ABSTRACT
This introduction lays out the stakes of this book as the first English-language text to address Dutch Neorealism. Beginning with a brief explanation of the aesthetic tendency of Neorealism, defined as a Dutch iteration of the global aesthetic tendency Magic Realism, this introduction names the key players, the problems with terminology, and the historical scope of the book from the transition to sound cinema technology in the late 1920s through the German Occupation (1940–1945). The text then spells out the scholarly history of interdisciplinary studies that attempt to look at painting through the lens of film, and to place this book within that legacy, as well as the most recent studies of “Realisms” between the world wars.
