Studies in Film Realism

21/09/2026

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Realism in film can be viewed in numerous ways, but two that are especially pertinent concern social revelation and low-budget suspense. One of neo-realism’s practitioners, Vittorio De Sica, believed his “goal was to look for the dramatic in ordinary situations, the wonderful in the smallest, the tiniest news item, in the material everybody considers insignificant.” (BFI) His scriptwriter Cesare Zavattini added that “a woman is going to buy a pair of shoes. Upon this elementary situation it is possible to build a film. All we have to do is discover and show all the elements that go to create this adventure, in all their banal ‘dailiness’.” (Film: A Montage of Theories) Federico Fellini felt under fewer obligations than De Sica and Zavattini to show that banal ‘dailinesss’, saying “Neorealism is not about what you show, but how you show it. It’s simply a way of looking at the world without preconceptions or prejudices. Some people are still convinced that neorealism should only be used to show a particular type of reality – social reality to be exact. But then it becomes propaganda.” (BFI) In looking at realism in film, we will keep in mind Fellini’s comment, even if we shall ignore his take on realism. Fellini’s approach to it would seem closer to magic realism, a mainly Latin American literary movement that could be summed up by one of its greatest exemplars, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, by invoking his grandmother’s approach: “She told things that sounded supernatural and fantastic, but she told them with complete naturalness … What was most important was the expression she had on her face. She did not change her expression at all when telling her stories, and everyone was surprised.” (Guardian) And yet in Fellini, it was more the reverse but somehow consistent with Marquez’s remarks. Fellini often gave the everyday a flamboyant style that could make it seem magical, whether it is a dance scene mainly backlit in 8 ½ that gives the characters an otherworldly quality, or a scene early on in La Dolce Vita when the central character rushes his girlfriend to hospital: a place that looks more like an underground car park than a hospital reception.

Yet while Fellini opened up neorealism to new possibilities as he moved from earlier works like I Vitelloni, with a neorealist flavour, to Giulia of the Spirits, where it was almost absent, we want to look at films which hold to the principles of neorealism, and, if advancing the movement at all, do so well within the confines of the type of realist aesethetic De Sica and Zavattini proposed. Thus we can offer Germany Year Zero and A Kind of Loving as classic examples of realism, and The Child and Sweet Sixteen as modern variations.

Germany Year Zero and A Kind of Loving could be opposites from a certain perspective. Rossellini’s film is about death; A Kind of Loving, about life. That is, if we make much of the two deaths in the former film, and the baby in the latter. In Germany Year Zero, a young boy under the influence of a Nazi kills his father, assuming that the man’s sickness is a burden, and at the end, now with the burden of guilt upon him, he will kill himself. In A Kind of Loving, Vic Brown is a draughtsman who gets his girlfriend pregnant and realises that rather than believing he will be the father of a baby and the beginning of a new life, his own existence becomes stillborn. He is a young man still in his 20s (Alan Bates was 28), and like other works of what was called Kitchen Sink Realism (Room at the Top, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning), a pregnancy isn’t a welcome addition, but an existential threat. It stunts the lives of the living, rather than renewing the generational tree. Germany Year Zero and A Kind of Loving represent different expectations, even if the gap between the two films was only fifteen years. In Rossellini’s film he explores post-war poverty, where another mouth to feed isn’t the presence of a newborn, but the persistent presence of the sickly. The Nazi’s cajoling is despicable, of course, but perhaps he wouldn’t have weedled his words into twelve-year-old Edmund’s ear if it weren’t for this most immediate post-war period. While the pre-war Nazis might have held sway with promises of grandeur and a thousand-year Reich, in the post-war years the remnants of their thinking could still influence a young boy. A boy who could see that, with so many mouths to feed and so little food to go around (a recently dead horse is immediately butchered for its flesh by locals on the street), he was doing the family a favour. Rossellini shows that though shalt not live by bread alone, and while there may be a little of it, even after his father dies, Edmund leaves the family with even more to share amongst themselves as he throws himself from a building at the film’s conclusion.

Rossellini’s point isn’t to say that Naziism is wrong (that we may take as a given), but that it can still possess some validity in the minds of the young when circumstances are terrible. Like many a work of realism, narrative meets morality, and Rossellini would propose that social amelioration is the proper solution. This needn’t be a didactic claim, and won’t be found clearly stated in Germany Year Zero, but it is deductively present. In other words, if post-war governments don’t improve the lot of the working classes, then they might seek terrible solutions to a terrible situation. Edmund is sacrificed to this greater good, as we see how the wrong-headed meets the right-hearted, and the boy cannot see any way out of his immutable act other than adding another tragedy to his father’s demise.

A Kind of Loving can seem more trivial. But while John Schlesinger’s films may not be as great as Rossellini’s, this shouldn’t rest on its apparently less significant storyline. A Kind of Loving is a tale of quiet desperation, while Germany Year Zero draws on melodrama, within its realist use of location, to point up the material despair of the characters’ lives. Just after Edmund witnesses Berliners taking chunks of raw meat from the horse, we see him return home to a house that we discover he shares with four other families. The place is a dilapidated ruin, part of a city bombed into surrender by the very Brits who are central to A Kind of Loving, even if Vic would have been but a boy during WWII. Germany Year Zero is, as its title testifies, the moment when a country must rebuild. The characters have few expectations, and wondering where the next meal comes from will be a priority, as we see with the horse as dinner, and also staying warm – as we notice when Edmund rescues some coal that falls off the back of a truck. Austerity is a necessity, while in A Kind of Loving, the film explores a country that, though it was deemed to have won the war, didn’t seem as prosperous or as dynamic as other parts of Europe by the early 1960s. The difference between Germany Year Zero and La Dolce Vita was only thirteen years, and though both films were directed by Italians, both Germany and Italy had seen economic miracles coming out of defeat. Britain too may have had strong growth between 1951 and 1964, but it didn’t look like it. When A Kind of Loving came out in 1962, The Beatles had yet to become huge stars, and the swinging sixties hadn’t yet started to swing, as it would by 1966 – when yet another Italian, Michelangelo Antonioni would make Blow Up, and Time magazine’s cover announced London the swinging city.

