The Politics and Poetics of Cinematic Realism by Hermann Kappelhoff (review)

In The Politics and Poetics of Cinematic Realism, Hermann Kappelhoff reaffirms the cultural significance of cinema by exploring how filmmakers from the 1920s avant-garde to the present-day relate to and reimagine their spectators’ sociopolitical contexts in an attempt to facilitate a more dynamic confrontation with reality. This spectatorial engagement, moreover, is necessarily political in that it aspires to remake the fabric of spectators’ lived experiences and social conditions.

In chapter one, “Poetics and Politics,” Kappelhoff meticulously sketches a theoretical framework in which to situate his claims. Drawing on the work of Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Rancière, and Richard Rorty, Kappelhoff proceeds to unspool the irony built into the notion of cinematic realism. That is, film is a medium capable of producing affective moving images of a shared lifeworld altogether not our own. Given this paradoxical valence, cinema allows for the formation of a utopian political community – an “aesthetic democracy” – in which a spectator participates in the construction and play of a totalized, communal, and alternate reality fashioned by other human beings. The poetics of cinematic realism, Kappelhoff continues, designate the discursive strategies enlisted by filmmakers to convey the various configurations of said utopias. As an exemplar of this sort of cinematographic world building, he offers an incisive reading of the opening sequence of Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera.

The utopian potential accommodated by realism especially took root among directors in the first third of the twentieth-century. In a section titled “Before The War,” Kappelhoff reconsiders Sergei Eisenstein’s theories of montage, which he sees less as an ideological ploy to mobilize spectators in service of socialism and more as a gambit to nurture a utopic mass community. Distinguishing itself from the poetics of the Russian formalists, Eisenstein’s filmography mimics the very way spectators perceive, sense, and understand corporeal experience. In doing so, Eisenstein erases a distinction between film and filmgoer in the construction of visual space; all audiences become film, and all films become audience. A school of 1920s German cinema, New Objectivity, despite its adherents’ call for a return to facticity against the artifice of Expressionism, similarly strove for an Eisensteinian-like utopia. Relying on the writings of Siegfried Kracauer and Béla Balázs, Kappelhoff demonstrates how the Objectivists, by abstracting the spatiotemporal coordinates of commonplace objects, incidentally generated the sort of aestheticized and collectivized consciousness celebrated by the avant-gardists. The cinematic realism of the prewar era, then, denotes a pursuit of utopia through the suturing of the spectator into a radicalized mass community. The forthcoming experiences of war, fascism and genocide, however, would destabilize this revolutionary, communalizing vision of film.

In the next chapter, “After The War,” Kappelhoff suggests that the trauma of utopian political projects, culminating in National Socialism, jolted filmmakers out of a desire to forge a radical community of viewers. The audience stopped being perceived as a revolutionary mass and more as what audiences have always been: anonymous individuals faced with the challenge of finding meaning in modern society. Postwar realism, as especially theorized by Deleuze, helped filmgoers to ameliorate and adjust to the uncertain and unforgiving nature of everyday experience. Kappelhoff then turns to the work of Luchino Visconti, whom he defends against ill-considered criticism, as a case study of films depicting ordinary individuals being in the world as it is without the utopic histrionics of the 1920s avant-garde.

The fourth chapter, “After ‘68,” offers a detailed analysis of the filmography of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, which, for Kappelhoff, captures the zeitgeist of Western cinema in the late sixties and early seventies. The cinematic realism of this period, while nevertheless entangled in political discourse, seriously cast doubt on the possibilities afforded by modern politics. This era’s realism signaled an ambivalent search for a filmic poetics that could remake the political. Representative of the New German Cinema, Fassbinder’s films explore the societal forces propelling individuals in their inevitably unsuccessful pursuit of happiness. The director, per Kappelhoff, is...