Frank Kogan

Well, "realism" usually means "Matches up with something else in the world that is real." "Hearing a real person in her songs" isn't quite the same concept as "is realistic because that's what people are really like in real life." Not that the two concepts can't coincide, but they're still not the same thing.

In La Chinoise Godard has Léaud claim that Melies was more realistic than Lumiere, that Lumiere was basically copying genre pictures from Impressionist paintings, while Méliès in "Trip To The Moon" and such was depicting what people really cared about. (Um, I haven't seen the movie in over 30 years and I'm having trouble finding the quote online; here's a link to excerpts from a Sarris piece that brings it up; "By contrast, Méliès may have staged the state visit of a Balkan monarch to France with actors and fake sets, but nonetheless he transformed the cinema into a kind of Brechtian newsreel." And here's a bit of the quote I found in another piece, "Well, he made newscasts. Maybe the manner in which he did it made them reconstituted newscasts, but it was really news. And I'll go even further: I'll say that Méliès was Brechtian." But I'm not sure how he claims that "Trip To The Moon" was a Brechtian newscast. Maybe the Léaud character didn't bother to elaborate, and probably the phrase "what people really cared about" is from my mind, not from the script. I'm sure he included "A Trip To The Moon" in his lists of Méliès' realist accomplishments.

Ferguson says of Disney's animated, animal-filled The Band Concert, "The thing in main outline would be very little, if it weren't for the way every incident, every foot of film, is given a solid basis in observation, so that natural action is caught and fixed in a typical gesture, rendered laughable through exaggeration or transference into the unfamiliar; and for the swift way all the incidents pile up on one another. No one ever saw a band so busy, proud, and full of troubles as this, from the virtuoso swapping of hands in the flute duet to the hard-pressed air of the brass section; but the point is, no one ever saw a band that did not have all these things logically in solution, once he looks back on it. As one who has wasted a better part of a lifetime following the bass drum and wondering whether to be a great trombonist, with all that sweep of brass, or famous in the lower registers, to blow thunder into a tuba, I can say that in The Band Concert one of the final comments on the public playing of instruments everywhere has been commented."

But I'd say that Disney is pulling two things off at once; making the comedy work by making it feel real, and making commentary through exaggeration. And I'd say that Ferguson as a critic was real strong on showing how the movies do the former - make something feel real, to the benefit of the yarn, the experience - while not having that much to say about how (or if) movies do the latter; i.e., make a comment on extra-cinematic life.

I'd say that Ashlee and crew created someone real in her songs, and I'd be very surprised if this creation didn't match pretty closely to the Ashlee you get in her day-to-day life, at least the Ashlee as she experience herself internally, getting the motives and the understandings and the feelings you don't necessarily see in the reality show (and so may be truer to Ashlee than the show is); but nonetheless, it this Ashlee on record doesn't have to match up with Ashlee Off Record to feel real. And a character in song is real, even if there is no matchup, in that you do experience and respond to that character. I mean, songs are part of real life, since we really listen to them.

(But then, there are different uses of the word "real"; often it's employed to ask, "What else is going on; what's going on under the surface?")