Yet one way of looking at A Kind of Loving is to see the yearning to be found in it, the cultural phenomenon that was soon to be evident. Indeed, Schlesinger made his own swinging film just before Antonioni did, Darling, and it starred Julie Christie, who appeared in the film Schlesinger made just after A Kind of Loving, Billy Liar. In Billy Liar, her character is the one who gets away, who, at the end of the film, takes a train to London, while Billy chickens out last minute. She is the figure in Kitchen Sink who acts upon her yearnings, while most of the others stay put, often angry, resentful, frustrated, deluded or stuck. Vic is stuck, but we might wonder if he would be less so if only a few more years and the austerity Britain that he is coming out of was replaced by the permissive society Christie’s character in Billy Liar escapes into, and that her character in Darling exemplifies: a model who travels all over Europe, has various lovers, and marries a prince, however bleakly. It is the difference between stunted opportunity and empty living. Diana in Darling isn’t too far removed from Marcello in La Dolce Vita, a person who has it all and wishes instead to have less, but with more meaning. Yet at least from a prosperous perspective, in Darling Britain had caught up with the consumerist promise evident in La Dolce Vita, and that Vic in A Kind of Loving cannot yet countenance. This is seen in the film’s beautiful closing moments, a scene that captures well the ambiguities of post-war Britain before the swinging sixties possibilities.

Vic and his wife June visit a place that is rundown and where they will have to share a bathroom, but Vic is keen, and while initially it seems all June can see is a hovel, as they walk up by the back of the town, she believes that one reason Vic wants to take it is because he wants to be alone with her. They may be married, but they’ve been living for months with June’s conservative mother, and the pregnant June has miscarried. It could be a new start, no matter its inauspicious beginnings, and the film tentatively proposes this is a couple who might just be able to get along without an interfering parent ruining things. Vic tells June she will need to stand up to her mother, and June agrees, just as she might agree also to a bit of canoodling up in these hills where they would before meet for an assignation.  It is a moment of compassion and a kind of loving, perhaps a loving kindness, as they treat each other with respect and consideration. The weather is cold, dank, and a bit misty, but there is warmth, and Schlesinger closes the scene on a series of brief shots as they walk and talk in close-up, before ending on them moving away from the camera. They are viewed in the medium distance, moving further away from the lens as Schlesinger’s camera remains fixed. It indicates their privacy is their own, even if their lives might not be. They are products of a post-war assumption that they should be happy with their lot. They missed a war, and while they might yearn for more than they can expect, that modest home Vic and June may take, will have a lot more space than the crammed apartment five families share in Germany Year Zero.

While one might wish to make much of neorealism as a cinematic movement, and Kitchen Sink Realism as simply an expansion of a literary one (since so many of the latter films were based on novels and plays), one can also view them as sociological moments in time, and that realism is the mode best adopted to explore it. While Germany Year Zero, like other, later Rossellini films Stromboli and Voyage to Italy have a cinematic sweep as they explore vividly their locales, A Kind of Loving can seem often visually cramped – that it hasn’t quite opened up Stan Barstow’s novel to the visual. That may be so, up to a point, but it more than manages to make vivid, as a book or play could not, the essentials of British life in the early sixties: a world of factories, full employment, people knowing their place, and desire that is often thwarted, or too hastily practised without protection. We can look back on these kitchen sink films no less than neorealist ones, and see a time reflected back to us. Its realism feels vividly sociological, even documentative.

While crime isn’t completely absent in earlier realism (in Bicycle Thieves, of course, and in Osessione: an adaptation of The Postman Rings Twice that is often see as the birth of neo-realism), it becomes much more pronounced in contemporary realist films: if we take Ken Loach and the Dardenne Brothers as key practitioners of it, and especially if we have in mind Sweet Sixteen and The Child.  Speaking of the Dardennes’ Rosetta, which involves petty criminality as a key character sells illegal waffles under the counter of the van in which he works. Lauren Berlant, discussing the Dardennes, says they wanted to look at “post-Fordist affect as a scene of constant bargaining with normalcy in the face of conditions that can barely support even the memory of the fantasy.” Berlant says, “How do fantasy-practice clusters such as those we’ve seen become the grounds for political and social conservatism? How can we understand the singular tragedies of Rosetta and Igor [in La Promesse] in light of the recent uprisings in Paris, where students marched to maintain the same state-secured labor protections enjoyed by their parents, who benefited from the post-war Western European promise of social democracy?”( ‘Nearly Utopian, Nearly Normal: Post-Fordist Affect in La Promesse and Rosetta’) Berlant sees that the very factories that led to the prosperity of the post-war years, and that are so prominent in most of the kitchen sink films, and allied to full employment, are all but absent. Yet this isn’t because of a utopian release from the tasks of arduous labour. It is more that life itself has become a laborious determination to get on or hang on, as though the gap between the two is a constant chasm that leaves people feeling if they don’t get on then they won’t be able to hang on.

Some might see in such characters as Liam in Sweet Sixteen, and Bruno in The Child, the lazy, the feckless and the failures of delayed gratification. There may be some truth to this, but far more in them representing a moment in late capitalism that may show the boys as exceptions to the rule, yet also creatures of their time. The time is the post-Fordist society Berlant speaks about, and we might wonder whether, if advanced capitalist economies want figures of improvisatory zeal, over solid, reliable workers who can see in Fordism a job for life and a modest conformity in return, Liam and Bruno are those people. They are, in their way, ambitious, and both well aware that, given their circumstances, their lack of education, and their need for survival, they will do whatever it takes to succeed. After all, what are the alternatives? Collin Wallace says, “Today’s American capitalism is looking more and more like Ruthless Capitalism. It distinguishes itself differently: by allowing success to reach stratospheric heights while failure sinks to devastating lows. It maximizes outcome dispersion. The result isn’t just that some people win bigger—it’s that losing hurts dramatically more.” (‘Perishable Knowledge’) Wallace might see capitalism ameliorated in other countries but, if advanced capitalism and globalisation are closely associated, then living in the UK or Germany isn’t going to allow one to escape its ruthless reach. Both Liam and Bruno want to practice something of that ruthlessness, as if by doing so they achieve something of its success.

