A Lecture on Realism RW

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A Lecture on Realism*Raymond Williams

The Big Flame is a play written by Jim Allen, produced by TonyGarnett and directed by Ken Loach for BBC television. I want todiscuss it in relation to our understanding of realism. It should beclear at the outset that except in the local vocabulary of par-ticular schools, realism is a highly variable and inherently con>plex term. In fact, as a term, it only exists in critical vocabularyfrom the mid-nineteenth century, yet it is clear that methods towhich the term refers are very much older. Let me make just oneobvious general distinction between conceiving realism in termsof a particular artistic method and conceiving realism in terms ofa particular attitu de towards wh at is called ' re al ity' . Now if,taking the first definition, we concentrate on method, we putourselves at once in a position in which the method can be seenas timeless: in which it is, so to say, a permanent possibility ofchoice for any particular artist. Certain things can be learnedfrom this kind of emphasis, but once we become aware of thehistorical variations within this method, we find ourselves evidentlydissatisfied with the abstraction of a method which overrides itsrelations with other methods within a work or with other aimsand intentions.

Let me give one or two examples of this. Realism would be anobvious term for that well-known episode within the medievalplay known as the Play of the Townley Shepherds, which is basic-ally a play of the nativity and the annunciation of the birth of

* The text which follows is transcribed from a version of a lecturefirst given by Raymond Williams at the SEFT/Screen weekendschool on Realism held at the London International Film Schoolon October 8-10, 1976. We are grateful to the speaker for makingavailable the tape from which the text is transcribed. Transcriptionby Annette Kuhn.

atCentralInstituteofEnglish&ForeignLanguagesonFebruary1,2012

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62 Christ to the shepherds, and in that sense a characteristic religiousform of medieval drama indeed largely written in that way. Theinserted episode to which I am referring is that in which, beforethe annunciation, the shepherds, recognisably shepherds of thedistrict in which the play was written and played - that is to say,offering themselves for recognition in these terms discuss theproblems of their own life as shepherds and represent themselvesin that very specific situation. Then comes the annunciation. Now,you can look at this either way: you can say that the scene isinserted because it is of interest to the people who know of thatlife or are sharing that life and who recognise this as the life ofshepherds in their own district, in which case this definition canbe assimilated to a common later definition of realism; or youcan look at it in quite another way and say that the establishmentof the locality, the local realism, of these Yorkshire shepherds isa condition of that work as a whole, in that the annunciation, pre-sumed to have happened to shepherds in Palestine, is a universalannunciation, and the condition of the local realism is a conditionfor the universality of the religious event. In other words, youcan only finally determine the function of that realism, and thencethe critical^ significance of a descrip tion of it as th at , when youhave analysed not only the local method but the relation of thatmethod to other methods and other intentions within the work.Or, again, consider those scenes which are often inserted inEnglish renaissance tragedies, usually with a conscious socialmovement from the major personages of the drama, personages ofrank, to persons of a different social order who speak in differentways, and who again, interestingly, are often recognisably con-temporary English characters, even within an action which can bethat of an Italian court, or a Roman forum, or of some much earlierperiod. The intention at these points is not the same as thatwithin the Townley shepherds play, where the locality-with-universality is a very specific convention. On the other hand, interms of method, we have to describe certain scenes as realistic:the written speech moves much closer towards the imitation ofeveryday ordinary life: all these are later seen as conditions ofrealism. Yet the scene inserted within this very different kind ofplay can be described as realism with any accuracy only if therelation to the intentions of the larger work is made. Here wehave not the local/universal specificity of the religious drama, buta problem of interrelation and extending action in which the con-trast between the modes of action and the modes of speech ofthe principal characters and these subsidiary characters is itself afunction of the definition of the dramatic action as a whole. Thecontrast between this version of realism as method and the alter-native version of realism as fundamental attitude can, I think,only be appreciated historically when, looking through the develop-ment of dramatic forms, we come to the unmistakable qualitative



