By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas.
It is my wish that Beyond Realism would inspire active dialogue and research with other disciplinary practices, academics, and film lovers. I would enjoy hearing a geneticist discuss the child serial killer in pigtails and speculative heredity in Mervyn Le Roy’s The Bad Seed (1956) or a sociologist discuss girlhood, ritualistic cruelty and obesity in Carlota Pereda’s Piggy/Cerdita….”
No one can ever accuse Robert Singer of slacking off. Aside from his own impressive body of work, in recent years Singer has taken on the enormous task of co-editing Edinburgh University Press’s game-changing ReFocus: The American Directors series (with Gary D. Rhodes and Frances Smith) and ReFocus: The International Directors series (with Rhodes and Stefanie Van de Peer).
But in 2024, the book to which he has dedicated so much of his recent life to – Beyond Realism: Naturalist Film in Theory and Practice – has hit the shelves, also published by Edinburgh University Press. 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.
Confidently weaving critical threads including film and literary studies and art history together with seamless precision, Singer likewise leaps back and forth in time, from cinemas earliest days and beyond into novels, paintings and so much more. And yet, Beyond Realism never loses sight of our current moment and issues surrounding contemporary discourse, rendered perhaps nowhere more apparent than his consideration of Todd Philips’s Joker (a film with the privileged placement on the book’s front cover).
Robert very kindly took time to speak to us about his already essential book.
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Alexandra Heller-Nicholas: In no small way, Beyond Realism really feels in many ways like the culmination of a lifetime’s work of watching and thinking about the moving image. Now that the book is “born”, how do you feel it fits into the bigger Robert Singer story?
I have always been fascinated by the extremes of human behavior. When I was in high school we read Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, certainly not a work one associates with Realism or Naturalism, but there is a compelling incident that occurs in Act 3, scene 3: “Cinna, the Poet” – that had a profound effect on me. As he crosses the streets of Rome at night, the poet Cinna, who is not Cinna the conspirator, is murdered by the enraged mob for having the wrong name at the wrong time in the wrong place. Who were these murderers: common people, ordinary citizens? This fierce criminal act is both violent and alternately made humorous; today, we might refer to it as “Tarantino-like.” The irrational, predatory fury of the mob made an endurable impression.
In other books and magazines, I came across Weegee’s street people and images of the underworld. I was especially intrigued by the photograph, The Critic (1943) with its ironic, tabloid image of class contrast and absurdity in the faces of three women, and I also encountered Lisette Model’s photographs of sympathetic, destabilized humanity, in particular, the image of the gender-bending performance artist, Albert-Alberta, Hubert’s Forty-Second Street Flea Circus, New York (~1945). I read Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890), which still has an overpowering, lacerating “punch” in its stark documentary style. As far as popular film culture, local television repeatedly broadcast Edgar Ulmer’s noir masterpiece Detour (1945), which introduced me to a fatalistic sense of entrapment, and also, Ann Savage! These are a few of the inspirational catalysts I could cite leading to the genesis of Beyond Realism.
Around this time, I discovered 16mm and super 8 cameras and began shooting narrative and documentary format films across NYC in the early 1970s in punk clubs, parks, and local, semi-safe streets, but especially in Coney Island. In those pre-VCR and cable television days, the Elgin Theater in Chelsea and other local venues would show films by Kurosawa, Truffaut, Buñuel and other directors not readily broadcast on network television. During this era, I attended NYU and developed my academic interest in comparative literature and film studies, especially when engaging myths, aesthetics, history, and the complex, struggling, frequently violent spectacle of the human: La Bête humaine. Then, in the late 1980s, I discovered Kims Video and amazing, unknown films, national cinemas, and many directors who never found an international audience. I believe the discovery story never really ends and consider naturalist cinema an ongoing research concern since there are so many films, technological advances, and directors to encounter. Hence, the “Singer Story” is an incomplete but ongoing narrative.
The way you speak about Naturalist film aesthetics frequently brings with it a sense that you are speaking about something not merely just ever-evolving, but almost alive. How did you go about getting a handle on something so conceptually slippery when you first sat down to start planning and writing the book? What was that process?
