegas? did for box office in Amsterdam, but they couldn’t even make a stab at what La Dolce Vita means without looking it up on Google translations, let alone tell you who made it. (It’s The Sweet Life, Fellini’s 1960 classic. Put it on your NF queue – it rocks). Maybe there are people who can find life reflected back to them in Transformers and the impending Paul Bart: Mall Cop II(already in the works, my friend). Shit, if you’re going to go to the trouble of seeing these films at a theater near you just stay home and play a video game with your friends (cyber or otherwise) – it amounts to the same thing, although I suppose that’s the point.
The trouble with cinema in the United States can be easily traced to the ol’ uneasy balance between art and commerce, which in 2009 is as seriously out of whack as W’s view of his own “legacy”. These mega-douche-movie-factories would rather spend 150 million on some crappy CGI ridden remake of a comic book (excuse moi, graphic novel), or an animated flick about fencing giraffes starring the voices of Ray Romano, Lili Tomlin, and Miley Cyrus than make cinema with thinking, feeling characters and relevant, challenging subject matter. Backed by statistical indexes and pie charts (I’m guessing) that are all about nothing more than spreading out corporate risk and cutting the mega-huge corporate exposure (and we all know how well that mutual fund concept worked out), the suits claim to understand categorically and empirically what we want to see and they’re gonna give it to us, and give it to us good, ad naseum… that means until we puke… a lot.
Since that wonderful decade in American film history – the 1970s – when, for a short window anyway, studios and execs threw up their hands and allowed Coppola, Scorcese, Bogdonavitch, Ashby, Altman and the boys to run wild and actually make films that meant something, our overall output as a movie-making nation has gone to shit in a hand-basket (is that a real saying?). The best we can boast since Jaws (1975) all but created summer blockbusters and studios started micro-managing the film-making process again is a handful of preternaturally gifted, referential filmmakers (Wes Anderson; PT Anderson; The Coen Brothers… and Tarantino, at least once upon a time), who are, of course, all mega-talented film auteurs possessed with more crazy chops and style than Liberace in his prime, but they largely make films (some of them truly great, by the way) populated by characters who are about as close to real, live human beings as Kelly Ripa or Octo-Mom.
The term social realism when it’s applied to the arts can also refer to a group of painters in the early to middle part of the 20th century whose work focused on depicting this country’s marginalized workers. Social Realism as we understand it today is most often related with photography and cinema, but the term hasn’t really changed in meaning. Basically, it involves artists who point their lenses at people who work for a living, and in the case of film-making, creating films in a kind of no-nonsense, cinema verite style that mirrors documentary work. This is not the same thing as socialist realism by the way, which is essentially a style of propaganda films commissioned by socialist dictators (you know, like Howard Hawks and John Ford used to make for us guys) like Joseph Stalin in Russia. Another characteristic of social realist film-making is that the filmmakers often use inexperienced actors. Sometimes the casts are completely non-professional, sometimes more experienced actors are blended into the mix, but the idea is that there is something to be achieved by using real people (often those who are very close to the parts they are playing in real life) to reproduce realistic characters and scenarios.
There is not a vast history of social realist film-making in this country – nothing as substantial as one could deem a movement anyway. Europe, on the other hand, has a long tradition in this realm, beginning in earnest with the Italian neo-realists’ films like Robert Rossellini’s Open City(1945); and Luchino Visconti’s La Terra Trema (1948) and De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief(1949). Lacking funds and functioning studios during WWII, these talented directors used short ends (portions of unused film rolls) and took to the streets to make films about ordinary people trying to live their lives in the face of great adversity and loss. A handful of these films are among the best ever made, although there is also a strain of sentimentality (at times bordering on melodrama) running through films of the movement. France boasts the past work of a great minimalist like Robert Bresson (Diary of A Country Priest (1950); A Man Escaped (1957); Pickpocket (1959), and Belgium can claim the more recent work of The Dardenne Brothers La Promesse (The Promise) (1996); Rosetta (1992); The Son (2002); L’Enfant (The Child) (2005); and Le Silence de Lorna (Lorna’s Silence) (2008).