Yet the two films move in different directions, and we will say how they do so after looking at a scene from each, and speak also about the suspense they generate. In Sweet Sixteen, Liam’s mum is in prison, and her boyfriend, a dealer visiting her with Liam. He wants the boy to pass a package of drugs onto his mother, and the exchange will take place when Liam and his mum kiss. Will he do it, or won’t he? Will he get caught by the prison guards if he does; will he get beaten up by the boyfriend if he doesn’t? Loach doesn’t build suspense as we expect from a Bond film or Hitchcock thriller; he illustrates it. He suggests this is a common predicament for those harried into doing what others tell you. Loach finds a space halfway between the mundane and the melodramatic, between the sort of engineered tension to be found when Bond must stop the villain from destroying the world, and the everyday realities of someone paying a visit to a relative in prison. Loach films it without emphasising the lighting to generate foreboding, and offers no non-diegetic music. As they go in to the room to meet Liam’s mum, we hear the quiet chatter of others making the most of their hour with their loved ones.

However, viewers are at least as strongly invested in the outcome as they are in films where the suspense is the thing. Thus one needn’t adopt big budgets to achieve narrative excitement; it can be there within the quotidian, if slightly tweaked. Visiting a prison can be no different from visiting a care home: seeing a loved one who you see only occasionally. But there might be an expectation in the prison visit missing from the care home, a point brutally made manifest in Steve McQueen’s Hunger, when a member of the IRA puts a bullet in the head of a prison officer when he visits his mother in a hushed, sedate environment. Yet Loach doesn’t film it as a generic prison movie space, with clanging doors, numerous guards and long corridors. It is simply a visitor centre, a place hardly comforting, but not quite harsh. It is closer to the unemployment office that shows up in numerous Loach films like Raining Stones and I, Daniel Blake: a place of authority but not quite oppression. The point is that, though Loach manages to make the viewer sweat just a little over what Liam will do, and the risks he is taking, he refuses to make use of mise en scene, camera movements or music to convey suspense.

Yet, the tension is there, and the viewer is as interested in what will happen next as anyone watching a blockbuster. This suggests that realism needn’t only be a filmic mode to convey social justice, but can also give to narrative a different register of impact. If the blockbuster and the generic film work outside in, Loach works inside out. The blockbuster and a genre work need to activate spectacle and convention. A blockbuster with no spectacle would be as remiss as a horror with no jump scares. But though Loach’s films can make you cry like a good weepie, can make you scream in fright like a good horror, or fret over an action like a good thriller, this is not what the film is chiefly there to do. One may find oneself tearful over the young woman who is starving when she turns up at the food bank in I Daniel, Blake, in shock and empathising with the wife in Raining Stones when the loan shark comes round, or concerned by a situation’s outcome as we find here in Sweet Sixteen. But this isn’t a generic necessity. It is simply seeing in everyday situations of hardship elements that coincide with commercial cinema’s tropes, emphasising that everydayness can give to realism a purpose beyond social justice, without at all undermining it. That most brilliant exponent of realism, Andre Bazin, would say of Umberto D: “at the scenario level this type of subject [an older man losing his home; a pregnant maid] corresponds, reciprocally, to the scenario based entirely on the behavior of the actor. Since the real time of the narrative is not that of the drama but the concrete duration of the character, this objectiveness can only be transformed into a mise en scene (scenario and action) in terms of something totally subjective.” (What is Cinema?, Vol II) Bazin means by this that the actor isn’t pressed into dramatic demand, and the viewer isn’t forced into narrative expectation. We observe the actors and extract from them the behavioural over the narrational. Such remarks would prove immensely pertinent to ‘observational documentary’, where the central purpose was to observe behaviour and situations. Some might say Loach ‘betrays’ the Bazinian by putting so much drama back into the story. This depends on how we look at it. From one perspective, Loach might seem less loyal to realism than we might like; from another, it shows that, within a realist aesthetic, a filmmaker can achieve the levels of suspense and tension of genre cinema, while still holding strongly to aspects of realism in mise en scene, acting, sound design and so on.

This is also evident in The Child, but we noted too that Loach’s film and the Dardenne brothers’ work move in two different directions. In Loach’s film, Liam does the decent thing in this scene and refuses to do his mum’s boyfriend’s bidding. But his humanity becomes weakened through the course of the film, and he will become a small-time gangster, betray his friend, and is even asked to kill him, and ends up stabbing and possibly killing the mum’s boyfriend. His sister says to him on the phone afterwards, that there he is turning sixteen and he has already destroyed his life. In contrast, Bruno acts appallingly at the beginning of the film, as he sells the child of the title, but realises soon enough how awful he has acted, and comes to see that a life of petty crime will only alienate him from the person he loves: the mother of their child. Both are works of realism, but the Dardennes move in the redemptive direction that is closer to a theological tradition, including Dostoevsky, Bresson and Levinas, while Loach in this instance is closer to Zola, Scorsese and, as always, a Marxism that suggests individual advancement isn’t of much use if society is structured in such a way that any progress is usually at somebody else’s expense, and often finally one’s own. To explain all this would take up a lot of space, but all we wish to indicate is that realism can be a broad church indeed, if it can include and exclude notions of faith, and can incorporate suspense without being beholden to genre.

The garage scene in The Child is no less tense than the one in Sweet Sixteen; probably more so. Bruno is waiting to find out if his child has been returned after he sold him. He waits in one garage while talking to those who claim they will return the boy, who are in the garage next door. There is a narrow slit at the top between the garages where Bruno returns the money, and we wait to see if the traffickers have deposited the child. The Dardennes would have ruined the tension by a crosscut, but this doesn’t feel like formal astuteness (though it is), but chiefly part of a broader aesthetic integrity. The Dardennes in Rosetta stayed so close to their title character that there was hardly an establishing space in the whole film. We learnt about her surroundings as she moved through it. They are less strict here, but still unerring in their determination to keep the focus limited as we attend to Bruno in ways that Bazin would surely have admired. In this scene we aren’t at all concerned with the trafficker’s motives; our interest is in Bruno’s anxiety. He realises he did a terrible and stupid thing, and that his girlfriend is in hospital dealing with the shock of it all after he told her he sold their baby. The child must be there, and we wait to see if the child is when Bruno exits his garage, after the gang members have taken off, and he lifts the door of the other garage to see if the child is.

