Oct.4.2009: Realism

In order to compare Tokyo Story and a classical Hollywood film on the basis of realism, one must first define realism. This is difficult because the term realism can mean many things. It can refer, for example, to the aesthetic representation of a person, place, or time; or to the accuracy of the story. If the film is based on real events, how truthfully are they represented? If the film is fictional, do the events of the story represent things that can happen in real life? The factors involved in defining a term like realism, under these circumstances, are endless.

For the purpose of exploring the various definitions of realism, I will compare and contrast Tokyo Story with a Hollywood film that is entirely different, conceptually and aesthetically--let's use The Blair Witch Project--and I will discuss how realism should be defined differently for each film.

Tokyo Story follows two elderly parents during their trip to Tokyo to visit their children and the one granddaughter who still lives with them. The film is very simply as the director, Yasujiro Ozu, uses basic story-telling techniques to represent the calm and slowly paced lifestyle of his characters. The film is realistic in this sense; the characters are calm, collected, patient, practiced, precise in their actions. The subject matter is realistic. The story and the characters involved accurately represent a traditional Japanese lifestyle. They are believable, they are real.

The Blair Witch Project follows a group of documentary filmmakers investigating the legend of a local witch. They become lost, hunted by the witch, and eventually disappear. The story is told through their footage that was recovered some time later. In terms of subject matter, this film is unrealistic. It is clearly fictional, and as far as we know, witches don't exist. Regardless, the film still creates a sense of realism. And this is done so through aesthetics, camera work, etc. We, as the audience, accept that it isn't real, yet we find that it is an accurate representation of what it might be like to encounter inexplicable evil. In this sense, the film is realistic. If it were introduced to me as 'real' footage, rather than a Hollywood film, I would have had no trouble accepting it as truth.

Each film creates realism in a different way. While Tokyo Story does so through realistic characters and subject matter, The Blair Witch Project does so through creative (and aesthetically technical) storytelling. They are both realistic, but it must be taken into account that they each are defined by a separate type of realism.

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