Yet an even shorter time spent in the movie theater provides an experience of novel-like realism because film looks real . This suggests that we may characterize film as realistic spectacle . Film realism domesticates the sacrificial ethos of the SNM, just as the fantasy built on this realism devalues it. But because this death is only an image, we can indulge in fantasies of resuscitation or, alternatively, of the infinite carnage that video games and Schwartzenegger films have made familiar. Understood as realistic spectacle, film need not and, indeed, cannot seek the suspension of time that is the ideal of the novel.
Cinematic time is suspended within time.
Film is a series of representations whose content is nonetheless processed by our senses as lived reality. The very impermanence of its images that defines film s realism is what preserves these images of human time from decay. But after the first flush of novelty, the mere fact of filming is not sufficient to guarantee film s consecration of reality, whence the early demise of the Lumi re 50-second documentary. What a movie shows us cannot be more real than what we see from our window, but unless we have something like Jimmy Stewart s view in Rear Window , we won t continue to watch. No Don't ask If you enjoyed this column, subscribe to the galist and you'll receive updates about our on-line journal Anthropoetics and get Chronicles of Love and Resentment every week by email .