Studies in European Cinema

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The European realist tradition

Ian Aitken

To cite this article: Ian Aitken (2007) The European realist tradition, Studies in European
Cinema, 3:3, 175-188

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/seci.3.3.175_1

Published online: 06 Jan 2014.

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Studies in European Cinema Volume 3 Number 3 © Intellect Ltd 2006.

Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/seci.3.3.175/1

The European realist tradition

Ian Aitken Hong Kong Baptist University

Abstract Keywords
This paper explores the development of the realist tradition from its origins in the cinematic realism
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nineteenth-century through its appropriation by Lukács, to the ideas of the ‘clas- Bazin
sical’ realist film theorists. It will be argued that this realist tradition is best Grierson
understood as a form of reflexive practice which arose to resist an aestheticization Kracauer
of art and an intensifying specialization of the aesthetic sphere within capitalist Lukács
modernity. It will also be argued that this tradition was based in an intuitionist
model of knowledge, and was characterized by a rejection of the provenance of
rule-governed systems and the a priori formulaic. The paper relates the ideas of
Grierson, Kracauer and Bazin to a paradigm of ‘intuitionist cinematic realism,
and then relates this realist tradition to the broader spectrum of contemporary
film theory, and, in particular, to a ‘pragmatist’ school which emerged during the
1990s. It will be argued that the realist tradition is superior to this school,
because of its fruitful synthesis of idealist aesthetics, phenomenology and
Marxism, and ability to engage with abstract theoretical models. This argument
is developed by applying Kracaurian and Bazinian ideas to an analysis of Dreyer’s
La Passion de Jeanne d’ Arc.

This article will investigate that which is often labeled ‘classical’ realist
film theory, but which will here be referred to as the ‘Lukácsian and intu-
itionist realist tradition’. However, to begin with, distinctions between
realism, modernism and the avant-garde will first be considered in relation
to the critical tradition of realist art which developed in France during the
nineteenth-century. Such consideration is necessary because Lukácsian
and intuitionist cinematic realism ultimately have their origins in this tra-
dition, and, also, because it is of the essence that film theory should now
re-engage with the pre-twentieth-century traditions of European thought
and art which have in fact influenced it so greatly. Following this analysis
of the nineteenth-century tradition, the ideas of Georg Lukács, John
Grierson, Siegfried Kracauer and André Bazin will be considered. Finally,
the paper will conclude with an outline assessment of the values and
drawbacks of the realist tradition, and its place within the overall frame-
work of film theory.
Distinctions are often made between nineteenth-century realism, mod-
ernism and the avant-garde. However, it will be argued here that, in fact,
no consequential division can be drawn between the abstract idea of a

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1 A familiar example is nineteenth-century modernist avant-garde and the critical realist move-
Peter Wollen’s 1975
‘The Two
ment in the arts which emerged in France during the early nineteenth-
Avant-Gardes’, in century, because that movement was both modernist and avant-garde
which Wollen puts from its inception. The terms modernism and avant-garde have been
forward a conception
of modernism in widely contested and variously defined within film scholarship, but will be
which French engaged with here solely to advance this analysis of the realist tradition.
cinematic
impressionism, cinéma To this end, these terms will be interpreted as the art historian Clement
pur and various forms Greenberg did when referring to a category of art both representational
of structural and
abstract cinema are and reflexive (Frascina et al. 1993: 13). In the latter part of his career
criticized; and a Greenberg increasingly conflated these two terms as he came to under-
conception of the
stand ‘advanced’ avant-garde painting as that which attempted to realize
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avant-garde in which
Dziga Vertov, dada, the aesthetic specificity of the medium. This position, within which the
surrealism and term avant-garde is subsumed by that of modernism, provides the basis for
Jean-Luc Godard are
eulogized. Greenberg’s influential 1965 essay ‘Modernist Painting’. However, in an
essay dating from 1939, entitled ‘Avant-garde and Kitsch’, Greenberg
defined the avant-garde in other terms, when he insisted that the employ-
ment of reflexive modernist form should be considered as an attempt ‘to
keep culture moving in the midst of ideological confusion and violence’.
This was the ‘true and most important function of the avant-garde’
(Greenberg 1992: 531).
It is hardly unanticipated that modernist avant-garde art should be
held up as a principled form of ideal cultural exemplar as the world slipped
into total war, and such convictions also reverberated elsewhere during
the period, perhaps most notably in Theodor Adorno’s notion of
‘autonomous art’. Here, art ‘becomes an analogy of that other condition
that should be’, where analogy implies modernist technique and other
condition the converse of subordinated human essence (Adorno 1992:
763, 764). These positions link opposition to a ‘violent’ modernity with
the primacy of modernist form and bring the terms modernism and avant-
garde into concurrence, so that the evolution of the avant-garde is not
determined by a quest for the grail of specificity, but a need to perpetuate
human essence through form which stands apart from the infected
imagery of instrumentalized life. These positions evidently do not require
that modernism should be held as inferior to the avant-garde on grounds
of political retreat, because, here, modernist technique is conceived of as
one of the means through which an oppositional sensibility struggles to
contest the pervasive diminution of essence. However, such a requirement
has become influential within film studies,1 and it will be argued here that
such an unwarranted partition of modernism and the avant-garde is both
misguided per se, and also stands in the way of reaching a satisfactory
understanding of the critical nineteenth and twentieth-century realist
traditions.
Given this, a more inclusive conception of the historically based rela-
tionship between realism, modernism and the avant-garde will be adopted
here, and, within the terms of that conception, it will be suggested that the
‘critical’ nineteenth-century realist tradition should not be considered as

