Rites of Realism

"Rites of Realism is a valuable text for any scholar of realist or documentary film, providing both wide-ranging surveys and challenging, in-depth theoretical analyses of a variety of films from world cinema." - Rebecca Bell-Metereau , Journal of Film and Video

"[S]hould help to gain new respect for cinematic realism within the academy. . . [T]he writing is almost uniformly clear, cogent, and well-informed. I confess that the book exceeded my expectations and Ivone Margulies, the editor, deserves credit for assembling such a stimulating collection of essays and maintaining a high level of scholarship and fluency throughout the volume. Rites of Realism succeeds in bringing an important issue back to the attention of film scholars." - Leger Grindon , Cineaste

"[S]timulating and diverse. . . . Rites of Realism reminds us to always be wary of throwing the baby out with the bathwater: it represents a welcome return of the real." - Tim O'Farrell , Screening the Past

"Rather than simply assembling a mix of new essays on the subject, Margulies' collection thoughtfully returns us to some of Bazin's seminal insights on realism, and then develops a framework for contemporary research by grouping the new translation of his essay with thorough and insightful critical commentaries upon Bazinian concepts." - Jason Middleton , Quarterly Review of Film and Video

"This ambitious volume approaches realism from a new perspective—not as a mimetic problem involving art's representation of reality, but as what Ivone Margulies calls a dynamic 'aesthetic that effectively enacts cultural and social tensions' (14)." - Joel Black , Symploke

"This collection does three remarkable things. First, it offers a welcome rereading of André Bazin; second, it gathers contributors who regard human bodies not as mere representations on film, but as actual pro-filmic bodies, witnessed in their vulnerability; and lastly-and more diffusely-it attempts to show how the Bazinian legacy is intertwined with 'corporeal cinema.' . . . Rites of Realism succeeds in its aim: to give shape to a very important new avenue for film criticism." - Christophe Wall-Romana, Film Quarterly

“These exciting and varied essays probe the relations between cinematic realism and representations of the body—above all the body as a guarantor (or not) of a link between images and the real. As in the best collections, the essays present distinctive points-of-view, yet they cohere around a compelling through-line, offering illumination and insight beyond just the sum of their parts.” - Leo Charney, author of Empty Moments: Cinema, Modernity, and Drift

"Ivone Margulies's Rites of Realism is a stunning reconsideration of one of the most important and often underestimated issues in film studies—the complex nature of cinematic realism. Orchestrating a wide range of critical debates, this collection ranges brilliantly across decades, cultures, and individual films to remind us that realism at the movies has never been a more interesting and demanding topic. I highly recommend it for any serious student of film." - Timothy Corrigan, author of A Cinema without Walls: Movies and Culture after Vietnam