Beyond Realism is my attempt to present a post-realist, international film aesthetic that has been critically ignored. Initially, after watching several dozen films and deciding which films best illustrated my overall ideas and critical approach, I gathered a comprehensive list of relevant international literary and film scholars who I knew had to be included in this project, and there were also visual artists and theoreticians who were especially germane to the historical and technological movement of the naturalist film aesthetic. I then developed a book proposal for Edinburgh University Press based on a course I previously taught at the CUNY Graduate Center, Film Studies Program. The book proposal developed the framework for an intermedial exploration of multiple naturalist film narratives, traversing the silent to contemporary era of production. I had to establish how Naturalism is linked conceptually to Realism, metaphorically “conjoined at the hips,” as the first stage of an experimental, ongoing process of “clinical” observation. Throughout the history of international film studies, from the Lumiere brothers’ actualités to Gaspar Noé’s erotic-nightmarish landscapes and beyond, I established that international naturalist film engages all narrative genre and is a structural “presence” involving figures such as Darwin, Marx, Courbet, Zola, among several other artistic, clinical, and historical sources. I consider naturalist cinema as a broad aesthetic classification that demonstrates significant intertextual associations, principally beginning with nineteenth-century art, scientific history, technology, and literature, and extending to the present era of postmodern cinematic reformulations of society and selfhood(s). Naturalist cinema contains recurring, observable tropes of representation, appropriated from these disciplines, to engage the viewer such as the alcoholic, the “fallen woman,” the intellectually-challenged, and the raging predator. La Bête humaine is a factual presence. It is my contention that before the celebration of the irrational and the subconscious in Dada, Surrealism, Expressionism and other avant-garde styles and movements, Naturalism looked within, to the internal terrain of theoretical genetics and post-religious temperament, to provide a context for representing the human. Naturalist cinema provides a close reading of the multifaceted, cinematic image of society, the mob-group, and a man or woman, under the microscopic view of experience as it is lived.
The book is extraordinarily nimble when it comes to just how expansive your case studies are; impressively global in nature and frequently stemming back to early cinema, you also bring in literature and painting into your discussion in a really seamless way. How did you go about deciding what to include on this front in terms of case studies – and what not to?
There are several historical figures whose presence looms in near-titanic proportion to the naturalist aesthetic, especially as evident in film narratives. Beyond Realism proposes a classificatory status upon Zola as a transdiscursive author of modern critical theory. Zola’s The Experimental Novel and series of Rougon-Macquart novels process Realism’s commitment to ideologically informative verisimilitude into Naturalism’s experimental field of analytical and theoretical narrative possibilities, incorporating socio-biological representative tropes. Zola’s human beast, a complex, troubled male/female, lives in a predatory, impersonal social milieu, to be observed like a specimen. Zola’s “signature” has a peremptory palimpsestic, foundational position in Naturalism.
Marx and Darwin also configure into the naturalist narrative as conceptual ideas of environment and heredity to establish an imminent presence and tradition. Consider Marx’s humanist writing about the alienated worker, dehumanization, and class stratification and Darwin’s writing on evolution, mutation, emotion in animals, and (especially) the “struggle to survive.”
And then there is Courbet. In naturalist studies, and particularly naturalist cinema, nineteenth-century French realist-naturalist artist Courbet establishes a prominence rivaled only by Zola. When viewed retrospectively as a progenitor of the naturalist aesthetic, Courbet is the artist of the landscape, both environmental and human; his is an indicative canvas. Naturalist art, especially Courbet’s signifying canvas, literally or figuratively extends the realist frame of reference into the urban or rural working class as it depicts the life and experiences of the modern male and female worker, often in exhausted crisis, as well as the uninviting, unattractive socially problematic image of the environment. Rotting fruit and worn-out people have a place on the canvas.
Beyond Realism could not exist without these informing historical figures; they are the DNA of the naturalist aesthetic. And as life in the modern world is conceived as an ideologically imbued narrative, these figures consistently inform the image-driven medium of cinema.
I believe the discovery story never really ends and consider naturalist cinema an ongoing research concern since there are so many films, technological advances, and directors to encounter.”