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distinct from either modernism or the avant-garde, but as a type of mod- 2 There are, of course,
distinctions to be
ernist avant-garde art which arose initially in resistance to an official made between realist
appropriation of the aesthetic sphere founded on photographic realism. and modernist
The tradition of critical, or ‘serious’ (Auerbach 1979: 556) realism under avant-garde art, based
on distinctions
consideration here was, for example, vitally concerned with both represen- between
tation and reflexivity, and cannot be defined as naive realist. Raymond representationalism
and formalism.
Williams makes this point when asserting that this realist tradition However, what is at
attempted to go beyond the portrayal of ‘surface appearances’ (Williams issue here is the
critical realist
1979: 219), whilst the art historian Gerald Needham argues similarly, tradition, whose
when insisting that a distinction be made between the academic painting concerns flow from
nineteenth-century
of Jean-Léon Gérôme, Ernest Meissonier and others, and contemporaneous
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realism into
painting which does not merely attempt to create a ‘smooth, invisible intuitionist realist film
surface which is a window into the scene beyond’ (Needham 1988: 95). theory. Although this
tradition can be
This same distinction between reflexive and naive realism also held true distinguished from
within the field of literature, where contemporaneous realist and natural- more extreme forms
of twentieth-century
ist novelists were intent to distinguish realism from art which presented ‘a formalism, such as
bland photographic view of life’ (Hemmings 1966: 200). But, if the critical abstract art, it
nevertheless remains,
realist tradition can be considered as modernist in this reflexive sense it as argued here, one
can also be considered as avant-garde in that it was characterized by a which can
legitimately be
tendency to be politically oppositional in relation to the dominant capital- described as realist,
ist order. Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart (1871–1893) ‘chronique’ portrays modernist, and
working-class families whose genetic inheritance drives them to a ruin avant-garde.

ultimately fashioned by the malignant impact of capitalist industrialism.

Similarly, Courbet’s paintings, which draw upon imagery engendered by
the radicalized proletariat and peasantry, and which Greenberg has also
claimed as ‘the first Modernist paintings’ (Frascina 1993: 13), can be con-
sidered as both ‘an attack on the technical foundations of bourgeois art’,
and, also, on the social order which generated such art (Eisenman 2001:
212–214). Within the terms discussed here, therefore, this nineteenth-
century tradition of critical realism can be defined as modernist, avant-
garde, and realist.2
However, the problem is that, within film studies, this tradition has not
been defined within such terms. For example, Fredric Jameson has distin-
guished nineteenth-century realism from the avant-garde, and character-
ized it in terms of the naturalizing ‘conquest of a kind of cultural,
ideological and narrative literacy by a new group or class’; whilst Colin
MacCabe has argued that, far from emerging in opposition to the dominant
order, the nineteenth-century realist novel carried through ‘ideological
tasks . . . undertaken for the bourgeoisie’ (Jameson 1992: 156). However,
Jameson’s use of the term ‘conquest’ is misleading, if what is meant is ‘take-
over’, because the critical realist tradition evolved in resistance to official
attempts at a take-over of the artistic sphere. Jameson is also mistaken in
ascribing such a degree of homogeneity to nineteenth-century realism;
whilst MacCabe’s assertion does not stand scrutiny: how, for example, can
Balzac, a writer committed to the Monarchist-Catholic ideal, or the Zola of
L’ Assommoir/The Dram House (1877), be said to carry through ‘ideological