Like the scene in the prison with Liam, the viewer is briefly placed in what can seem like the most obvious of suspense devices. A will they/ won’t they scenario. Will Liam do what his mother’s boyfriend insists he does, or will he rebel? Will Bruno find his baby in the garage next door, or not? But we could equally say this is a pretty primal response to the world, and not only a cheap dramatic one. People wait for exam results, job offers, flat purchases, pregnancy tests and numerous other moments where one waits suspensefully to know an outcome. It would be remiss to allow such a basic feeling to be co-opted narratively by only large-scale films. Both Sweet Sixteen and The Child are low-budget examinations that may even be better at offering (as opposed to generating) tension, because the problems, while extreme, are also more readily emotionally accessible than those generated in many an action film. To stop someone from destroying the world is likely to remain far outside most people’s orbit, but to risk disobeying an abusive authority figure, or to fret over the absence of one’s child, is well within it. Realism needn’t negate suspense; it can instead be its natural home, using the most apparently mundane of spaces and situations within which to activate excitement, without hyperbolising it.

It was as if there were several directions realism, coming out of neorealism, could go. One was seeing that the social project had changed: the poverty of the post-war years became the relative prosperity of the economic miracle, and directors like Fellini and Antonioni observed these shifts and wished to find a style that matched them – one that retreated from the observation of the poor to the observation of the comfortable. Roberto Rossellini was central to this shift if we notice the difference between German Year Zero and Voyage to Italy six years later. In the earlier film, characters have hardly enough to eat; in the latter film, the couple at the film’s centre have hardly anything to do. They wander aimlessly around Naples, drinking wine, eating food, partying and, in the wife’s case, visiting museums. What they lack is purpose, not sustenance, and the film’s style reflects this: a languorous account of characters moving through space slowly under the heat of the Italian south.  

Nevertheless, there were directors holding to representational portraits of the poor, and none more so than Pier Paolo Pasolini in his first two features, Accatone, made in 1961, and Mamma Roma in 1962. At the same time, Fellini was making La Dolce Vita and 8 ½, and Antonioni L’avventura and La notte, continuing Voyage to Italy’s luxurious torpor. Pasolini, perhaps more than anybody, instigated a new approach to neo-realism that would become important in Loach, the Dardennes and Maurice Pialat. Pasolini’s weren’t tender portraits of working-class life, but an acknowledgement of rough, uncouth, and often criminal deeds amongst the poor. What Pasolini understood was that poverty isn’t the same as passivity, and that many will find their own form of agency, even if society has all but written them off. They will not wait around looking like the deserving poor, but become figures potentially undeserving of our sympathy because what matters more is their own ability to act. In Pialat’s Loulou, a low-level criminal recently out of prison takes up with a middle-class woman who works in her ex-husband’s ad agency. Loulou loves women and booze, partying and a ruckus and, whatever society might make of him, he thinks quite highly of himself as within this environment he has friends, lovers and finds ways to have enough cash for his needs. Yet like Pasolini’s title character in Accattone, and the son in Mamma Roma, it is a life that can only live in the present, hemmed in by a past that has offered few opportunities, and a future where the character might well end up back in prison, or trapped in low-paid work, with familial obligations but few domestic pleasures. Yet they are not passive characters, nor especially pitiful ones, and this is what the Dardennes and Loach in their best work accept. In Rosetta, the eponymous character will betray a friend to get a job, no matter if the job is simply selling waffles in a van. Many of Loach’s characters are petty thieves, often no more serious than Billy in Kes stealing milk, characters in Raining Stones nicking turf or sheep, or Liam selling cheaply knocked-off cigarettes in Sweet Sixteen. In The Child, Bruno is constantly cooking up dodgy schemes, with the selling of his own child just one of the more outlandish and horrific. He doesn’t want to be a work slave earning a grand a month, as if his ambitions far exceed Rosetta’s, but both characters are equally unable to see the reality of their situation. However, rather than merely observing the impoverished in their false consciousness, Loach and the Dardennes insist also on the importance of characters believing they can change the material circumstances of their lives. They may be misguided, as they end up betraying, thieving and cheating, but they aren’t passively accepting their lot. Broader economic circumstances may have created the situations where they find themselves, but that doesn’t mean the filmmaker must illustrate this broader reality as tragic. After all, they are living specific lives.

It is partly why we have made much of the suspense scenes in both Sweet Sixteen and The Child. If we didn’t believe the characters had agency, we wouldn’t be engaged in their predicament. The viewer wants Liam to defy his mother’s boyfriend, and Bruno to find his child in the garage next door as he determines to get him back. In the broader scheme of things, Loach and the Dardennes make clear that Liam and Bruno are products of their environment, and make sure we are well aware of their social circumstances, as a Hollywood film might not, and where agency unequivocally trumps environmental factors narratively,  even if we might wonder if the broader environment impacts on their lives nevertheless. Loach and the Dardennes both note the political dimension to their films. “Bruno doesn’t belong. He doesn’t belong any longer to a class – the working class - because it doesn’t exist anymore”, the Dardennes say. Usually they set their films in Seraing, and “Seraing is a town where the working class was very important. It was a centre for mining and heavy industry. There was a tradition, a solidarity, and a strong working class culture which disappeared with the end of this form of industry. And we saw a lot of lonely people appearing[…]that don’t have a context anymore.” (Film Ireland) Loach says of British governments, “They closed the shipyard, they didn’t believe in the industry in the place. And now they’ve got call centres and the kids are on three, four week contracts with no possibility of planning in their lives, no possibility of a settled future.” (DannyMoran) Yet what matters is the balance between the political and the dramatic, the passivity and the agency. From one perspective they are contained by social forces; from another, they are figures of choice. Both Sweet Sixteen and The Child insist upon showing that both are working in conjunction, manifesting themselves in tensions that offer narrative urgency as well as socio-political anger. It gives contemporary realism an aspect of action; one illustrating it can be as tense as large-budget suspense cinema, while still respecting a tradition of realism.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Studies in Film Realism