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difference which occurs when the realistic method, often very 63similar to that used in these earlier particular scenes, is extendedto the construction of a whole form, and when the play as awhole is conceived as not only using these methods but as embody-ing entirely different intentions. If we are to discuss those laterintentions, there is a certain obvious loss if we set intention asideand discuss only method, or think that we can reduce the questionof intention to the question of method.The crucial development of realism as a whole form occurs inthe drama in the eighteenth century, although there are precedents.There is a very interesting case, for example, in restoration prosecomedy, which happened to have an unusually integrated relation-ship between plays, actors and audience within the quite extraor-dinarily class-limited nature of the restoration patent theatres. Thelife of a small class around the court is written about by drama-tists who belong to that life, and plays for audiences almostexclusively of that life, and as a whole form, these are perhaps thefirst realist plays according to one definition in English. Thereis a concentration on contemporary everyday reality within theterms of that class. The modes of speech have moved towardsthe imitation of conversation with a much greater consistencythan in any earlier drama. Moreover, this is accompanied by certainchanges, themselves not wholly determined by artistic intention:substitution of actresses for boy actors in the playing of femaleparts is only one obvious example. And yet it is significant howoften the title of realism is refused to that kind of comedy ofmanners, as it is now usually classified, because, although themethod and the intention is in these broad terms realist, thelater definition of realism as a whole form was concerned withdifferent, and indeed consciously opposed, attitudes towards reality it being assumed that the limited interests and the limited habitsof this class, which found its embodiment in that particulardramatic form, are not in the full sense an engagement with con-temporary reality.It is indeed when we come on to this later drama, specificallythe bourgeois drama of the eighteenth century, that we come torealism as a whole form, and that we need to identify certaindefining characteristics. First there is a conscious movementtowards social extension. There is a crucial argument in the earlyperiod of bourgeois tragedy about the need to extend the actionsof tragedy from persons of rank, to whom by convention and pre-cept tragedy had hitherto largely been confined, to - as it wasput ' your equals, our equals '. This movement of social extension- ' let not your equals move your pity less * - is a key factor inwhat we can now identify as a realist intention. Then, second,there is a movement towards the siting of actions in the present,to making action contemporary. It is remarkable that in mostpreceding drama it seemed almost a constituent of dramatic form



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64 that it was set either in the historical or in a legendary past, andthe emphasis on the actions of the contemporary world is thesecond defining feature of this new bourgeois lealism. And thethird, which is perhaps in the end the most important, is that thereis an emphasis on secular action, in the quite precise sense thatelements of a metaphysical or a religious order directly or in-directly frame, or in the stronger cases determine, the humanactions within the earlier plays. This dimension is dropped, and inits place a human action is played through in specifically humanterm s - exclusively hum an te rm s. This was seen as a loss of signi-ficance, as a narrowing of drama. It is often condemned as asentimentalisation of the tragic action, and indeed in local termsthis was often true. But it is impossible to overlook the con-nection between this conscious secularisation and the developmentof attitudes which we must associate with realism in a much widersense than that of dramatic method, that is to say with thedevelopment of rationalism, of the scientific attitude, of historicalattitudes towards society.At the same time, within a specific situation, these generalrealistic intentions were limited by specific ideological features.Lello's play The London Merchant is an important example of thistype. And yet, it is held within a particular local structure whichhas to do with the ideology of a particu lar class" and no t with thesemore general intentions; or rather these general intentions aremediated through the specific ideology. It is a story of the honest,hardworking, obedient apprentice who is contrasted with theapprentice who is seeking his own fortune and his own pleasurein his own way. This leads him into theft and murder, while thegood apprentice marries his master's daughter and succeeds.The good apprentice and the daughter watch the execution of thebad apprentice and his mistress, and invite the audience con-sciously to mark their fate and learn how to avoid it. It is notsurprising that this play was subsequently subsidised for annualperformance to apprentices by a London guild of merchants, andthat this went on for more than a century. And we can see thatin a sense, just because of the ideological content, the realisticintention is obliquely confirmed. It is assumed that this pictureof what happens is sufficiently clear and convincing in the termsof realism to be available as a lesson, a moral lesson, to peoplefinding themselves in the same situation: they can directly applythe actions of the drama to their own lives.