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tasks undertaken for the bourgeoisie’? Such sweeping distinctions do not

help achieve an enhanced understanding of the relations which existed
between critical realism, modernism and the avant-garde during the nine-
teenth-century, and, in contradistinction to such generalities, it will be
argued here that French nineteenth-century realism can be more fruitfully
divided into three interlaced tendencies: those of ‘illustrative’, ‘official’ and
‘oppositional’ realism. Illustrative realist art emerged to meet the demands
of a growing bourgeois public requiring images and stories of its own expe-
rience of modernity. Official realism, on the other hand, was commissioned
to legitimate ruling power structures, and, between the Coup d État of 1851
and the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1855, the Napoleonic regime culti-
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vated an official realist style in opposition to both neo-classicism (which

had become associated with the Monarchist-Catholic right), and the critical
realism of the left (Boime 1982: 33).
However, we are concerned here primarily with the third tradition of
realist art, a critical, reflexive tradition which must be distinguished from
both the illustrative and official realisms of the period, and which can also
be classified as modernist and avant-garde. That tradition was also char-
acterized by a key tendency which was to prove crucial for the way in
which the nineteenth-century tradition was to evolve into later theories of
cinematic realism: a tendency which aimed to reject the provenance of
rule-governed systems to seek a more immediate, concrete, intuitive
understanding of reality. The origins of this tendency can be found, in
part, in the appropriation of neo-classicism, a highly coded and thought-
provoking form of art, which had initially attempted to combine an early
Enlightenment philosophy based on ‘unaltering principles’, ‘classic perfec-
tion’ and ‘rational humanitarianism’ (Honour 1968: 13) with the more
ambivalent world-view of the later Enlightenment. However, during the
Napoleonic, Restoration and July Monarchy periods (1799–1815,
1815–1830 and 1830–1848, respectively), increased censorship and
other forms of official control led to a depreciation of the neo-classical
vision, and it was partly in response to this decline that an emergent
realism turned away from such highly structured and coded universals to
focus upon ‘the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art
whose other half is the eternal and the immutable’ (Frascina 1993: 9).
Whilst, therefore, the critical realist tradition inherited the questioning
mantle of neo-classicism, it also adopted an intuitionist orientation in
direct opposition to a neo-classical stylistic whose innate rationality had
been so easily put to darker ends.
These characteristics of the nineteenth-century tradition were passed
on to the body of twentieth-century European realist film theory considered
here. They were also reinterpreted by Georg Lukács, the most important
Marxist aesthetician of the twentieth-century. However, in this process of
reinterpretation an unfortunate deformation occurred, as Lukács adopted
the blind-alley distinction between realism and modernism initially put
forward by Engels, then enshrined within official Soviet-Marxist doctrine,

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in which modernism and the avant-garde were posited as necessarily

regressive. However, the influence of Engelsian distinctions between
realism and modernism is not, in the end, of great significance for the
intellectual reconstruction of a Lukácsian theory of cinematic realism
because, despite his endorsement of such distinctions, almost all Lukács’
foundational concepts resonate with the intuitionist characteristics of a
nineteenth-century critical realist position compatible with modernism.
Such concepts include those of Scheinen, ‘art as revelation of unity and
freedom’ (Houlgate 1991: 130) and the idea of art as ‘sensuous manifes-
tation’ (rather than conceptual indication) of the Absolute. In addition, all
the key Lukácsian categorizations of historical realism, including those of
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‘classical’ and ‘democratic-humanist’ realism, conform to this evocative

intuitionist approach. Lukács’ late aesthetic, embodied in his Die Eigenart
des Ästhetischen/The Specificity of the Aesthetic (1963), is little known
amongst English speaking and western European film scholars. However,
both The Specificity of the Aesthetic as a whole, and the chapter on ‘Film’
within it, evidence the same endorsement of an evocative intuitionist por-
trayal which leads to enhanced ‘self-awareness’ (Selbstbewusstsein)
(Parkinson 1970: 120). Distinctions between realism and modernism in
The Specificity of the Aesthetic are also less in evidence than in the earlier
writings on literary theory, as Lukács moves from the model of Balzacian
‘narrational’ realism to the more theoretical idea of realism as ‘imitation
of ethos’, where ethos stands for the human condition, or ‘species essence’
(Gattungswesen) (Heller 1983: 177). Clearly, such imitation is capable of
modernist-symbolic, as well as realist inflection, given that it stands for
imitation of an ideal category (Parkinson 1970: 116).
The idea of totality, based on the Hegelian notion of Totalität, of art as a
‘total and free world’, lies at the heart of Lukács’ thought in The Specificity
of the Aesthetic (Pascall 1970: 152), as does the Hegelian idea that, unlike
philosophy, in art, the Absolute cannot be rendered conceptually, but only
‘manifested’ (Taylor 1975: 467). In art, Totalität is the ‘sensuous parallel’
of a conceptual rendering and comprehension of the Absolute as a realm
in which contradictions are resolved and the principle of freedom fostered
(Houlgate 1991: 137). Lukács, following Hegel, argues that the Absolute
must ‘shine forth’ through the work of art so that Schein (appearance) is
recast into Scheinen (appearance as revelation of freedom and unity). All of
this leads Lukács to argue that film, as a primarily visual medium, must
attempt to portray Scheinen, not at the level of plot and dialogue, but at the
level of visual Stimmung, or ‘atmosphere’, and Stimmungseinheit, or ‘unity
of atmosphere’ (Levin 1987: 50). These inherently impressionistic notions
of expression and communication then, importantly, lead Lukács to
develop a model of film form which actually embraces the impressionism he
otherwise renounces in his literary theory.
Such a model of film form is also designated by yet another shift which
takes place in Lukács’ thinking from the earlier writings on literary criti-
cism to the philosophical tenor of The Specificity of the Aesthetic. In the

