Realism and Documentary

Realism is an important and complex concept in the analysis of media texts. Discussions about realism are usually based around the extent to which the media are able to represent the world as it really is. The following extract by Nicholas Abercrombie considers various different theories about the nature of realism on television. As Abercrombie notes, this debate is complicated by the fact that ‘realism’ itself is associated with a set of codes and conventions that we recognize as ‘real’ or ‘realistic’ but are in fact as artificial and constructed as any other media text. Abercrombie suggests that for most viewers the news on television appears to be realistic, an impression enhanced by its sense of ‘liveness’: ‘not only is it describing reality, it is giving us the events as they happen’. However, we also recognize that it is not real but a highly mediated version of events. Abercrombie argues that what television realism offers is essentially a ‘construction of reality which is not deliberately misleading, but which cannot hope to speak for every-one’s experience and understanding of the world’. Realism

First, realism offers a ‘window on the world’. In the case of television, there is no mediation between the viewer and what he or she is watching. It is as if the television set were a sheet of clear glass which offered the viewer an uninterrupted vision of what lay beyond. Television is, or seems to be, like direct sight. Second, realism employs a narrative which has rationally ordered connections between events and characters. Realist cultural forms, certainly those involving fictional presentations at any rate, consist of a caused, logical flow of events, often structured into a beginning, a middle and a closed conclusion. Events and characters, therefore, do not have a random or arbitrary nature, but are organized by rational principles. In these respects, realist forms may be contrasted with those texts that are essentially ‘spectacular’. The pleasure of texts that involve ‘spectacle’ lies in the images themselves; it is a visual, not a narrative pleasure. It is important to note that static images can also be narrative. Many photographs and paintings often have a ‘before’ and ‘after’ outside the specific moment captured in the frame. They are episodes in a story and imply the rest of the narrative; the meaning of the picture is given by its place in an implied narrative. Non-realist forms do not imply such a narrative. They do not so much tell a story as invite contemplation.

The third aspect of realism is the concealment of the production process. Most television is realist in this sense in that the audience is not made aware, during the programmes themselves, that there is a process of production lying behind the programmes. The illusion of transparency is preserved. It is as if there were no author. The form conspires to convince us that we are not viewing something that has been constructed in a particular fashion by a determinate producer or producers.

However powerful its effects, realism is only a convention. Television may appear to be a window on the world but it is not really transparent. What it offers is essentially a construction of the world, a version of reality. This is not a conspiracy to mislead the audience. It is simply that there is no way in which any description of reality can be the only, pure and correct one, just as people will give very different descriptions of what they see out of their kitchen window. As soon as television producers start to film, they are necessarily selecting and interpreting; they must do so in order to present a coherent programme of whatever kind. As a result, of course, all sorts of thing can be excluded by realist conventions. For example, Jordan (1981) argues that:

“Coronation Street conventionally excludes everything which cannot be seen to be physically present … This means, in effect, that most social explanations, and all openly political ones, are omitted. The differing situations, the troubles or successes, of the various characters are explained largely in terms of their (innate) psychological make-up, occasionally attributed to luck.”

The critical question raised by the convention of realism is then: is there a systematic exclusion of particular features of the world from television? A number of writers argue that there is and the effect on audiences is particularly powerful because the realist convention does seem to be a correct description of the world. Television presents one reality and audiences are persuaded to accept it as the only reality. MacCabe (1981) argues for this position. He suggests that a variety of points of view may be articulated in a television text, but one reality is still preferred; there is a dominant point of view, that of the narrator, which is presented as the natural, transparent one. There is therefore a hierarchy of discourses or points of view in which one discourse controls the others.

It might be replied, however, that MacCabe’s is too simplified a view. Jordan (1981), for example, argues that there is not a single realism in television, but rather a number of realisms. She therefore describes Coronation Street as a version of realism which she calls soap opera realism. This is a combination of the social realism of films of the 1960s with the realism of soap opera. The former demands that:

“life be presented in the form of a narrative of personal events, each with a beginning, a middle and an end, important to the central characters concerned but affecting others in only minor ways; that though these events are ostensibly about social problems they should have as one of their central concerns the settling of people in life; that the resolution of these events should always be in terms of the effect of personal interventions; that characters should be either working-class or of the classes immediately visible to the working classes (shopkeepers, say …) and should be credibly accounted for in terms of the ‘ordinariness’ of their homes, families, friends; that the locale should be urban and provincial (preferably in the industrial north); that the settings should be commonplace and recognisable (the pub, the street, the factory, the home and more particularly the kitchen); that the time should be ‘the present’; that the style should be such as to suggest an unmediated, unprejudiced and complete view of reality; to give, in summary, the impression that the reader, or viewer, has some time at the expense of the characters depicted.”

(p. 28)

The latter, on the other hand, requires that:

“though events must carry their own minor conclusions they must not be seen as finally resolving; that there should be an intertwining of plots so deployed as to imply a multiplicity of experience whilst effectively covering only a narrow range of directly ‘personal’ events; that these personal events should be largely domestic; that there should be substantial roles for women; that all roles should involve a serious degree of stereotyping; that the most plausible setting, in view of these later requirements, would be the home; and that the long-term passage of fictional time should mirror fairly accurately the actual passage of time.”

(p. 28)

Although this form of realism does exclude certain features it also does allow alternative realities to emerge. Furthermore, as Jordan notes, the pleasure of a soap opera like Coronation Street may partly lie in the perception by the audience that it is a construction. The programme, in other words, breaks with the third feature of the definition of realism put forward at the beginning of this section. It may, indeed, be doing this quite deliberately in a number of ways. For example, some of the characters are caricatures rather than realist depictions. Reg Holdsworth in Coronation Street is a good example. Again, the programme uses the self-conscious linking technique of shifting to a scene involving characters who have been the subject of a conversation in the previous scene. As Jordan argues:

“My argument then is that Coronation Street, though deploying the devices of the Soap Opera Realism upon which it is based, far from attempting to hide the artifice of these devices (other than by the generic imperative to hide) rather asks us to take pleasure in its artistry, much as a stage magician will not show us how his tricks are done yet never claims … that he has actually sawn a woman in half.”

(p. 39)

Jordan’s view of Coronation Street suggests that there can be a substantial dislocation of realism’s effects. Such dislocation may, of course, be even more noticeable in other sorts of programme which set out to play with reality (The Singing Detective, for example).

N. Abercrombie, Television and Society, Polity Press, 1996, pp. 26–30

Activity

Look again at Abercrombie’s distinction between realist and spectacular texts. What examples of the different forms can you think of? What different pleasures do they provide for the audience?

Choose a film or TV programme which has been described as realist – does it conform to the conventions of realism or do you think it’s more complicated (as with Jordan’s analysis of Coronation Street)?