On this front, I would also love to ask you specifically about the choice to feature Joaquin Phoenix from Todd Phillips’s Joker (2019) on the cover; obviously tied very much to your final chapter, it also in a way feels like a bit of a provocation, and a demand that we expand our way of thinking about Naturalism in film very much “beyond realism”. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this more specifically!
Todd Phillips Joker (2019) is a masterful naturalist film narrative. Joker is a film about profound male disillusionment, alienated, precariat labor, and urban survival in a predatory landscape and era, a film about the presence and release of a raging, masked human beast, a victim of unknown genetics and serial abuse. Arthur Fleck/Joker is one of us – almost. He is the person you uncomfortably sit next to on a bus, the person who awkwardly leaves the room, the invisible, lonely man on dusky streets; I think of Ashcan artist Edward Hopper’s Night Shadows etching of an ambulatory, nocturnal creature, alone on a street.
Joker is not an escapist film about super heroes or villains; Phillip’s film is a case study in human neglect. To paraphrase Joseph Conrad, “All urban culture contributed to the making of Fleck.” We all have known Flecks. He is representative of the troubled real world, a strange, recognizable, pathetic creature, surrounded by mob violence. If Beyond Realism achieves one of its goals, the viewer will see Fleck’s flawed humanity not just as an entertainment spectacle but also as a clinical document.
I was really struck by an incredible quote from Clifford Geertz that you cite in the Introduction to your book; “culture is not cults and customs, but the structures of meaning through which men give shape to their experience”. This very much frames both your own very explicit exploration of how Naturalist film aesthetics are tethered to things like race, gender, and class, but also feels in a sense a demand that we more generally lift our game when it comes to thinking about the importance of studying form and style more aggressively through the lens of ideology. Can you talk me through your thoughts regarding this a little?
We are ideological as well as biological creatures. I believe that film studies must traverse the comforting immediacy of genre, movements, auteurship, and other traditional classificatory parameters to thoughtfully examine, like an informed clinician, the X-ray along with the epidermis. So much belief is predicated on a socialized need for coherence, a tribalized acceptance of the “yes” or “no” of meaning, but this is rarely sufficient. It is my contention that naturalist film studies enables the viewer to see beyond the immediate, requisite information load of statistical details afforded by genre and other staples of representation into speculative reasoning – a look “inside” – that involves the “how” of things, events, people.
For example, William Lustig’s Maniac (1981) is not only a horror, slasher narrative; Maniac is also a film about a sick male predator in the urban jungle who, while surviving and making a salary, kills like a savage troglodytic ancestor sacrificing to some strange god. He is a wounded specimen to be observed like a virus on a petri dish causing irreparable damage. For me, Maniac is a clinical study and has the quality of an Edgar Allan Poe confessional, invoking the more radical range of La Bête humaine as divisively controversial spectacle.
One of the things I really love about your work is just how beautifully you unite more theoretical discussion with really strong, focused textual analysis. I confess I have sometimes found myself reading academic film studies and feeling that the writer is just tacking on a specific filmic example almost as an afterthought, merely there to ‘prove’ a point they had already decided on. This is never the case in your work, and there is clearly a deep love of film at play that really feels like the life blood of your broader arguments. So as a film scholar, I am really interested to find out from you how you actually go about watching films; do you source things that you think might be relevant, or do they come to you more organically? And how do you actually watch films; are you a notetaker?
This is a fun question. Whether the film is suggested by any critical source or I come across an intriguing title or director in my own research, for example, Lav Diaz’s Ang babaeng humayo/The Woman Who Left (2016) or Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1971), I will watch a film by a director of interest for its immediate reception-experience. This initiates the process. As a matter of research, I always watch the same film multiple times; for example, I have seen Joker in its entirety 7 or 8 times. Then, once I isolate critical shot sequences and the “naturalist moment,” when form and content seemingly merge, I sharpen my focus on that space and time. The real thought process then begins, in which I engage associative images (paintings, other films) and related intermedial sources (literature and history) which are mostly organic impressions but frequently the fruit of intense research.
I do seemingly live in archives and libraries – online or in person – because everything is potentially, notably interesting and there to be discovered. The intense note-taking begins around this time. To be completely frank, I am uncertain if I have ever experienced the totality of a film, which means there is always one more insight to qualify my perspective. This was the case with Loden’s naturalist masterpiece Wanda; the film always seems fresh and “better”; the more desperate Wanda’s life, the more human it seems.