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3 By ‘novella’, Lukacs earlier writings Lukács holds to Hegel’s distinction in the arts between the
does not just mean
short story, but a type
‘symbolic’, ‘classical’ and ‘romantic’, where the symbolic is ranked as the
of literature which, lowest category of the three (romantic the highest) because it is dispropor-
unlike the novel – tionately emblematic. However, when he writes about film, Lukács argues
which aims to portray
totality by depicting that, to remain true to its own aesthetic specificity, the medium should
all the mediations adopt a symbolic approach, rather than a classical one more appropriate
which comprise that
totality – focusses on to the novel. In his contemporaneous writings on literature Lukács contin-
a particular exemplar ues to adhere to the Hegelian perspective on the symbolic in order to
which somehow
evokes totality. persist in his diatribes against naturalism. This is the case, for example, in
his ‘Solzhenitsyn: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich’, written one year
after the publication of The Specificity of the Aesthetic. Here, Lukács is con-
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cerned to distinguish Solzhenitsyn’s short novel – which he, Lukács,

regards as historically significant – from naturalism, arguing that, in One
Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), concrete details achieve unifica-
tion within a circumscribed totality, whereas, in a naturalist novel, they
generally do not. Lukács refers to the genre of literature of which One Day
in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is an example as the ‘novella’,3 and argues that
the products of such a genre are able to omit ‘social genesis’, agency and
perspective (Lukács 1971: 8). Here, ‘suggestive description’ achieves an
‘inner completeness, roundness and coherence’, which can be distin-
guished from the more fragmented reportage of naturalism (Lukcás 1971:
26). Nevertheless, despite his praise for Solzhenitsyn’s ‘novella’, Lukács
remains discomfited by the book’s lack of perspective, and insists that both
it, and the modern novella in general, mark only a ‘transitional stage’ in
the development of a new ‘great form’: the ‘universal novel’. Lukács also
perceives the blossoming manifestation of such an emergent ‘great form’
in Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle (1970), a work which, he believes, com-
bines the portrayal of a symbolic, circumscribed reality, and accounts of
social-temporal perspective, in a manner qualitatively superior to that
attempted in One Day in the life of Ivan Denisovitch (Lukács 1971: 15).
Three points can be made here concerning Lukács’ interpretation of
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, all of which have a bearing on this
assessment of the realist tradition. First, Lukács’ endeavor to distinguish
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich from naturalism is, ultimately, uncon-
vincing, because the novel is written in a style which most would consider
‘naturalist’. Second, what is endorsed, as an unforeseen consequence of
this endeavor, is an aesthetic which is not only naturalist, but also impres-
sionist and symbolist, so linking Lukács once more to some of the key
aspects of the nineteenth-century tradition. Third, given Lukács’ approach
to the novella in 1964, and the earlier writing on film in The Specificity of
the Aesthetic, where the argument leads to the inexorable conclusion that
naturalism is appropriate to the aesthetic specificity of film, it would
appear that an on-going critique was taking place within Lukács’ thought
during this period over the question of naturalism. Given the chronology
involved it would also appear that it was the engagement with film, rather
than the later challenge posed by Solzhenitsyn’s novel, which provided the