The development of realism in the drama from these early bour-geois plays towards the important high naturalism of the late nine-teenth century is slow and complex, and yet by the time, forexample, that we come to Ibsen in the late nineteenth century, it



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is clear that what has developed from these three emphases is a 65new major form. The three emphases which are then often con-sciously described as realism are the secular, the contem porary 1and th e socially extended. In a sense, tho se definitions have become so widespread, though never of course exclusive, that theyhave come to include within their overall definitions many localvariations of method.There is a complication here in that in the late nineteenthcentury there was an attempt to distinguish realism from natural-ism, and it is worth considering this distinction for a moment. Infact, naturalism, even more clearly than realism, is not primarilydefined as a dramatic or more general artistic method. Naturalismis originally the conscious opposition to supernaturalism and tometaphysical accounts of human actions, with an attempt todescribe human actions in exclusively human terms with a moreprecise local emphasis. The relation to science, indeed consciouslyto natural history, the method of exhaustive analytic descriptionof contemporary reality, and the terms naturalism and realismwhich have those philosophical connections, are for a time inter-changeable, even complicated by the fact that in a famous defini-tion Strindberg called naturalism the method which sought to gobelow the surface and discover essential movements and conflicts,while realism, he said, was that which reproduced everything,even the speck of dust on the lens of the camera. As I supposewe all now know, the eventual conventional distinction was thesame but with the terms the other way round. Naturalism wasseen as that which merely reproduced the flat external appearanceof reality with a certain static quality, whereas realism - in theMarxist tradition, for example - was that method and that intentionwhich went below this surface to the essential historical move-ments, to the dynamic reality. And within the terms of that dis-tinction it is now a commonplace - it seems to be a picture thatcould be set up in type for every interview with a contemporarydirector or drama tist that naturalism has been abandoned,naturalism in the sense of the reproduction of the appearance ofeveryday reality. It remains remarkable in view of all these declara-tions that the great majority of contemporary drama is of coursethe reproduction of everyday reality in precisely those terms, withreally surprisingly small local variations. And realism, although per-mitted a wider extent because of the reference to dynamic move-ment, has tended to be swept up in this abstract and ultimatelymeaningless rejection - with various complications about psycho-logical realism, neo-realism, and so on.

It is clear even from these few examples that we have to beespecially careful about definitions which we have seen to behistorically variable, and especially about definitions which abstractthe method from an-intention in ways that are finally insupport-able in any substantial analysis. The best example I can give of



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66 this problem of the relation between a technical and a generaldefinition is the case of the room on the stage in nineteenth-century drama. It is undoubtedly a quite specific historical develop-ment: the reproduction of the stage as room, or a room on thestage, which occurs during the nineteenth century in a wide areaof the European theatre. Before that, even where rooms had beenin ques tion, the s tage w as still primarily a playing, space. And ofcourse given the nature of earlier actions, the room - the specific-ally domestic unit - was much less often used than the morepublic places of street, palace, forum, court. Now there is a familiarkind of technologically determinist history which relates thedevelopment of the room on the stage to developments in theatricaltechnology: the introdu ction of gas lighting, the improvem ent ofstage carpentry, and so on. But it is in fact ludicrous to supposethat if people before the nineteenth century had wanted to createrooms on stages in the way that they were created in the latenineteenth-century and twentieth-century theatre they would havebeen technically unable to do so. The truth is that the productionof the room on the stage was a particular reading both of thenatural centre of dramatic action in terms of social extension andthe emphasis on the contemporary; it was also as it happens inits later development a specific naturalist reading in the full senseof the indissoluble relation between character and environment, inwhich the room was a character because it was a specific environ-ment created by and radically affecting, radically displaying, thenature of the characters who lived in it.