In the UK, social realist cinema has been around since the 1930s. There has been a surprising number of quality low budget documentary and narrative offerings from several different film collaboratives, most notably The Amber Collective, who dedicate themselves to living among and intimately getting to know the people they make their films about. Social Realism really came into its heyday in the UK, however, in the late 50s and 60s with films (many of them based on plays produced a few years earlier) like Room at the Top (1958); Look Back in Anger (1958) The Entertainer (1960) Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1961); The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) and The Sporting Life (1963); and Don’t Look Back (1967). These films starred upcoming actors like Albert Finney, Richard Burton, Alan Bates, and Richard Harris, who, in some cases, carved international names for themselves with these efforts. In the tradition of playwright Harold Pinter, these films were interested in the lives of working people, and were dubbed “Kitchen Sink” films (a label of Kitchen Sink Realism is sometimes applied), or “The Angry Young Man” films. To this day there are several directors in the UK who have continued creating films that blend political/social concerns with stories that entertain us. Ken Loach (Poor Cow (1968); My Name is Joe (1998); Raining Stones (1993); Sweet Sixteen (2002); Bread and Roses (2000); The Navigators (2001) It’s a Free World (2007) has, for the last forty some odd years, made stories about working class people, and the down and out, delving into the issues surrounding people on the lower rungs of the social ladder. Mike Leigh, (Life is Sweet (1991); All of Nothing (2002); Happy-Go-Lucky (2008)) is a filmmaker who is perhaps less interested in politics than he is about social conventions, nonetheless he frequently produces films about the lives of the working class.
We in the United States can only point to a selection of films made by various directors over the course of our 100 year movie-making history that demonstrate an overt commitment to social causes. Outside of a few famous labor documentaries like Barbara Koppel’s Harlan County War (1976) and American Dream(1992), there have been surprisingly few widely seen films that have taken a critical look at workers and their issues. King Vidor enjoyed critical success, but also vast criticism from some circles for his films The Crowd (1928) and Our Daily Bread (1934). Herbert Biberman’s Salt of the Earth (1954) is a film describing the experience of a group of mostly Latino striking coal miners. Using many of the same people involved in the actual strike, the film was actually banned in the United States, illustrating the difficulty of funding and distributing controversially dissonant films of this kind. African American Charles Burnett made Killer of Sheep (1977) and My Brother’s Wedding(1983) on a shoestring. Both films are a bit rough around the edges, but stay true to the social realist ideal of looking at the lives of ordinary working people. Similarly, indie filmmaker Michael Roemer, a white Jew, made a film Nothing About a Man (1964) having to do withrace and class and the plight of a working man and woman of color. Any talk of US independent film must include maverick John Cassavettes, who also dealt with race in his film Faces (1968). Cassavettes made films that searched for a kind of naturalism, eschewing the canned plots and dialogue of traditional Hollywood films, although some might argue that there was a particular stylization that developed within his improvisational-feeling work that separated it from those attempts to accurately document naturalistic human behavior. Where Cassavetes characters were often long-winded philosophers agonizing over their existential angst, most strictly social realist films employ spare dialogue with characters who are often too concerned with putting food on the table to wax eloquent about their imperiled souls. Wanda (1971), the story of a married woman who leaves her hometown for a life on the road, was made by Barbara Loden, wife of Elia Kazan, and is one of the few examples of a film of this type made by a woman. Longtime Hollywood cinematographer Harold Wexler made Medium Cool (1969), a film starring Robert Forster as a television news reporter sent to Chicago to cover the Democratic National Convention. Forster is filmed among the actual swarming crowds during the protests and rioting that too place, and the plot combines a tender story about a woman (Verna Bloom) who has moved with her young son from Appalachia to Illinois in the hopes of a better life.