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catalyst for such questioning. In any event, the supposition that natural-
ism, symbolism and impressionism may be associated with a Lukácsian
conception of the aesthetic specificity of film suggests that established
understandings of Lukács within film theory must now be reassessed.
Like the nineteenth-century and Lukácsian realist traditions, intuition-
ist cinematic realism is premised upon an insightful approach to cinematic
signification and spectatorship. Grierson’s notion of the ‘real’, Kracauer’s
concept of ‘redemption’, and Bazin’s models of ‘grace’ and ‘love’ imply that
a free knowledge (of experience and ideal categories) is to be reached
mainly through perceptive discernment. However, these theorists also
assert that such insight can only be achieved via the catalyst of the empir-
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ical because it is the empirical, rather than reason, which possesses the
greater ability to counter invasive ideology. The work of Lukács, Grierson,
Bazin and Kracauer emerged in response to a perceived hegemony of
instrumental rationality within modernity and, as a consequence, looks to
intuition, the empirical and universals, and in particular, to the relation-
ship between these categories (as opposed to a rationality that had become
worryingly ‘abstract’), as the prime means for effecting emancipation.
Nevertheless, although the intuitionist realist theorists prioritize the
empirical and non-cognitive, they do not reject reason as such, but instru-
mental rationality, which they wish transformed into enlightened reason,
and re-sited as a component within, rather than a force which governs
human experience. In addition to the role which the empirical plays in
intuiting totality and circumventing ideologized rationality, Kracauer and
Bazin are also influenced by the idea that the true character of the phe-
nomenal lifeworld (Lebenswelt – Kracauer/Husserl), or experienced tempo-
ral duration (durée – Bergson/Bazin), is non-conceptual and indeterminate
in character, and this, again, augments the degree of importance which
they award to the empirical.
It is because of these positions on instrumental rationality, indetermi-
nacy and the importance of the empirical, that the intuitionist realists also
come, through a process of lateral analogy, to oppose ‘traditional’ concep-
tions of film art. Here, ‘traditional’ film art is thought to partake of the
form of ideology, or instrumental rationality, in consisting of intentional
constructs whose degree and depth must necessarily determine spectator-
ship. Like instrumental rationality and its resulting ‘objectivations’
(Lukács), or like any kind of entity per se, such art ‘adds’ to the world of
objects, and thereby augments the alien landscape which consciousness
must confront. At the opposite polarity to such art is Murnau’s Nosferatu:
Eine Symphonie des Grauens/Nosferatu: A Symphony of Terror (1921) which,
according to Bazin, ‘adds nothing to the reality, it does not deform it, it
forces it to reveal its structural depth’ (Bazin 1967: 27). Bazin also argues
that a film such as Nosferatu is not ‘independent of nature’ in the way that
a ‘traditional’ art film is, where, by ‘nature’, Bazin means the experienced
relationship between human consciousness and the material world, by
‘independent’, a state of disconnection from that relationship, and, by

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‘traditional art’, a form of art which enhances such disconnection

through imposing a synthetic structure on that relationship.
On the other hand, an art work is as one with this ‘nature’ if it is able
to replicate the configuration of that relationship: a configuration which
consists of a flux of interpenetrating relationships constituting a totality. All
the intuitionist realist theorists are committed to the notion that the
subject engaged in experiencing the relationship between consciousness
and the material world seeks both identity with the imprecise, fluid,
human aspect of that world and understanding of how that ambiguous
fluidity constitutes a totality. Before we encounter the indefinite instances
of the world, we already see them as unified, and this a priori commitment
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to unity is what Husserl refers to as the principle of Vorgegebenheit, or ‘pre-

givenness’ of the Lebenswelt, a principle which influences Kracauer directly
through Husserl, Bazin through Bergson and Grierson (in another sense)
through Hegel. (Carr 1987: 232) This places the notion of totality at the
centre of intuitionist realist thought, and a film like Nosferatu is ‘realist’,
rather than merely ideological/artistic, because it both replicates the inde-
terminate character of the Lebenswelt, and allows the spectator to engage
in the process of correlation implied by Vorgegebenheit.
Like Bazin, Kracauer also asserts that genuinely ‘realist’ films ‘incorpo-
rate aspects of nature’ (Kracauer 1997: 40) and, for both theorists, the
primary purpose of such incorporation is to enable the spectator to re-
experience both reality, and authentic human ‘being’, in an enhanced
way. This means that the art work must not only establish a sense of total-
ity and freedom within itself, but also eventually within the life-world of the
spectator. This idea, which is central to Grierson, Kracauer, Bazin and
Lukács, is probably best theorized within the latter’s notion that works of
art constitute ‘pictures of reality’ out of which the spectator intuits a world
(a real ‘picture of reality’) which is the basis of the art-picture currently
before her or him. Here, the artist’s art-picture stems from and embodies
the interaction between consciousness and a particular historical period:
the ‘real picture of reality’ which the spectator also intuits as lying behind
the art work (Parkinson 1970: 120). This intuition leads spectators to
compare these more satisfying intuited ‘world’ and ‘art’ pictures with their
own lesser picture of themselves and own world. Two Totalitäts are in evi-
dence here: the totality of the art object and its ‘world’, and the totality of
the perceived congruence between consciousness and historical context
which was the initial basis for the art object. The impact of these two Total-
itäts on the spectator leads to what Lukács calls a ‘catharsis’ or ‘moving-
shaking effect’: an enhanced awareness concerning the inadequacy of
‘ordinary life’ which provides the potential for the spectator to move out of
aesthetic experience and attempt to change her or his own real world
(Királyfalvi 1975: 117). This idea of a dialectical process of engagement
with and disengagement from the aesthetic, which takes place to both
enhance self-awareness and effect change in the world, lies at the heart of

