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1 Prelude: Corn “Reality,” no less an expert than Liza Minnelli opined to Vanity Fair in November 2010, “is something you rise above.” In saying this, and without being philosophical, she invokes “reality” as a weight, the humdrum oppression of the everyday. Liza imagines herself—and us—striving to reach some almost-imperial artistic plateau resting “above the clouds,” from which perspective the vulgar, quotidian, and workaday world “down there”looks small and banal and impure. Of course this is a very Romantic view. It embodies, perhaps especially, the artist as an isolated and distinguished figure, subject to different laws of gravity, thus able to fly. By contrast, Edmund Husserl made bold to disclaim the real existence of “reality”: “We can no longer say that the world is real—a belief that is natural enough in our ordinary experience—; instead, it merely makes a claim to reality” (7). Makes a claim. Even wallowing in the world one might already be capable of escaping it, if only one could share this observation , and acknowledge a transcendence one was called upon to achieve. William James would come to twiddle this same thread, that it is only our convictions that make things real.“Belief, or the sense of reality, is a sort of feeling more allied to the emotions than to anything else” (283).“Reality” onscreen is thus no simple measurement of film’s reproducing the world we live in outside the theater. It is yet one more of the “effects” of cinema, a cultured stylization that must change with the knowledge, desire, and expectations of those who appreciate it. And the terms in which “reality ” is manifested will shift with what is technically, materially possible in the means of reproduction. When, broadly as a culture, we took painting 2 The Eyes Have It seriously, filmic settings had to be painted, or otherwise hand-made, to seem “real.” Now that we spend our time looking at digital graphics, the “real” is wondrously digitized. “Reality” isn’t really there in the depiction, it’s here in our way of accepting, interpreting, moving through, and moving on.Walter Benjamin notes how in filmmaking, we have“a process in which it is impossible to assign to the spectator a single viewpoint which would exclude from his or her field of vision the equipment not directly involved in the action being filmed—the camera, the lighting units, the technical crew, and so forth (unless the alignment of the spectator’s pupil coincided with that of the camera)” (“Work of Art” 115). The viewer is inextricably embedded in the action. What seems“real” to the viewer is bound up in its “reality” with a viewing position that excludes contradictions. “Reality” has been a perduring theme for cinema scholarship and has obsessed filmmakers from early cinema onward. Georges Méliès, for example , wanted to both embrace and elude it with magical tricks, as did Buster Keaton with choreographic movement and Charlie Chaplin with his plastic body. David Bordwell reflects upon Gregg Toland’s assertion that in order to make Citizen Kane (1941) seem real, many of the sets “were designed with ceilings, which required him to light from the floor” (347–48); these places seen on the screen would look like comparable places seen in the actual world. The screenwriter Frances Marion is pointed to by Bordwell as well. She “claims that the strongest illusion of reality comes from tight causal motivation” and points to the audience “demanding” an illusion of reality (19). Bordwell and Janet Staiger show that the Society of Motion Picture Engineers worked from the early 1930s at “the presentation of a real or imagined happening to the audience in such approach to perfection that a satisfactory illusion of actual presence at the corresponding event is created” (Goldsmith 350, qtd. in Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson 257). Further, the Bazinian fondness for depth of field came to be associated with the representation of “real” space and the “real” event onscreen. Yet at the same time film artists have worked against a kind of journalistic “realism.” For one salient case, we might consider Alfred Hitchcock’s ripostes to François Truffaut about the presence of an ornery old ornithologist in the middle of The Birds (1963). She happens to be there by pure chance! . . . To insist that a storyteller stick to the facts is just as ridiculous as to demand of a representative painter that he show objects accurately. . . . I don’t want...

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