ABSTRACT
Realist claims of any sort (cinematic, scientific, theoretical or political) may well be sufficiently adequate (better than others) to permit a substantial degree of understanding and rational action. Metabolic production is ‘the necessary condition for effecting exchange of matter between man and Nature’. A mediation of that mediation, film is at once only intelligible by reference to the social production of life and in this sense there is an inextinguishable element of realism in all acts of communication and representation. Photography was primarily associated with ‘the camera’s unique ability to record as well as reveal visible, or potentially visible, physical reality’. Positivism, with its reflection theory of knowledge was and remains utterly foreign to a Marxist philosophy of knowledge and representation, which is based on an active production of life. In his 1976 ‘Lecture on Realism’, Raymond Williams sought to offer an alternative account of realism from the one being developed by Screen at the time.
