ABSTRACT
Any discussion of popular movies, or indeed of film in general, must tackle the problem of realism. People like myself, who were born and brought up in Europe and came to the United States later, are possibly in a privileged position to answer the question, “How realistic are American movies?” My first visit to this country, after years of consuming Hollywood movies, answered the question positively. The United States is like its image in the movies, despite the conviction of most American and some foreign film critics that Hollywood's America is a false scene. Parker Tyler called it The Hollywood Hallucination. 1 Dissent about the iconicity (one-to-one correspondence of sign and referent) of the movies often takes the form of allowing that movies may have a surface realism, but that this conceals a historical falsity. This dualistic view oversimplifies the nature of cinematic realism. Discussing the role of indigenous places and things in American painting, Constance Rourke pointed out that “Posture, gesture, movement, bone structure, ranges of individual expression – these inevitably suggest underlying social ideas and emotions and motives in terms of typical form.” 2 This perception of realism as a complex of physical details and implicit meanings is singularly applicable to a discussion of the movies. A definition of realism in the movies must allow for the connotative dimension of gesture and style as well as for the level of declarative statement.
