The signs of realism: from literature to cinema, from Flaubert to digital images

Abstract

This work proposes a theoretical reflection on the concept of realism in literature and cinema, establishing connections between the two artistic fields. For that purpose, it reviews classic formulations of these two theoretical fields and proposes their analysis based on the readings of contemporary thinkers, highlighting aspects of the current scenario of the crisis of representation in the arts. For Roland Barthes, the aesthetics of the realist novel embodied a new idea of verisimilitude, the result of a fusion between the referent and the signifier, resulting in the “reality effect”. For André Bazin, the cinematographic image was capable of operating the “epiphany of the real”, taking the desire for realistic representation to its limit. The positions of these authors were widely criticized by theorists such as Rancière, Grodal and Carroll, who pointed out their deficiencies and incompleteness. For Wood, realism is an evaluative parameter for all narrative art, which is built upon a dynamics of approximation and distancing from reality. In the current scenario, the problem of representation calls into question the truth value of the forms of representation, which intensifies the feeling of skepticism that characterizes the post-truth context. Cinematographic images lost their status of material veridicality, since the film no longer has a physical support, while literature mixes fact and fiction in practices of self-fiction. What form of esthetic realism is possible for our time?