The true history is more complex than either a history in termsof increasing technical capacity, or a history in terms of thisscientific version of a relation between character and environment.In fact, if you look at when the first ' box sets' with reproducedrooms were put on the stage in England (the English and Frenchtheatres moving at about the same rate in this respect), you willfind that the rooms are there not to give any impression of recog-nition or demonstration of environment, but simply to display acertain kind of luxury. They are ' so c ie ty ' plays of a consciouslydisplayed kind of a fashionable kind, as we would now say and most of the technology of the box set and the subsequentadaptation of theatres to the fully-framed box set, which was notcomplete until the 1870s, was more conditioned by this ' furnish-ing display' than by either of the other intentions. But there is aradical development, not so much in English drama as in Scan-dinavian, German, Russian, and then extending through Europe, ofthe room as the centre of the reality of human action: the privatedomestic room, which is of course entirely consonant with a par-ticular reading of the place of human action this is the life of thebourgeois family, where the important things occur in that kindof family room. All I mean is that if we are analysing a form ofthat kind it is not enough to note the method and relate it to some



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i abs tract concept Of realism, or to assume that the reproduction 67of a room has some constant implication in overall dramaticintention.This point is also relevant to the subsequent variable uses offilm. It is clear that film could in certain ways more activelydevelop the reproduction of room, of mobility from room to room,of a variety of scenes conceived in those simple term s, -tha t itcould again move out of doors into the street, into the publicplaces which on the whole the theatrical drama had left behind.At the same time, inherent in the fact of the camera was thepossibility of the use of the image for quite different purposes.And since most uses of films were defined in terms of the receiveddramatic tradition, you find the same variation of message andintentions and variable combinations of methods and intentions,and the same variability not to say confusion - of terms. It is inthis sense that one can perhaps best approach the problem ofdefinition of The B ig Flame with a consciousness of inherent varia-tion, and ask certain questions about it.It might be worth asking first: how would the makers of TheBig Flame themselves describe their work? Would they say that itwas showing real life in the Liverpool Docks? They might. But Ithink that that is not all that they would say. One can see certainobvious continuities with the earlier history that I hare described.In one sense, the movement to which this particular work belongscan be sited historically as a further phase of that social extensionwhich defined the first period of bourgeois drama. When the bour-geois traged ians talked of moving ou t to a concern with ' yourequals, their equals', they were moving towards their own class.Still there was very little extension towards a class beyond them.And there is a perfectly accurate way of reading the subsequenthistory of this kind of dramatic form in terms of its further socialextension, one of the three key features of the definition of thebourgeois dramatic form. This is a conscious extension of dramaticmaterial to areas of life which had been evidently excluded evenfrom majority drama. And television was often conceived in thisway as the site for a particular dramatic extension, since it hadalready a fully socially extended audience. It was seen as the propersite, in conscious opposition to the theatre with its persistentminority audience in social terms and its much more limited classaudience, of the alternative which allowed a popular audience andthe extension to themes of a much more fully extended drama,that of the drama of working-class life, bringing the working class Ito the centre of dramatic action.

There are still not enough examples of this to indicate that themovement is complete. In the theatre it is a very late movement:I don't know that it happens before, say, Hau ptmann 's The Weaversin 1892, which is a- classic in the naturalist theatre, and which isaccompanied by certain conscious political intentio ns. It is hardly [