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intuitionist cinematic realism, and is the basic realist imperative which

drives the theoretical systems of Grierson, Bazin, Kracauer and Lukács.
Such an imperative would also appear, at first sight, to imply that
‘realist’ cinematic representation should be founded upon a style which
conforms to a considerable extent with our perceptual experience of the
world. However, the intuitionist realist demand for the portrayal of both
‘aspects of nature’ and ‘generalities’ also suggests – given that a generality
is not empirical – that intuitionist cinematic realism should not be
thought of as ineluctably wedded to a style consonant with our sensory
awareness of reality. This suggestion is also given added weight when one
considers that the process of engagement with and disengagement from
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the aesthetic just referred to is premised more upon a comparison between

the Totalitäts of art-picture and life-world, than on one between the visual
realism of the art-work and our experience of perceptual reality. Of the
three theorists considered here, only Bazin insists on the realistic percep-
tual paradigm of a film such as Vittorio De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette/The
Bicycle Thieves (1948), whose long-take, deep-focus, ambivalent documen-
tary naturalism corresponds analogously, or, so Bazin believes, to our per-
ceptual experience of the world. However, Bazin also asserts that the
primary function of cinema is to represent the ‘symbolic’ (i.e. generalities
and universals), suggesting that a more formalist Bazinian cinema is
potentially imaginable (Bazin 1967: 10, 11).
However, it may be that, although intuitionist cinematic realist film
theory is capable of embracing Bazin’s praise for the visual realism of The
Bicycle Thieves, Kracauer’s praise for the impressionistic modernism of Joris
Ivens’ Regan/Rain (1929), and Grierson’s endorsement of a montage film
such as Alexander Dovzhenko’s Zemlya/Earth (1930) it cannot easily
accommodate a cinema of dominant event, break-neck action or compul-
sive drama. In the first place, such drama would inhibit the dialectical
process of engagement with and disengagement from the aesthetic
through limiting the possibility of disengagement; and, in the second
place, would act counter to the characteristic intuitionist realist modality
through which that process is realized: a modality determined by the
Kantian concept of Naturschöne, or ‘natural beauty’.
We can better appreciate how intuitionist cinematic realism might
portray both this process of engagement and disengagement, and intuitive
insight of generalities, through a review of two key concepts: Kracauer’s
idea of ‘redemption’, and Bazin’s notion of the ‘dialectic of concrete and
abstract’. In the ‘Epilogue’ of Theory of Film Kracauer speculates upon the
comparative value of two sharply contrasting resolutions to the predica-
ment posed by modernity. First, Kracauer rejects the assertion that such a
predicament may be overcome through a return of the religious world-
view, arguing that there is no possibility of any ‘return to ancient beliefs’
in a world already thoroughly conquered by abstract rationality; and that,
moreover, the decline of ‘master ideological discourses’ is actually of
benefit, because the world has, as a consequence, become divested of its

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4 1995b: The Mass ideologically totalising and asphyxiating ‘wraps and veils’ (Kracauer
Ornament: Weimar
Essays; 1995a:
1997: 299). However, Kracauer also rejects the converse ‘liberal-progressive’
History: The Last stance, that scientific advance will lead to emancipation, on the grounds
Things Before the Last. that, within modernity, science has neglected its beneficial potential to
such an extent that mankind’s experience of consciousness and reality has
become as ‘abstract’ as it was when it was so acutely enfolded within the
‘veils’ of ‘ancient beliefs’ (Kracauer 1997: 299). Kracauer believes that
the struggle between these two tendencies has led to a situation where the
‘process of history’ has become a ‘battle between a weak and distant
reason and the forces of nature that ruled over heaven and earth in the
myths’; (Kracauer 1995b: 79), and where the ‘unhampered expansion of
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capitalism’s power’ has prevented the ‘advent of the man of reason’

