REALISM AS RESISTANCE

Abstract

This paper explores the potential of realist cinema to portray resistance to oppression and restrictions on people’s lives. Wadjda (2013) presents a special case in world cinema in being made in Saudi Arabia, which until recently had no film industry or distribution system. The director, Haifaa Al Mansour, has been praised for making the film there at all. Yet this ignores the film’s power in taking a slice of time in the life of a young Riyadh girl, Wadjda, and focusing on her desire to own a bicycle. The film’s realism depicts restrictions on women’s lives in Saudi Arabia and at the same time affirms hope in gradual change through the natality, in Hannah Arendt’s sense, of a child who does not see these constraints as insurmountable obstacles. I argue that realist films can demonstrate the importance of gradual political progress and can anticipate those advances.

Keywords:

• Wadjda
• realism
• authenticity
• repression
• resistance

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

I would like to thank members of the Cinematic Thinking Network and Film-Philosophy Conference participants for their feedback, as well as the anonymous reviewers for Angelaki for their comments and questions.

1 This critique could be a criticism of social realism for glorifying socialist regimes, for example. Similarly, feminist theorists have criticised realist film for reinforcing patriarchal and bourgeois stereotypes (Kaplan 125–41). In contrast, Adorno criticises Hollywood films for reinforcing prejudices and stereotypes, arguing that only avant-garde art can be socially critical (178–86). However, Ryan and Kellner argue that some uses of some forms are ideological, such as “camera techniques that suggest natural hierarchies, spectacles that idealize violence as a solution to social problems, voyeuristic objectifications that debase others” (269).

2 For example, Ryan and Kellner suggest that realist narratives can provide challenges to domination through “different character representations, different plot strategies, different moral configurations, different tropes of action” (268). Kaplan also contends that there is nothing in realist cinema per se that means it cannot be critical of prevailing ideologies (132–35).

3 Wadjda was submitted for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 2013 but was not nominated. Al Mansour has also written a children’s book based on the film, The Green Bicycle. Prior to Wadjda, a documentary called Arabia 3D (2011) was made by Greg MacGillivray.

4 Techniques to promote realism, such as long takes, or methods, such as following the sequence of events, can be called naturalistic. Non-naturalistic techniques include those like the montage Bazin eschews, slow motion, and freeze frames. While this distinction between naturalism and critical realism has been important in discussions of literature (Lukács 85–96), Hallam and Marshment maintain that they cannot be distinguished formally, and that the distinction tends to rest on either a value judgement or assumptions about the intentions of authors (5–6). Cavell is open-minded about the techniques or methods film-makers use, depending on their significance and effectiveness, and the integrity, in the particular film (73, 133–46).

5 Smith stresses that for Bazin emotions and our reflection on them are also enhanced in film by narrative and drama (131).

6 Morgan argues that Bazin is more open about the kind of films that are realist than he appears in some essays, and that properly realist films are those in which what we learn can be transferred to our engagement with reality (481).

7 Sinnerbrink, in his discussion of Bazin, suggests that genuine realism tries to express a meaningful world “with as much authenticity as possible, combining concrete detail, unity of composition, with openness to interpretation” (98).

8 Alwaleed Bin Talal also supported the first Saudi woman pilot, Hanadi Al-Hindi, to fly planes in Saudi Arabia (BBC, “Saudi Arabia: First Woman”). IMDb lists seventeen production companies for the film.

9 Bicycle Thieves is also known as The Bicycle Thief.

10 Bazin refers to Bicycle Thieves as “pure cinema,” where there is “No more actors, no more story, no more sets, which is to say that in the perfect aesthetic illusion of reality there is no more cinema” (II: 60). Lane notes this connection, as well as that with Jacques Tati’s Jour de fête (1949), François Truffaut’s Les mistons (1957) (The Mischief Makers), and the Dardenne brothers’ The Kid with a Bike (2011). Shiel sees neorealism as “a historically and culturally-specific manifestation of the general aesthetic quality known as ‘realism’ which is characterised by a disposition to the ontological truth of the physical, visible world” (1). For Deleuze, realism is “milieux and modes of behaviour, milieux which actualise and modes of behaviour which embody” (Cinema I 141) while neorealism in cinema “is the purely optical and sound situation which takes the place of the faltering sensory-motor situations” (Cinema II 3).

11 Ahram Online (2016).

12 However, Fatemeh Hosseini-Shakib questions this analysis by suggesting that it neglects the important absences in the kinds of films made, such as fantasy films created for child audiences, or representations of ordinary children (Jahed 231). Deleuze suggests that children are limited in their movement, but this allows them to see and hear more (Cinema II 3). This comment about children taking the role of observers is relevant to some Iranian films, such as Nader and Simin, A Separation (2011) but is not a compelling description of Wadjda, as they are absorbed in their own lives.

13 Lane sees this friendship

as the weak spot in the tale. No boy, whatever his background, will risk the jibes of his pals to go and hang out with a girl. Compared with the rooted figures who surround him, he seems a bit of a dream.

However, this claim seems to me to miss the film’s point concerning the possibility for positive change in the future. See Armes (304) as he notes this aspect of the film.

14 Al Mansour herself responded to the restrictions on driving by going to her wedding in a golf cart (Hoggard). This decision is a way of acknowledging the existence of the limitations on driving and overcoming them at the same time.

15 Ryan and Kellner (266–95) discuss activist Hollywood and independent films. A different approach is taken in Lemon Tree, which was based on an incident which had already occurred and a court case that was not successful.