Realism in film can be viewed in numerous ways, but two that are especially pertinent concern social revelation and low-budget suspense. One of neo-realism’s practitioners, Vittorio De Sica, believed his “goal was to look for the dramatic in ordinary situations, the wonderful in the smallest, the tiniest news item, in the material everybody considers insignificant.” (BFI) His scriptwriter Cesare Zavattini added that “a woman is going to buy a pair of shoes. Upon this elementary situation it is possible to build a film. All we have to do is discover and show all the elements that go to create this adventure, in all their banal ‘dailiness’.” (Film: A Montage of Theories) Federico Fellini felt under fewer obligations than De Sica and Zavattini to show that banal ‘dailinesss’, saying “Neorealism is not about what you show, but how you show it. It’s simply a way of looking at the world without preconceptions or prejudices. Some people are still convinced that neorealism should only be used to show a particular type of reality – social reality to be exact. But then it becomes propaganda.” (BFI) In looking at realism in film, we will keep in mind Fellini’s comment, even if we shall ignore his take on realism. Fellini’s approach to it would seem closer to magic realism, a mainly Latin American literary movement that could be summed up by one of its greatest exemplars, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, by invoking his grandmother’s approach: “She told things that sounded supernatural and fantastic, but she told them with complete naturalness … What was most important was the expression she had on her face. She did not change her expression at all when telling her stories, and everyone was surprised.” (Guardian) And yet in Fellini, it was more the reverse but somehow consistent with Marquez’s remarks. Fellini often gave the everyday a flamboyant style that could make it seem magical, whether it is a dance scene mainly backlit in 8 ½ that gives the characters an otherworldly quality, or a scene early on in La Dolce Vita when the central character rushes his girlfriend to hospital: a place that looks more like an underground car park than a hospital reception.

Yet while Fellini opened up neorealism to new possibilities as he moved from earlier works like I Vitelloni, with a neorealist flavour, to Giulia of the Spirits, where it was almost absent, we want to look at films which hold to the principles of neorealism, and, if advancing the movement at all, do so well within the confines of the type of realist aesethetic De Sica and Zavattini proposed. Thus we can offer Germany Year Zero and A Kind of Loving as classic examples of realism, and The Child and Sweet Sixteen as modern variations.

Germany Year Zero and A Kind of Loving could be opposites from a certain perspective. Rossellini’s film is about death; A Kind of Loving, about life. That is, if we make much of the two deaths in the former film, and the baby in the latter. In Germany Year Zero, a young boy under the influence of a Nazi kills his father, assuming that the man’s sickness is a burden, and at the end, now with the burden of guilt upon him, he will kill himself. In A Kind of Loving, Vic Brown is a draughtsman who gets his girlfriend pregnant and realises that rather than believing he will be the father of a baby and the beginning of a new life, his own existence becomes stillborn. He is a young man still in his 20s (Alan Bates was 28), and like other works of what was called Kitchen Sink Realism (Room at the Top, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning), a pregnancy isn’t a welcome addition, but an existential threat. It stunts the lives of the living, rather than renewing the generational tree. Germany Year Zero and A Kind of Loving represent different expectations, even if the gap between the two films was only fifteen years. In Rossellini’s film he explores post-war poverty, where another mouth to feed isn’t the presence of a newborn, but the persistent presence of the sickly. The Nazi’s cajoling is despicable, of course, but perhaps he wouldn’t have weedled his words into twelve-year-old Edmund’s ear if it weren’t for this most immediate post-war period. While the pre-war Nazis might have held sway with promises of grandeur and a thousand-year Reich, in the post-war years the remnants of their thinking could still influence a young boy. A boy who could see that, with so many mouths to feed and so little food to go around (a recently dead horse is immediately butchered for its flesh by locals on the street), he was doing the family a favour. Rossellini shows that though shalt not live by bread alone, and while there may be a little of it, even after his father dies, Edmund leaves the family with even more to share amongst themselves as he throws himself from a building at the film’s conclusion.

Rossellini’s point isn’t to say that Naziism is wrong (that we may take as a given), but that it can still possess some validity in the minds of the young when circumstances are terrible. Like many a work of realism, narrative meets morality, and Rossellini would propose that social amelioration is the proper solution. This needn’t be a didactic claim, and won’t be found clearly stated in Germany Year Zero, but it is deductively present. In other words, if post-war governments don’t improve the lot of the working classes, then they might seek terrible solutions to a terrible situation. Edmund is sacrificed to this greater good, as we see how the wrong-headed meets the right-hearted, and the boy cannot see any way out of his immutable act other than adding another tragedy to his father’s demise.

A Kind of Loving can seem more trivial. But while John Schlesinger’s films may not be as great as Rossellini’s, this shouldn’t rest on its apparently less significant storyline. A Kind of Loving is a tale of quiet desperation, while Germany Year Zero draws on melodrama, within its realist use of location, to point up the material despair of the characters’ lives. Just after Edmund witnesses Berliners taking chunks of raw meat from the horse, we see him return home to a house that we discover he shares with four other families. The place is a dilapidated ruin, part of a city bombed into surrender by the very Brits who are central to A Kind of Loving, even if Vic would have been but a boy during WWII. Germany Year Zero is, as its title testifies, the moment when a country must rebuild. The characters have few expectations, and wondering where the next meal comes from will be a priority, as we see with the horse as dinner, and also staying warm – as we notice when Edmund rescues some coal that falls off the back of a truck. Austerity is a necessity, while in A Kind of Loving, the film explores a country that, though it was deemed to have won the war, didn’t seem as prosperous or as dynamic as other parts of Europe by the early 1960s. The difference between Germany Year Zero and La Dolce Vita was only thirteen years, and though both films were directed by Italians, both Germany and Italy had seen economic miracles coming out of defeat. Britain too may have had strong growth between 1951 and 1964, but it didn’t look like it. When A Kind of Loving came out in 1962, The Beatles had yet to become huge stars, and the swinging sixties hadn’t yet started to swing, as it would by 1966 – when yet another Italian, Michelangelo Antonioni would make Blow Up, and Time magazine’s cover announced London the swinging city.

