cop’s smiling response is prolonged in a matching
sustained freeze-frame. As you may have guessed,
The Killeris an odd sort of love story. With that
in mind, we can see that these freeze-frames do
more than manipulate time; they visually unite the
two former foes, thus emphasizing their mutual
admiration.
Realism and Antirealism
All of the unique features of film form described in
the preceding discussion combine to make it possi-
ble for filmmakers to create vivid and believable
worlds on the screen. Although not every film
strives to be “realistic,” nearly all films attempt to
immerse us in a world that is depicted convincingly
on its own terms. Moving-picture technology arose
primarily from attempts to record natural images
through photography, but it also was shaped by
similar attempts in painting and literature. That is,
the realist impulse of the visual arts—recording
the visible facts of people, places, and social life
for a working-class and growing middle-class
audience—helped inspire the first motion pictures.
However, it very soon became clear that movies
could be used to create antirealist as well as realist
worlds.
Between 1895 and 1905, the French filmmakers
Auguste and Louis Lumière and Georges Méliès
established the two basic directions that the cin-
ema would follow: the Lumières’ realism(an inter-
est in or concern for the actual or real, a tendency
to view or represent things as they really are) and
Méliès’s antirealism(an interest in or concern for
the abstract, speculative, or fantastic). Although in
the following years a notion evolved that a movie
was either realistic or fantastic, in fact movies in
general and any movie in particular can be both.
Today, many movies mix the real and the fantastic—
especially those in the science-fiction, action, and
thriller genres.
Realism is a complex concept, in part because it
refers to several significant and related ideas. Most
of us believe that the world really exists, but we
don’t agree about the level on which it exists. Some
people trust in their senses, experiences, thoughts,
56 CHAPTER 2PRINCIPLES OF FILM FORM
123Mixing the real and the fantasticDonnie Darko(2001;
director: Richard Kelly) shifts back and forth between
showing a realistic depiction of the life of Donnie Darko
(Jake Gyllenhaal) and his fantastic take on it. Darko is an
intelligent, sensitive, and schizophrenic teenager who is
seeing a therapist, and his normal suburban family blames
his aberrant behavior on his failure to take his medication.
When he is in control, he seems to be the only student in the
class who understands the reading assignment [1]. When he
is most troubled and loses control, he stares into a mirror,
looking deranged [2], and then listens to the voice of a huge,
demonic, imaginary rabbit [3], who encourages him to
commit crimes. Donnie’s motivating belief is in some kind of
time travel, and just as the story ends, it curves back on itself
to before the time it actually started. The movie asks more
questions than it answers and leaves the viewer with a
provocative vision of how thin the line between the real and
the fantastic can be.