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68 possible to conceive of an extmsion of this kind without a certainconscious political viewpoint in the at first relatively open termsof taking a much wider social life to a much wider audience. Andyet you only have to see The Big Flame once to realise that some-thing more than simple extension is involved. It is not, as in somecases of the extension to working-class life, the realisation ofsomething that is exotic to the audience. There is a sense in whichwhat was earlier called the drama of * low life * is a minor intentionof bourgeois drama itself, where ' to see how the other half lives *,as it was often put, was in itself a particular intention, even aparticular form of entertainment. Indeed, one of the questionswhich has to be asked about The Big Flame is whether it is inter-preting the particular action within the docks to a wider audience,or whether it is interpreting that class to itself. I think there isevidence of both intentions in the work, and to distinguish betweenthem is important in any complete analysis. On balance, I wouldsay that The Big Flame belongs to a kind of realist drama forwhich a fourth term is necessary in addition to the definingcharacteristics of the socially extended, the contemporary and thesecular; and that is the consciously interpretative in relation to a/ particular political viewpoint. It has an interesting cross-relationI with, for example, the drama of Brecht. It is interesting thatBrecht, although in many ways sharing the intentions and thephilosophical positions which had underlain realism, had in muchof his drama - although certainly retaining and increasing thesecular emphasis moved away from the contemporary. It remainsa remarkable fact of his drama that so much of his work is set inthe past, and the everyday is subject to that move. The intentionof interpreting an event, which Brecht made so intrinsic a part ofhis dramatic form, distinguishing it from the form which offeredan event for mere empathy, seems quite clearly evident in The BigFlame, and is probably even consciously derived from somethingof the influence of Brecht.,

The Big Flame sets out to establish the level of existing working-class history and consciousness in a specific workplace. It is look-ing at the Liverpool Docks at the time of the Devlin report onthe docks. It uses features of the developed realist film of thiscontemplative kind that which had been developed in the Sovietcinema, for example, and indeed, in the Soviet theatre in the early1920's: the deliberate use of non-actors, of people ' playing them-selves '. The locations are (or are in part) the locations of thehistorical action, the contemporary action, as well as being thelocations of the dramatised action, and within these locally definingfeatures a recognisable level of consciousness is established inthe conversation of the dockers in the early part of the film. W hat



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then happens is perhaps inconsistent with the narrower definitions 69of realism in that , having taken the action to th at po int in this recognisable place, a certain dramatic, but also political, hypo- \thesis is established. What would happen if we went beyond theterms of this particular struggle against existing conditions andexisting attempts to define or alter them? What would happen ifwe moved towards taking power for ourselves? What would happenin specific terms if we moved beyond the strike to the occupation?Thus if we are establishing the character of realism in The BigFlame, we have to notice the interesting combination, fusionperhaps, and within this fusion a certain fracture, between thefamiliar methods of establishing recognition and the alternativemethod of a hypothesis within that recognition, a hypothesis whichis played out in realistic terms, but within a politically imaginedpossibility. The thing is played through. It is not, incidentally,played through in a Utopian way. What happens in the move tooccupation is of course a good deal of success, a good deal ofexhilaration, the familiar idea of the release of energy whenpeople take control of their own lives. But within it there are allthe time movements towards betrayal, demonstrations of certainkinds of inadequacy of organisation, lack of preparation, theabsence of any real warning against the eventual attack by thearmy; there is the insistence that against the demonstration ofthe workers' own power the forces of the State will act, and willact both by fraud and by violence, and in the end the particularhypothesis is shown as defeated, but defeated in terms of the localaction, and not, while it is retained as a hypothesis, defeated asan idea. There is a very characteristic ending in which, althoughthe particular action has been defeated, the organising committeereplaces itself, and in the final scene boys come out from behindthe men who are assembling to reconstitute the occupation com-mittee: the boys of the next generation who will take over, andthis within a teaching perspective that the working class mustunderstand and learn from its defeats as well as its victories.