Yet one way of looking at A Kind of Loving is to see the yearning to be found in it, the cultural phenomenon that was soon to be evident. Indeed, Schlesinger made his own swinging film just before Antonioni did, Darling, and it starred Julie Christie, who appeared in the film Schlesinger made just after A Kind of Loving, Billy Liar. In Billy Liar, her character is the one who gets away, who, at the end of the film, takes a train to London, while Billy chickens out last minute. She is the figure in Kitchen Sink who acts upon her yearnings, while most of the others stay put, often angry, resentful, frustrated, deluded or stuck. Vic is stuck, but we might wonder if he would be less so if only a few more years and the austerity Britain that he is coming out of was replaced by the permissive society Christie’s character in Billy Liar escapes into, and that her character in Darling exemplifies: a model who travels all over Europe, has various lovers, and marries a prince, however bleakly. It is the difference between stunted opportunity and empty living. Diana in Darling isn’t too far removed from Marcello in La Dolce Vita, a person who has it all and wishes instead to have less, but with more meaning. Yet at least from a prosperous perspective, in Darling Britain had caught up with the consumerist promise evident in La Dolce Vita, and that Vic in A Kind of Loving cannot yet countenance. This is seen in the film’s beautiful closing moments, a scene that captures well the ambiguities of post-war Britain before the swinging sixties possibilities.

Vic and his wife June visit a place that is rundown and where they will have to share a bathroom, but Vic is keen, and while initially it seems all June can see is a hovel, as they walk up by the back of the town, she believes that one reason Vic wants to take it is because he wants to be alone with her. They may be married, but they’ve been living for months with June’s conservative mother, and the pregnant June has miscarried. It could be a new start, no matter its inauspicious beginnings, and the film tentatively proposes this is a couple who might just be able to get along without an interfering parent ruining things. Vic tells June she will need to stand up to her mother, and June agrees, just as she might agree also to a bit of canoodling up in these hills where they would before meet for an assignation.  It is a moment of compassion and a kind of loving, perhaps a loving kindness, as they treat each other with respect and consideration. The weather is cold, dank, and a bit misty, but there is warmth, and Schlesinger closes the scene on a series of brief shots as they walk and talk in close-up, before ending on them moving away from the camera. They are viewed in the medium distance, moving further away from the lens as Schlesinger’s camera remains fixed. It indicates their privacy is their own, even if their lives might not be. They are products of a post-war assumption that they should be happy with their lot. They missed a war, and while they might yearn for more than they can expect, that modest home Vic and June may take, will have a lot more space than the crammed apartment five families share in Germany Year Zero.

While one might wish to make much of neorealism as a cinematic movement, and Kitchen Sink Realism as simply an expansion of a literary one (since so many of the latter films were based on novels and plays), one can also view them as sociological moments in time, and that realism is the mode best adopted to explore it. While Germany Year Zero, like other, later Rossellini films Stromboli and Voyage to Italy have a cinematic sweep as they explore vividly their locales, A Kind of Loving can seem often visually cramped – that it hasn’t quite opened up Stan Barstow’s novel to the visual. That may be so, up to a point, but it more than manages to make vivid, as a book or play could not, the essentials of British life in the early sixties: a world of factories, full employment, people knowing their place, and desire that is often thwarted, or too hastily practised without protection. We can look back on these kitchen sink films no less than neorealist ones, and see a time reflected back to us. Its realism feels vividly sociological, even documentative.

While crime isn’t completely absent in earlier realism (in Bicycle Thieves, of course, and in Osessione: an adaptation of The Postman Rings Twice that is often see as the birth of neo-realism), it becomes much more pronounced in contemporary realist films: if we take Ken Loach and the Dardenne Brothers as key practitioners of it, and especially if we have in mind Sweet Sixteen and The Child.  Speaking of the Dardennes’ Rosetta, which involves petty criminality as a key character sells illegal waffles under the counter of the van in which he works. Lauren Berlant, discussing the Dardennes, says they wanted to look at “post-Fordist affect as a scene of constant bargaining with normalcy in the face of conditions that can barely support even the memory of the fantasy.” Berlant says, “How do fantasy-practice clusters such as those we’ve seen become the grounds for political and social conservatism? How can we understand the singular tragedies of Rosetta and Igor [in La Promesse] in light of the recent uprisings in Paris, where students marched to maintain the same state-secured labor protections enjoyed by their parents, who benefited from the post-war Western European promise of social democracy?”( ‘Nearly Utopian, Nearly Normal: Post-Fordist Affect in La Promesse and Rosetta’) Berlant sees that the very factories that led to the prosperity of the post-war years, and that are so prominent in most of the kitchen sink films, and allied to full employment, are all but absent. Yet this isn’t because of a utopian release from the tasks of arduous labour. It is more that life itself has become a laborious determination to get on or hang on, as though the gap between the two is a constant chasm that leaves people feeling if they don’t get on then they won’t be able to hang on.

Some might see in such characters as Liam in Sweet Sixteen, and Bruno in The Child, the lazy, the feckless and the failures of delayed gratification. There may be some truth to this, but far more in them representing a moment in late capitalism that may show the boys as exceptions to the rule, yet also creatures of their time. The time is the post-Fordist society Berlant speaks about, and we might wonder whether, if advanced capitalist economies want figures of improvisatory zeal, over solid, reliable workers who can see in Fordism a job for life and a modest conformity in return, Liam and Bruno are those people. They are, in their way, ambitious, and both well aware that, given their circumstances, their lack of education, and their need for survival, they will do whatever it takes to succeed. After all, what are the alternatives? Collin Wallace says, “Today’s American capitalism is looking more and more like Ruthless Capitalism. It distinguishes itself differently: by allowing success to reach stratospheric heights while failure sinks to devastating lows. It maximizes outcome dispersion. The result isn’t just that some people win bigger—it’s that losing hurts dramatically more.” (‘Perishable Knowledge’) Wallace might see capitalism ameliorated in other countries but, if advanced capitalism and globalisation are closely associated, then living in the UK or Germany isn’t going to allow one to escape its ruthless reach. Both Liam and Bruno want to practice something of that ruthlessness, as if by doing so they achieve something of its success.

