Film and Reality: A Historical Survey

Most contemporary film criticism does not take into account the relationship between artistic achievement and the historical context. Film and Reality sets out to redress the balance by offering both a broad outline of the cinema’s development and a framework within which critical judgements can be made. Roy Armes explores in this book the varying relationships between image and reality in films from Lumière to the present.

The author first looks at film realism – from the early documentaries of Vertov and Flaherty to cinema-verité – and at the progress of fictional realism – from Stroheim’s silent masterpiece, Greed, to the films of Renoir, Rossellini and the television work of Kenneth Loach. In the second part of his book he considers Hollywood and film illusion, showing how the work of Griffith and Chaplin finally gave place to a formalised system of studios, stars and genres. The book concludes with a discussion about the growth of film modernism and demonstrates how film, as a new and important twentieth-century art form closely related to such movements as Expressionism and Surrealism, has found its place as a genuinely new form of expression alongside the novel and the theatre.