Realism is my area of expertise (if anything is... lol), so I was excited and curious when this popped into the drafts for CA.

My time in film has taught me that, weirdly, realism in film is subjective.

What people will accept as real when presented on-screen varies wildly from person to person. I would look to Ken Loach for this. Many of his films feel very real to me, but that is because my personal life experiences mirror that of some of his characters.

I saw Whit Stillman's Metropolis relatively recently, and considered it completely false. Entirely. But how much of that is just because my personal life is so far detached from Stillman's middle to upper class, New Yorkian intellectual characters? I'd say, probably, a lot!

Still, as you rightly say, there are elements of film form which can help us to see realism on screen. Handheld camera, use of non-professional actors (or as Robert Bresson called them, 'models'). A non (or loosely) structured narrative. Shooting on location.

I look to a film like Bicycle Thieves as a very strong example of film realism. It's a perfect one to study. To watch without thinking about it more deeply, it seems completely real thanks to the way it works with time, its location-shooting, its characters and their plights. But it is also very episodic, very structured and very dramatic.

I'd recommend reading Kristin Thompson's chapter titled 'Realism in the Cinema: Bicycle Thieves' from her book Breaking the Glass Armor, if you did want to delve into this further. I struggled to find any time to even pretend to get academic with other topics while at university, so I love that you went out of your way to look into this.

My dissertation supervisor would get into quite the argument with Heckmann, I think. Then again, so did I!

Hope you had a lovely Christmas Amanda :) sorry for the book-length comment, I am procrastinating an article which, for a while there, was blissfully hidden away in another tab!