Yet the two films move in different directions, and we will say how they do so after looking at a scene from each, and speak also about the suspense they generate. In Sweet Sixteen, Liam’s mum is in prison, and her boyfriend, a dealer visiting her with Liam. He wants the boy to pass a package of drugs onto his mother, and the exchange will take place when Liam and his mum kiss. Will he do it, or won’t he? Will he get caught by the prison guards if he does; will he get beaten up by the boyfriend if he doesn’t? Loach doesn’t build suspense as we expect from a Bond film or Hitchcock thriller; he illustrates it. He suggests this is a common predicament for those harried into doing what others tell you. Loach finds a space halfway between the mundane and the melodramatic, between the sort of engineered tension to be found when Bond must stop the villain from destroying the world, and the everyday realities of someone paying a visit to a relative in prison. Loach films it without emphasising the lighting to generate foreboding, and offers no non-diegetic music. As they go in to the room to meet Liam’s mum, we hear the quiet chatter of others making the most of their hour with their loved ones.

However, viewers are at least as strongly invested in the outcome as they are in films where the suspense is the thing. Thus one needn’t adopt big budgets to achieve narrative excitement; it can be there within the quotidian, if slightly tweaked. Visiting a prison can be no different from visiting a care home: seeing a loved one who you see only occasionally. But there might be an expectation in the prison visit missing from the care home, a point brutally made manifest in Steve McQueen’s Hunger, when a member of the IRA puts a bullet in the head of a prison officer when he visits his mother in a hushed, sedate environment. Yet Loach doesn’t film it as a generic prison movie space, with clanging doors, numerous guards and long corridors. It is simply a visitor centre, a place hardly comforting, but not quite harsh. It is closer to the unemployment office that shows up in numerous Loach films like Raining Stones and I, Daniel Blake: a place of authority but not quite oppression. The point is that, though Loach manages to make the viewer sweat just a little over what Liam will do, and the risks he is taking, he refuses to make use of mise en scene, camera movements or music to convey suspense.

Yet, the tension is there, and the viewer is as interested in what will happen next as anyone watching a blockbuster. This suggests that realism needn’t only be a filmic mode to convey social justice, but can also give to narrative a different register of impact. If the blockbuster and the generic film work outside in, Loach works inside out. The blockbuster and a genre work need to activate spectacle and convention. A blockbuster with no spectacle would be as remiss as a horror with no jump scares. But though Loach’s films can make you cry like a good weepie, can make you scream in fright like a good horror, or fret over an action like a good thriller, this is not what the film is chiefly there to do. One may find oneself tearful over the young woman who is starving when she turns up at the food bank in I Daniel, Blake, in shock and empathising with the wife in Raining Stones when the loan shark comes round, or concerned by a situation’s outcome as we find here in Sweet Sixteen. But this isn’t a generic necessity. It is simply seeing in everyday situations of hardship elements that coincide with commercial cinema’s tropes, emphasising that everydayness can give to realism a purpose beyond social justice, without at all undermining it. That most brilliant exponent of realism, Andre Bazin, would say of Umberto D: “at the scenario level this type of subject [an older man losing his home; a pregnant maid] corresponds, reciprocally, to the scenario based entirely on the behavior of the actor. Since the real time of the narrative is not that of the drama but the concrete duration of the character, this objectiveness can only be transformed into a mise en scene (scenario and action) in terms of something totally subjective.” (What is Cinema?, Vol II) Bazin means by this that the actor isn’t pressed into dramatic demand, and the viewer isn’t forced into narrative expectation. We observe the actors and extract from them the behavioural over the narrational. Such remarks would prove immensely pertinent to ‘observational documentary’, where the central purpose was to observe behaviour and situations. Some might say Loach ‘betrays’ the Bazinian by putting so much drama back into the story. This depends on how we look at it. From one perspective, Loach might seem less loyal to realism than we might like; from another, it shows that, within a realist aesthetic, a filmmaker can achieve the levels of suspense and tension of genre cinema, while still holding strongly to aspects of realism in mise en scene, acting, sound design and so on.

This is also evident in The Child, but we noted too that Loach’s film and the Dardenne brothers’ work move in two different directions. In Loach’s film, Liam does the decent thing in this scene and refuses to do his mum’s boyfriend’s bidding. But his humanity becomes weakened through the course of the film, and he will become a small-time gangster, betray his friend, and is even asked to kill him, and ends up stabbing and possibly killing the mum’s boyfriend. His sister says to him on the phone afterwards, that there he is turning sixteen and he has already destroyed his life. In contrast, Bruno acts appallingly at the beginning of the film, as he sells the child of the title, but realises soon enough how awful he has acted, and comes to see that a life of petty crime will only alienate him from the person he loves: the mother of their child. Both are works of realism, but the Dardennes move in the redemptive direction that is closer to a theological tradition, including Dostoevsky, Bresson and Levinas, while Loach in this instance is closer to Zola, Scorsese and, as always, a Marxism that suggests individual advancement isn’t of much use if society is structured in such a way that any progress is usually at somebody else’s expense, and often finally one’s own. To explain all this would take up a lot of space, but all we wish to indicate is that realism can be a broad church indeed, if it can include and exclude notions of faith, and can incorporate suspense without being beholden to genre.

The garage scene in The Child is no less tense than the one in Sweet Sixteen; probably more so. Bruno is waiting to find out if his child has been returned after he sold him. He waits in one garage while talking to those who claim they will return the boy, who are in the garage next door. There is a narrow slit at the top between the garages where Bruno returns the money, and we wait to see if the traffickers have deposited the child. The Dardennes would have ruined the tension by a crosscut, but this doesn’t feel like formal astuteness (though it is), but chiefly part of a broader aesthetic integrity. The Dardennes in Rosetta stayed so close to their title character that there was hardly an establishing space in the whole film. We learnt about her surroundings as she moved through it. They are less strict here, but still unerring in their determination to keep the focus limited as we attend to Bruno in ways that Bazin would surely have admired. In this scene we aren’t at all concerned with the trafficker’s motives; our interest is in Bruno’s anxiety. He realises he did a terrible and stupid thing, and that his girlfriend is in hospital dealing with the shock of it all after he told her he sold their baby. The child must be there, and we wait to see if the child is when Bruno exits his garage, after the gang members have taken off, and he lifts the door of the other garage to see if the child is.