(Kracauer 1995b: 82, 83).4
Despite such scepticism, however, Kracauer was not a nihilist, and, like
Bazin, also developed a utopian theory of film to establish how the ‘world
of the dead’ at the heart of modernity could be transcended, and the ‘basis
of man’ redeemed (Kracauer 1995b: 68). In developing his notion of
‘redemption’, Kracauer adopted a phenomenological and existential per-
spective, in arguing that a qualitative reformation can occur within the
subject-spectator when experiencing a multiplicity of sense perceptions,
and when contemplating the interaction of consciousness with those per-
ceptions. The transformation which Kracauer signals here occurs when
the immersion of consciousness within physical reality reaches the point
that an intuition is leads to an intuition concerning the intimate bond
which exists between consciousness, the ‘human aspect of reality’ (Tavor
1982: 112), and wholeness, and when consciousness seeks to compre-
hend that bond more profoundly. At that point, the subject searches ‘for
something tremendously important in its own right – the world that is
ours. . . . [the] . . . Utopia of the in-between – a terra incognita in the
hollows between the lands we know’ (Kracauer 1995a: 217). By ‘world
that is ours’ Kracauer means that which is experienced when conscious-
ness interacts with a physical environment in a free manner, and the
importance which Kracauer places on such interactions reveals the
origins of his conceptions of ‘physical reality’ and ‘redemption’ in the
Husserlian idea of the Lebenswelt as the ‘actually concrete surrounding
world’, which is encountered by the individual as his or her most tangible
mode of being (Bernet, Kern and Marbach 1993: 224). Kracauer believes
that such interactions provide ‘Highways through the void’ of modernity,
and that the crucial importance of film lies in its ability to display such
interactions (Kracauer 1997: 291).
We can also see how intuitionist cinematic film theory seeks to theorise
the deliverance of the spectator, and also portray a fusion of generalities
and ‘aspects of reality’, through applying a key Bazinian notion – that of
the ‘dialectic of concrete and abstract’ – to a film that Bazin has written
on: La Passion de Jeanne d Arc/The Passion of Joan of Arc (C.T Dreyer, 1928).
Bazin believes that such a dialectic is realized through ensuring that the

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physiology of the human face which features in Dreyer’s film invokes a

‘seismic’ ‘nature’, one incarnated through Joan’s agony and her torturers’
brutality (Bazin 1967: 110). For Bazin, the ‘aesthetic secret’ of the film lies
in the way it mobilizes a ‘documentary of faces’, a richly textured empiri-
cal fabric in which this ‘seismic’ nature both ‘palpitates beneath every
pore’, and is also contained by such ‘pores’ (Bazin 1967: 109). The ‘pores’
and ‘movements of wrinkles’ which make up this ‘documentary of faces’
are the ‘secondary details’ which form the ‘concrete’ basis of the dialectic
of concrete and abstract: a centre which transforms the spectator, who
would otherwise be transfixed by the film’s unendurable subject-matter,
from a restless voyeur into a composed observer.
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Bazin goes on to give further examples of such ‘secondary’ details from

Bresson’s Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne/The Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne
(1944/5), when he refers to on-screen ‘noises’, such as the ‘sound of a
windshield wiper’ (Bazin 1967: 110). Bazin says these ‘noises’ are ‘indif-
ferent to the action’, and that it is this indifference which ‘guarantees’ the
film’s realism (Bazin 1967: 110). Here, as in The Passion of Joan of Arc, the
role of the concrete within the dialectic of concrete and abstract is both to
designate and reign theme in, so that the spectator is able to surmount the
diegetic pressure exerted upon her or him and achieve a degree of
autonomous spectatorship. The concrete is also ‘indifferent to the action’
here because it is not meaningful in itself, and so does not possess the
potential to manipulate the spectator in the way that the ‘action’ can. This
is why the empirical ‘guarantees’ the film’s realism, and what Bazin
means by ‘realism’, is, therefore, a mode of expression in which neutral
detail links the concrete to the abstract in a manner that promotes active
but composed scrutiny within the spectator.
Despite his praise for the The Passion of Joan of Arc, however, Bazin is
also critical of aspects of the film, and such disapproval stems from a key
intuitionist realist concern with medium specificity which is also shared
by Kracauer. Bazin’s displeasure with The Passion of Joan of Arc stems from
his belief that the film disregards the aesthetic specificity of the medium in
failing to preserve ‘the reality of space’, and, for Bazin, the ‘systematic use
of close-ups and unusual angles’ in Dreyer’s film ‘is well calculated to
destroy any sense of space’ (Bazin 1967: 109). However, Kracauer’s dis-
comfort over The Passion of Joan of Arc stems from his conviction that
Dreyer’s film disregards the aesthetic specificity of the medium in another
sense, in failing to embody the Kantian model of Naturschöne. Kracauer is
strongly influenced by the idea of Naturschöne, in which the aesthetic judg-
ment is conceived of as rich in connotation, and as requiring to be directed
at an object which possesses potential to stimulate a profusion of mean-
ings in the mind of the perceiving subject. Kant argued that such potential
was best found within nature, and this is the basis of the idea of ‘natural
beauty’, or Naturschöne.
However, although Naturschöne is an aesthetic category, it is also related
to the more fundamental Kantian ideal of the ‘harmony of the faculties’,

