Film and Realism

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Just finished Hausu, thought it was pretty good. Made me think about a thing. What do you think should be the relationship between a film and reality?

Hausu is a deeply unrealistic movie, and I'm not talking about how it couldn't take place in reality: it willingly forgoes those mimetic techniques commonly employed in narrative cinema, which are so widespread I almost think it's become almost subconscious. It looks unreal and it feels unreal - but does this detract in any way from its quality of being a good movie?

A map is never *quite* the territory, and even the most perfect image of a thing isn't the thing itself; as much as a movie tries to style himself as a perfect representation of reality, it has a few inherent qualities (montage, fps...) that separate it from that which it's representing - but those same qualities make it a thing unto itself, something with a distinct ontological status than that of reality.

A movie is that which it becomes through the actualization of the possibilities implicit in those qualities - to put it simply, a movie is made up of those things that formally make it a movie, and on those things alone you can judge its "movieness", or beauty, or whatever you want to call it. Realism is an afterthought, or a trait we look for because of the importance of mimesis in western culture. It doesn't add or detract anything.

Dog Star man is a great movie because of its montage, as Mothlight is great because of Brakhage's intervention on every single frame; Benning's movies are incredible because, among other things, they go back to cinema's reason of existance: capturing movement; Clipson's Speaking Corpse is about how to push your medium (which nowadays is both kinoglaz, the camera, and digital post-production) to its limits.

I know I may have put it better, but it's a somewhat improvised reflection. What do you guys think?