Like the scene in the prison with Liam, the viewer is briefly placed in what can seem like the most obvious of suspense devices. A will they/ won’t they scenario. Will Liam do what his mother’s boyfriend insists he does, or will he rebel? Will Bruno find his baby in the garage next door, or not? But we could equally say this is a pretty primal response to the world, and not only a cheap dramatic one. People wait for exam results, job offers, flat purchases, pregnancy tests and numerous other moments where one waits suspensefully to know an outcome. It would be remiss to allow such a basic feeling to be co-opted narratively by only large-scale films. Both Sweet Sixteen and The Child are low-budget examinations that may even be better at offering (as opposed to generating) tension, because the problems, while extreme, are also more readily emotionally accessible than those generated in many an action film. To stop someone from destroying the world is likely to remain far outside most people’s orbit, but to risk disobeying an abusive authority figure, or to fret over the absence of one’s child, is well within it. Realism needn’t negate suspense; it can instead be its natural home, using the most apparently mundane of spaces and situations within which to activate excitement, without hyperbolising it.

It was as if there were several directions realism, coming out of neorealism, could go. One was seeing that the social project had changed: the poverty of the post-war years became the relative prosperity of the economic miracle, and directors like Fellini and Antonioni observed these shifts and wished to find a style that matched them – one that retreated from the observation of the poor to the observation of the comfortable. Roberto Rossellini was central to this shift if we notice the difference between German Year Zero and Voyage to Italy six years later. In the earlier film, characters have hardly enough to eat; in the latter film, the couple at the film’s centre have hardly anything to do. They wander aimlessly around Naples, drinking wine, eating food, partying and, in the wife’s case, visiting museums. What they lack is purpose, not sustenance, and the film’s style reflects this: a languorous account of characters moving through space slowly under the heat of the Italian south.  

Nevertheless, there were directors holding to representational portraits of the poor, and none more so than Pier Paolo Pasolini in his first two features, Accatone, made in 1961, and Mamma Roma in 1962. At the same time, Fellini was making La Dolce Vita and 8 ½, and Antonioni L’avventura and La notte, continuing Voyage to Italy’s luxurious torpor. Pasolini, perhaps more than anybody, instigated a new approach to neo-realism that would become important in Loach, the Dardennes and Maurice Pialat. Pasolini’s weren’t tender portraits of working-class life, but an acknowledgement of rough, uncouth, and often criminal deeds amongst the poor. What Pasolini understood was that poverty isn’t the same as passivity, and that many will find their own form of agency, even if society has all but written them off. They will not wait around looking like the deserving poor, but become figures potentially undeserving of our sympathy because what matters more is their own ability to act. In Pialat’s Loulou, a low-level criminal recently out of prison takes up with a middle-class woman who works in her ex-husband’s ad agency. Loulou loves women and booze, partying and a ruckus and, whatever society might make of him, he thinks quite highly of himself as within this environment he has friends, lovers and finds ways to have enough cash for his needs. Yet like Pasolini’s title character in Accattone, and the son in Mamma Roma, it is a life that can only live in the present, hemmed in by a past that has offered few opportunities, and a future where the character might well end up back in prison, or trapped in low-paid work, with familial obligations but few domestic pleasures. Yet they are not passive characters, nor especially pitiful ones, and this is what the Dardennes and Loach in their best work accept. In Rosetta, the eponymous character will betray a friend to get a job, no matter if the job is simply selling waffles in a van. Many of Loach’s characters are petty thieves, often no more serious than Billy in Kes stealing milk, characters in Raining Stones nicking turf or sheep, or Liam selling cheaply knocked-off cigarettes in Sweet Sixteen. In The Child, Bruno is constantly cooking up dodgy schemes, with the selling of his own child just one of the more outlandish and horrific. He doesn’t want to be a work slave earning a grand a month, as if his ambitions far exceed Rosetta’s, but both characters are equally unable to see the reality of their situation. However, rather than merely observing the impoverished in their false consciousness, Loach and the Dardennes insist also on the importance of characters believing they can change the material circumstances of their lives. They may be misguided, as they end up betraying, thieving and cheating, but they aren’t passively accepting their lot. Broader economic circumstances may have created the situations where they find themselves, but that doesn’t mean the filmmaker must illustrate this broader reality as tragic. After all, they are living specific lives.

It is partly why we have made much of the suspense scenes in both Sweet Sixteen and The Child. If we didn’t believe the characters had agency, we wouldn’t be engaged in their predicament. The viewer wants Liam to defy his mother’s boyfriend, and Bruno to find his child in the garage next door as he determines to get him back. In the broader scheme of things, Loach and the Dardennes make clear that Liam and Bruno are products of their environment, and make sure we are well aware of their social circumstances, as a Hollywood film might not, and where agency unequivocally trumps environmental factors narratively,  even if we might wonder if the broader environment impacts on their lives nevertheless. Loach and the Dardennes both note the political dimension to their films. “Bruno doesn’t belong. He doesn’t belong any longer to a class – the working class - because it doesn’t exist anymore”, the Dardennes say. Usually they set their films in Seraing, and “Seraing is a town where the working class was very important. It was a centre for mining and heavy industry. There was a tradition, a solidarity, and a strong working class culture which disappeared with the end of this form of industry. And we saw a lot of lonely people appearing[…]that don’t have a context anymore.” (Film Ireland) Loach says of British governments, “They closed the shipyard, they didn’t believe in the industry in the place. And now they’ve got call centres and the kids are on three, four week contracts with no possibility of planning in their lives, no possibility of a settled future.” (DannyMoran) Yet what matters is the balance between the political and the dramatic, the passivity and the agency. From one perspective they are contained by social forces; from another, they are figures of choice. Both Sweet Sixteen and The Child insist upon showing that both are working in conjunction, manifesting themselves in tensions that offer narrative urgency as well as socio-political anger. It gives contemporary realism an aspect of action; one illustrating it can be as tense as large-budget suspense cinema, while still respecting a tradition of realism.


© Tony McKibbin