There have, of course, been any number of Hollywood movies made about workers, labor unions, and the plight of people struggling to gain better conditions and increased rights in the workplace. Narratives like On the Waterfront (1954); The Molly Maguires (1970; Blue Collar (1978); F.I.S.T. (1978); Norma Rae (1979); Silkwood (1983); Matewan (1987); Hoffa (1992); and North Country (2005) all take a hard look at the way workers have been exploited and in, some most instances, fought back to gain rights and benefits. These films, however, essentially employ a Hollywood film structure in telling their tales of the abused and disenfranchised, generally playing as wrenching dramas. While they may follow one, or a couple of central characters, their essential approach is to take a wider, more operatic view. Social Realist films are traditionally (though not always) narrower in scope, focusing on an individual’s experiences as a microcosm for the larger issues. El Norte(1983) by Gregory Nava, is a good example - a film about exploited Latin workers that sticks closer to the tenets of social realist work.
The digital revolution has seemingly aided a new generation of filmmakers dealing with those on the economic margins, the accessibility and low production cost of the medium being a move toward the democratization of film-making. This doesn’t mean that many of these films are being distributed and seen by wide audiences, but, as always, some low budget offerings sneak through the cracks via the festival route. North Carolina based Ramin Bahrani, an American director of Iranian descent, has released the critically acclaimed Man Push Cart (2005) and Chop Shop (2007), in both cases telling stories about poor characters endeavoring to survive on the streets of New York. His latest film, Goodbye Solo (2009) again looks at marginalized people, this time taking place down south. Offerings from American Indie directors such as David Gordon Green’s, George Washington (2000), and more recently, Kelly Reichart, Wendy and Lucy (2008), and Courtney Hunt, Frozen River(2008), are perhaps reflective of our troubled economic times, and might indicate a move toward more films of this kind to come. Married partners Anna Bodin and Ryan Fleck, Half-Nelson (2005) and Sugar (2008), are two other directors working within this realm.
Many directors of serious cinema based in third world countries face severe budget constraints and are naturally prone to telling stories about those who live among them. By the nature of their limited resources and their surroundings alone they are certainly closer to the aesthetics of what traditionally comprise social realist films. However, the prevailing idea in some of these countries is that the last thing poverty stricken, oftentimes illiterate people want to see when they go to the movies is their own lives reflected back to them. So while many of the films produced in these countries use poor and working people as subject matter, they also combine genres and/or mix in elements of fantasy, music, and religion that show ordinary characters transcending the circumstances of their lives.
In this way, the product coming out of India or “Bollywood” is reflective of a kind of stylized wish fulfillment based cinema – in this way, it is not unlike most of what gets made in Hollywood, frankly - films designed (some would say, cynically) to bring the unwashed masses into the theaters. Under this way of thinking, audiences anticipate a certain combination of elements – in India the expectation is it all should be jammed into the same film (romance, crime, music, dancing, colorful costumes, etc.) While 2008 Oscar Winner Slumdog Millionaire certainly touched on experiences of the impoverished, its construct was a meld of genres and types, an homage even to the film industry of the region where it was based. Classic Indian films like Sajayit Ray’s Apu Trilogy in the 50s and 60s, and (American) Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay (1988), on the other hand, are examples of cinema grounded in the personal and set in a realistic time and place.
In Asia, a definite split is evident between commercially made and art-house cinema. Asia produces martial arts, horror, and crime films that are constructed within the boundaries of accepted genres and meant to sell theater tickets in South Korea; Hong Kong; Japan; or Taiwan. While a long list of Asian directors (War Kong Wei; Ming-liang Tsai; Ki-Duk Kim; Apichatpong Weerasehakul; Hsioa-hsien Hou; Zhang Ke Jia) are producing their share of the best cinema in the world, some of that in a minimalistic social realist realm, often elements of mysticism and spiritualism are infused into an impressionistic style that differentiates it from purely social realist work.
