The critique of realism as it was practiced by film critics and scholars in the late 1960s and 1970s has fallen rather dramatically off the film studies map. There are some reasons for this disappearance. For example, the emphasis on perceptual and cognitive frames of realism explored by cognitive film theorists has greatly refined film studies’ approaches to realism. As well, rather than critiques of realism,
defenses of realism have risen to the fore, especially in terms of a reassessment of Bazin’s theories. Alongside this renewed advocacy of realism, however, for large parts of the film studies community questions of realism seem more irrelevant than ever, especially insofar as special effects and CGI animation have tended to take centre stage in Hollywood blockbusters over the last fifteen to twenty years. For those who have celebrated the triumph of digital special effects over analogue indexicality, realism has well and truly been put to rest. The celebration of the digital has thus been one way of doing away with the critique of realism, for if there is no longer any realism, there is no need to critique it.
With these positions in mind, I want to revisit the critique of realism here with a few particular points in view. First, I want to claim that many contemporary special effects films and CGI animated features can be called realist in ways that are related, albeit in modified ways, to the realism associated with classical Hollywood. My intention in doing so is to claim that these films cannot be dismissed as either fantasies or escapes—a typical advocate of realism, for example, might dismiss special effects films as irrelevant departures from reality. In other words, a major reason for revisiting the critique of realism is because contemporary Hollywood films cannot be easily celebrated for their antirealism or their digital surpassing of analogue realism. My aim instead is to argue that these films can give valuable insights into the kinds of realities we currently inhabit. And while it is true that I am going to be somewhat negative about, and critical of, that reality—I am revisiting the critique of realism, after all—I do not wish to be critical of the films themselves. Rather, the films I discuss here—and I rely on some approaches made by other scholars—shed valuable light on the kinds of realities we have begun to take for granted.