It is interesting to look more closely at the specific techniqueswithin this general movement. At first, the techniques are thoseof the realist film in the simplest sense: the camera is a single eye,there is no possibility of an alternative viewpoint, the viewer hasto go along or detach him or herself, he or she has no complexseeing within the action. Indeed, a great deal is taken for grantedin knowledge and recognition of the situation. The Devlin reportis referred to, but whether it is known or not is in a sense takenfor granted. Nothing is done specifically to establish it. What isestablished is a sense of militancy which is yet an incomplete Imilitancy because it can only react negatively. The key transitionfrom this limited militancy to the next phase of the conscioustaking of power is introduced by an alteration of technique. Thestrong man with a clear view of what can next happen is intro-



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70 duced, again w ithout much identification, and interestingly withou tmuch precise specification of political roots or relation to thisaction, but he comes in as the voice of a different consciousness,and there is a movement in that part of the film from the ratherragged discussion which is done within naturalist terms to theconscious voice-over presentation of an alternative point of view.| The mode of the transition is the introduction of a convention; which allows complex-seeing, variable viewpoints when the hypo-i thesis is dramatised in term s of a recognisable action, again largelywithin naturalist terms. This convention is on the whole not usedagain, and at the end particularly this absence is significant becauseI the learning from defeat is done by th a t final scene, insofar as itis done at all, by offering the implication that the class will renewitself in subsequent generations and in self-replacement, ratherthan by the use of conventions which would show the actual learn-ing of lessons, the attainment of a new consciousness by analysis| of what has happened the convention which Brecht, unevenlybut persistently, tried to establish in his kind of drama.There is one local point here which is rather interesting toanalyse. There is a quite effective short scene of a television inter-viewer who has come to discover what the occupation is about,but to discover this within the terms of his function as a reporterfor a particular kind of television service. In fact, we are shownhim falsifying in his summing-up what has been said to him, andf this is an effective satiric presentation of what many working-classpeople feel about the function of television interviewers when theycome to report events of this kind. As an isolated scene it iseffective. Yet it is interesting also because of the general naturalistpresentation. If we remember what we have heard outside thatscene, we have in fact heard, though at a much more dispersedlevel than would give any warrant to the interviewer's summary,th at kind of feeling: that the thing is too much effort, that peoplewould like to get back to work. It is as if that scene was con-ceived as a satiric presentation in its own right. This use of yetanother convention dependent on our awareness of the modes oftelevision interviewing and its insertion into the dominant con-

1 vention of the rest of the film creates a certain unresolved tension,even a contradiction.Or take another problem of point of view, one which requiresa more positive emphasis: one of the unnoticed elements of theproduction of meaning within what is apparently the reproduction of what is happening, the familiar media claim to be showingthings as they occur. Here it is a question of the position of thecamera when there is fighting between the police and others whoare presented as engaged in some kind of social disturbance. Itis quite remarkable, and of course the reasons are obvious, howregular and how naturalised the position of the camera behind thepolice is in either newsreel or in fictionalised reports of that kind



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of disturbance. The police are seen with the camera. The crowd, 71the disturbance, is object. It is significant that in The Big Flame,in contrast with the normality of this convention, the viewpoint iswith the people being attacked. This is a useful reminder, bothfor an analysis of this film and for analysis of the many hundredsof examples which must be seen as working the other way round,of the way in which the convention of showing things as theyactually happen is inherently determined by viewpoint in theprecise technical sense of the position of the camera.Another local point worth analysis is the scene in the courttowards the end of the work, where there is a problem of undefinedpolitical viewpoint. I have already said that the work is a com-bination of the techniques of classical realism in its extendedsense of realism plus hypothesis - and of political intention inthe broad sense, to understand the nature of the movement fromone kind of militancy to another, the development of consciousness,which at this level is still, although a specific left viewpoint, theviewpoint of a rather broad left. What happens in the court sceneis the development of something else which I think in fact is theresult of a more specific, indeed sectarian, viewpoint within thefilm. The judge in his speech moves well beyond th e conventionsof the naturalist method which has sustained the rest of the work.He makes an extraordinary assertion about the relation betweendockers and students: that it's all right for students to have ideasof this sort, but if working men get them it's very dangerous. Theidea that it's all right for students is, I think, the product of aparticular sectarian position which develops into an implicationabout intellectuals generally; and the judge is in effect made astraight man for this sort of sectarian point. It would not be sonoticeable were it not inserted within a work which on the wholedevelops along more consistent conventions in which what is saidis conceived as what is typical. The judge speaks more like acharacter in a Brecht presentation, and this inconsistency issignificant not just as a problem about method and technique, butas an illustration of the way in which, as I think, inevitably,specific uses of method and. technique are in the end inseparablefrom fundamental conscious or unconscious positions, viewpointsand intentions.