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which transpires when the faculties of ‘understanding’ and ‘imagination’

interact so that the understanding is able to direct the imagination to seek
order and unity, and the imagination is able to moderate the instrumen-
tality of the understanding (Kant 1973: 176). Naturschöne is, therefore, an
aesthetic sub-category of this more fundamental category through which
consciousness interacts with the world, and, in embodying the principle of
Naturschöne, works of art also represent this more elemental category.
However, following Kant, Kracauer believes that the contemporary culture
of modernity is no longer able to embody these categories, and his criti-
cism of the fragmented ‘cosmos of poster-like tableaux vivants’, and lack of
‘causal continuum’ in The Passion of Joan of Arc stems from his conviction
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that Dreyer’s film cannot be reconciled with the reflective, meditative and
cohesive ideal of Naturschöne (Kracauer 1997: 80). Bazin and Kracauers’
positions here are, therefore, founded upon the belief that The Passion of
Joan of Arc is incommensurate both with the aesthetic specificity of film,
and with the way in which that specificity might be employed to counter
the problems of modernity; and this, in turn, makes it clear that a concern
with the relationship between medium specificity and the distinctiveness
of the modern experience underlines the intuitionist realist theoretical
tradition.

Conclusions
The critical realist tradition which developed in the early nineteenth-
century, and which later evolved into intuitionist realist film theory, was
influenced by important currents of eighteenth and nineteenth-century
European thought, and is more closely connected to those currents than
other forms of film theory, including a pragmatist cognitivist orientation
which has its roots in Anglo-American philosophy. This latter school of
film theory is singled out now because of its distance from these founda-
tional currents of European thought, because its remit is so different from
that of the realist tradition, and because that degree of divergence also
serves to elucidate the essential worth of that tradition. The realist tradi-
tion embodies an intuitionist attitude towards understanding and repre-
sentation. Such an attitude generally entails the fusion of the empirical
and abstract in a way that bypasses the intermediate middle-ground.
However, the middle-ground is the domain of warranted assertability, and
the advocacy of ‘warranted assertability conditions’, and of research
which can be directly tested, classified and evaluated, has come to be asso-
ciated with a pragmatist cognitivist school which also questions the cul-
turalist orientation of the cinematic realist tradition. The focus on what
David Bordwell has called ‘sharply focused, in-depth enquiry’ has many
benefits, but also a consequence which takes us back one last time to The
Passion of Joan of Arc (Bordwell 1996: 29, 30). In attempting to link the
Kantian concept of the sublime with cognitivist approaches to the analysis
of emotional responses to film, C. A. Freeland concludes that cognitivism
cannot easily cater for the ‘higher-level conceptions of value’ engendered

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by viewing The Passion of Joan of Arc, even though what the writer calls the
‘meta-emotions’ of spectators necessarily involve such conceptions
(Freeland 1999: 83). However, Bazin and Kracauers’ critique of Dreyer’s
film is essentially based on a ‘higher-level’ conception of modernity as
fragmentation and ideology, and this suggests that the realist tradition can
cater well for the ‘meta-emotions’ and ‘values’ manifestly associated with
the aesthetic experience of such an important European film.

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Suggested citation
Aitken, I. (2006), ‘The European realist tradition’, Studies in European Cinema 3: 3,
pp. 175–188, doi: 10.1386/seci.3.3.175/1

Contributor details
Ian Aitken currently works for De Montfort University and Hong Kong Baptist
University. He is the author of European Film Theory and Cinema, Realist Film Theory
and Cinema, Film and Reform, Alberto Cavalcanti, The Documentary Film Movement: An
Anthology, and the Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film. Department of Cinema and
Television, Hong Kong Baptist University; and Senior Research Fellow, Faculty
of Humanities, De Montfort University. Contact: Prof Ian Aitken, Singtao
Communication Centre, 224 Waterloo Rd, Rm. STC801, Kowloon Tong, Hong
Kong, People Republic of China.
E-mail: iwaitken@hkbu.edu.hk

188 Ian Aitken