For André Bazin, realism exists in the plural: “There is not one realism,” he writes, “but several…Each period looks
for its own” (“William Wyler” 6). In what follows, I look to a recent example that reflects this ongoing search. Joe Swanberg’s debut feature Kissing on the Mouth (2005), a founding film of the polarizing “mumblecore” movement, proves an illuminating case, for it confronts the “problem” of realism on a number of fronts, among them the technoontological, the inheritance of antecedent realist styles, and the question of taboo and taste as it pertains to that which mainstream realisms so often elide: sex. Moreover, I submit that the film’s most intriguing undertaking lies in its curious interplay between sound and image. Specifically, the sounds, or more aptly, the sound-image relations, found in Kissing on the Mouth deviate considerably from a “realist” soundscape and stage a manifold interrogation of the possibilities of realism in a poststructural, postmodern, postfilmic age.