Beyond Realism: Naturalist Film in Theory and Practice

About the Book

Beyond Realism: Naturalist Film in Theory and Practice is the first major critical study of international naturalist cinema.
Often mistaken for realist film, international naturalist cinema has a unique cultural and critical history. From its earliest representation in silent films such as Walsh's Regeneration (1915), and Eisenstein's Stachka/Strike (1925), to recent productions such as Chukwu's Clemency (2019), and Aronofsky's The Whale (2022), the naturalist film narrative encompasses the whole of film history, traversing language, movement, and genre. The naturalist film is predicated on two foundational, intersecting paradigms that configure as one ideological system in an overarching scientific and social experimental narrative. Either the scientific or social paradigm may be dominant in the film narrative or they may simply co-exist, but a naturalist film reveals both templates and, most significantly, suggests an implicit cinematic anthropology that renders the body as an observed spectacle.

Table of Contents:
Chapter One: Introduction Chapter Two: Naturalist Tropes Chapter Three: Operative Spaces Chapter Four: The Body Politic Chapter Five: Fleshy Imagery Chapter Six: Darwinian Disconnections Chapter Seven: Moreau Narratives Chapter Eight: Naturalist comedy Chapter Nine: A Joker’s World Index

About the Author :
Robert Singer, Professor of Liberal Studies, CUNY Graduate Center [ret]. He received a Ph.D. from New York University in Comparative Literature. His areas of expertise include literary and film interrelations, interdisciplinary research in film history and aesthetics, and comparative studies. He is the ReFocus: American and International Film series co-editor for Edinburgh University Press. He has written and directed several independent short films and co-produced the animated film, Ulalume (2022). Among his more recent publications are Consuming Images: Film Art and the Television Commercial (EUP, 2020), co-authored with Gary Rhodes, and “A View from the Boardwalk: The W.P.A. New York City Guide and Coney Island Hypertext,” in Rewriting America: New Essays on the Federal Writers’ Project, ed. Sara Rutkowski, (2022).

Review :
"Robert Singer’s Beyond Realism: Naturalist Film in Theory and Practice is a comprehensive guide to naturalistic film; Singer has been the leading global expert on this topic for many years. His book is a life’s work. He is able to move from the dark corners and sharp bright angles of early film to similar naturalist concerns in cinema today: social struggle, poverty, homelessness, violence, injustice, the naturalistic body, psychological conflicts, and many other features. It’s an erudite but engaging read and a must for any naturalist or film student." Beyond Realism: Naturalist Film in Theory and Practice is a treatise on naturalist themes and the moving image, a platform of continuous intertextual references. With this book, Singer takes us on a fascinating (inter)national journey of theories, genres and themes dedicated to the naturalist film, while also presenting a renewed vision of ourselves and our bodies as spectacles. Robert Singer’s Beyond Realism: Naturalist Film in Theory and Practice is a breathtakingly comprehensive and insightful investigation of naturalist themes in film. From Lumière actualités to the latest examples of international cinema, each chapter focuses on a separate facet of "naturalism’s grinding tradition" and its themes of violence, degradation, disease, and the tension between the human spirit and naturalism’s relentless assault on the body. Both a radical and fundamentally joyous celebration of Naturalist cinema, Singer here transcends the orthodox dominance of Realism on cinema discourse and painstakingly presents another way of thinking about the relationship of our world to the one we see on screen. This illuminating study is very good at finding themes, images, and figures—mine, factory, morgue, Darwin, Dr. Moreau—with which to organize its avowedly experimental, critical excursion. Robert Singer’s new book reads like a magnum opus: an enthusiastic and generous culmination of over three decades of Singer’s scholarship on naturalism in literature and film.