What is the one thing you would like your reader to ideally take away from Beyond Realism?
Film is an expansive, writerly narrative, full of complex reworkings of historical, scientific, and cultural data. I hope that film narrative, whether avant-garde or commercially produced spectacle, projected in a theater, television, or on an internet platform, would reveal its informing structural percepts to the viewer like an X-ray reveals inner, problematic workings.
It is my wish that Beyond Realism would inspire active dialogue and research with other disciplinary practices, academics, and film lovers. I would enjoy hearing a geneticist discuss the child serial killer in pigtails and speculative heredity in Mervyn Le Roy’s The Bad Seed (1956) or a sociologist discuss girlhood, ritualistic cruelty and obesity in Carlota Pereda’s Piggy/Cerdita (2022; see top image). I would welcome more critical, expansive intermedial scholarship into naturalist film studies.
For example, in 2005, I attended the opera at the Metropolitan Opera House by Tobias Picker, An American Tragedy, based on Theodore Dreiser’s naturalist novel, An American Tragedy (1925) about social climbing and murder, and in 2016, I attended Duncan Sheik’s musical adaptation on Broadway of Bret Easton Ellis’ naturalist, scandalous novel, American Psycho (1991). At one unexpected moment, a wave of blood rushes to and nearly covers a screen facing (protecting) the audience: the naturalist moment.
I would encourage more research into musicals, operas and other creative venues, whether video games, operas, or any media platform.
The nature of academic publishing means that it does take a little more time between the submission of a manuscript and the final publication. So the big question is, have you seen anything since your manuscript was submitted that you would – if you were writing it now – include?
Given the opportunity, I would have included more historical and contemporary Japanese, Arabic, and African cinema. However, for a recent publication, I located two fascinating, forgotten films: Danish director Bodil Ipsen’s Derailed/Afsporet (1942), the story of a woman’s departure from her bourgeois family and subsequent decline as a violated amnesiac, and French director Georges Pallu’s O Primo Basílio (1923), the silent film adaptation of Eça de Queirós’ realist novel of 1878. I also look forward to the release of Todd Phillips’ Joker: Folie à deux (2024), to see how he reconfigures the clinical, perverse insights he brought into the character’s development….perhaps a second edition?
One last question: what is your advice to any emerging film writer, be they working within academia or in the trenches of mainstream film crit?
My advice is quite simple: since film is an ever-expansive, international art form, one’s work never really ends, so keep watching all cinema. Regardless of a film’s language, nationality or generic format, expose yourself to all types of cinema; see these films repeatedly – consume them – and discover/rediscover how cinema “means.” Consider the film’s informing, artistic – intellectual foundation, its presence, its “DNA,” linking the respective selection beyond its immediate meaning. Although one may sit in the dark when watching a film, one should not remain in the dark when experiencing the film. One last thing – if possible, try to read history, science, literature as much as you read computer screens.
I wish all great success.
Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, a contributing editor to Film International, is a film critic from Melbourne, Australia, who frequently contributes to Fangoria and has published widely on cult, horror and exploitation film including The Giallo Canvas: Art, Excess and Horror Cinema (McFarland, 2021), Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study (McFarland, 2011) and the 2021 updated second edition of the same name, Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality (McFarland, 2015), the single-film focused monographs Suspiria (Auteur, 2016), Ms. 45 (Columbia University Press, 2017) and The Hitcher (Arrow Books, 2018), and two Bram Stoker Award nominated books, Masks in Horror Cinema: Eyes Without Faces (University of Wales Press, 2019) and 1000 Women in Horror (BearManor Media, 2020). She is also the co-editor, with Dean Brandum, of ReFocus: The Films of Elaine May (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), Wonderland (Thames & Hudson, 2018) on Alice in Wonderland in film, co-edited with Emma McRae, and Strickland: The Analogues of Peter Strickland (2020) and Cattet & Forzani: The Strange Films of Cattet & Forzani (2018), both co-edited with John Edmond and published by the Queensland Film Festival. Alexandra is on the advisory board of the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies, and a member of the Alliance of Women Film Journalists.