Across the globe there are examples of newer filmmakers creating cinema that may not be strictly defined as social realist, but demonstrates some of its characteristics. In The Middle East, a wealth of quality film has come out of a country like Iran with directors Abbas Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us (2000) and Mossen Makhmalbaf’s Kandahar (2001) leading a movement that has produced a number of films that have received international exposure and acclaim. These modern Iranian films, however, often meld social realist elements with a kind of unique post-modern perspective that utilizes documentary and narrative, many times involving the actual production of the film itself in the story-lines. Jafar Panahi, Offside (2006), and Bahman Ghobadi, Turtles Can Fly (2004), are two additional examples of Iranian directors making films about the oppressed, war-torn poor who populate these countries.
In other parts of the globe, directors like Irishman Lenny Abrahamson’s Adam and Paul (2004) and Garage (2008); Swede Lukas Moodysson’s Show Me Love (1999) and Lilya 4-Ever (2003); German Turk Fatih Akin, Edge of Heaven (2007); Mexico’s Alejandro Gonzales Inirrutu’s Amores Perros (2000); 21 Grams (2003); and Babel (2006) and Carlos Reygada’s Battle in Heaven (2005); Brazil’s Fernando Meirelle’s City of God (2002); Dane Nicolas Winding Refn’s Pusher Series (1995-2006); and Italian Matteo Garrone’s Gomorra (2008) are invested in the nitty gritty. These directors play with time and structure, depict graphic sex, drug use, and violence, and employ stylistic (often handheld) camerwork to create visceral stories largely involving underclass inhabitants. The wonderful thing about these filmmakers, however, is that although they might riff off of formalized genres, the films they produce do not feel like retreads or referential imitations - they are very much grounded in the places they were made and feel organic to those areas.
Still, here in The United States, escapism is what the statistics supposedly tell the movie studios we seek. There is nothing inherently wrong on the surface with quality animated films like Ratatoullie (2007); WALL-E (2008), or Monsters and Aliens (2009). At least the long list of big animated movies being churned out by Hollywood provides kids with something to watch, even if the product tie-ins always make these films circumspect. Perhaps too there’s nothing inherently wrong with these big budget popcorn offspring of Jaws, with their plethora of loud explosions, colorful CGI, and requisite truckloads of bad guys getting slaughtered. Maybe too the recent spate of horror/slasher movies is just an example of cutting edge adult escapism (after all, just because someone gets their eyes gouged out by a potato peeler doesn’t mean it’s not all in good fun, right?). Sure, our censorship concerns over sex opposed to violence might continue to be a source of confusion for most of the rest of the world (ya know - like Bush was), but this is America - we like our guns, carnival rides and tits big (as long as wee see said tits in the form of porn where it belongs, of course). It’s a slippery-slope though, a kind of tenuous balance existing within an industry that at the top levels only occasionally deigns sincere attempts at quality cinema, and even then it’s usually of the bait and switch loss leader variety, set apart from the rest of the dreck produced to actually make money. As actor/director Sean Penn once said, “if I want entertainment I’ll get a hooker and an eight-ball” (he also once said that Nicolas Cage had turned into an amusement park ride, which is pretty awesome too).
Film can be an important art form with the ability to reflect aspects of ourselves and our environment back to us, making us think about our lives, and the human experience in general, in new and interesting ways. It’s important to recognize our relative lack of financial support for the arts in the United States, to say nothing of our declining interest in dramatic stage production and novels – indications that we might be doomed to a movie future when the exclusive likes of “tent-pole” and summer “event” films are the only type of fare we can easily see in the theater. When, Saw V; Paul Blart: A New Assignment; Transformers 3; and the latest Ashton Kutcher opus are the best that’s out there for the summer of 2010 we’re all in trouble. Although I guess there’s always Netflix and HBO.