Realism and the Audiovisual Media

This collection examines two recent phenomena: the return of realist tendencies and practices in world cinema and television, and the rehabilitation of realism in film and media theory. The contributors investigate these two phenomena in detail, querying their origins, relations, divergences and intersections from a variety of perspectives.

LÚCIA NAGIB is Professor of Film at the University of Leeds. Her research has focused, among other subjects, on polycentric approaches to world cinema, new waves and new cinemas, cinematic realism and intermediality. Her single-authored books include World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism (Continuum, 2011), Brazil on Screen: Cinema Novo, New Cinema, Utopia (I.B. Tauris, 2007), The Brazilian Film Revival: Interviews with 90 Filmmakers of the 90s (Editora 34, 2002), Born of the Ashes: The Auteur and the Individual in Oshima's Films (Edusp, 1995), Around the Japanese Nouvelle Vague (Editora da Unicamp, 1993) and Werner Herzog: Film as Reality (EstaçãoLiberdade, 1991). She is the editor of Impure Cinema: Intermedial and Intercultural Approaches to Film (with Anne Jerslev, I.B. Tauris), Theorizing World Cinema (with Chris Perriam and Rajinder Dudrah, I.B. Tauris, 2011), The New Brazilian Cinema (I.B. Tauris, 2003), Master Mizoguchi (Navegar, 1990) and Ozu (Marco Zero, 1990).


CECÍLIA MELLO is FAPESP Senior Research Fellow in the Department of History of Art, Federal University of São Paulo, Brazil. Her research focuses on world cinema – with an emphasis on British and Chinese cinemas – and on issues of audiovisual realism, cinema and urban spaces and intermediality. She has published several essays in Brazil and in the UK and co-edited with LÚcia Nagib, Realism and the Audiovisual Media (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Her PhD thesis, 'Everyday Voices: The Demotic Impulse in English Post-war Film and Television' (Birkbeck, 2006), focuses on issues of realism in English film and television. She is currently working on her book, Movement and Urban Spaces in Contemporary World Cinema.