Towards the end of the film, there is the singing of the ' Balladof Joe Hill', and this is worth a brief consideration. Obviously inone sense this is the classic ballad for the expression of a defeatfrom which new energy, new consciousness, can be derived: tha tJoe Hill was killed but never died, and the mood of the balladmoves straight into the mood of the final scene, in which out ofdefeat comes the slow new organisation, new consciousness, thepossibility of the future. It is interesting because at one level theballad and the mood are consonant, but it raises a very specificproblem about the naturalist convention, because it is of course



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72 the introduction of a much wider history, a much wider conscious-.ness of the working-class movement as a whole, a use of a songof another place, another time; and again it is a problem, asthroughout in the film, of the matching (often the failure to match)of the most immediate kinds of naturalist reproduction and theattempted (and often successfully attempted) introduction of theconsciousness, classically defined as realism in contrast withnaturalism, of the movements of history which underlie theapparent reality that is occurring. This is so deep and permanenta problem of the methods of naturalism and realism that this localexample has a very obvious general bearing.Then, finally, the question of the use of the ' real pe op le ', thenon-actors, indeed the dockers, among actors in this play aboutdock life and dock struggle. The use of non-actors was extensivein early Soviet film and theatre: indeed, the problem of crowdscould perhaps.within that kind of production only be handled inthat way, not necessarily for more than logistical reasons. Butagain it raises a question about the method. It is interesting forexample that in Hauptmann's The Weavers what emerges, which ismost uncharacteristic of plays about the working class, is the shapeof the class as a whole rather than the more familiar figures of therepresentative or, even more commonly, the leader. As this comesinto the question of dramatic method, there are some very interest-ing differences to note. In the film, undoubtedly the overall inten-| tion is the presentation of the general life, and when the dockersspeak as themselves it is possible for the trained ear to recognisethat speech which is at once authentic and rehearsed. That is tosay, it is authentic in that it is the accent and the mode of speechof men reproducing their real-life situations. It is also rehearsedin that it is predetermined what they will say at that point andin what relation to each other. This is of great interest, and Loachand Garnett have given us more valuable material for thinkingabout this than any others in their generation.

It is interesting to look into the detail of this at the point ofproduction, because the relation between the producers and thepeople whom they are at once serving and reproducing and, itshould not be forgotten, directing, is something we should exploreand know more about, because there is a sense in which one cansee the production of this kind of work developing into the gain-ing of consciousness by the producer rather than only, what themethod implies, the reproduction of the development of conscious-ness according to an already finished script, which seems to bethe dominant.method. Indeed, we do need to explore, in detail andwith many examples, the process of production on this precisepoint of the relation between the prepared script and the use of



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people who are, in the significant phrase, ' playing themselves * - 73bu t ' playing themselves ' a s roles within a scrip t. There is alsothe problem in this reproduction of people in their own situationstrying to understand their own conditions, developing their con-sciousness within the very act of production of the film, a problemof the relation between this and what is also evidently a kind of' speaking to * bo th the real people finding themselves in" theirsituation - presenting an argument to them about what they needto do next (because that, remember, is the hypothesis of The BigFlame; it is not what they have done but what they could do next),and the mode of speaking beyond them, to an audience, of whatthey could do next. There is a clear implication at the end of thefilm that the report of the occupation, although it is shown asdefeated, is getting out to other people, and is shown as providinga model on which they could act. If we remember the period ofthe late 1960s in which the film was made - and ind ee d.t ha tperiod continuous to the present - then the movement towardsoccupation, the movement towards this new phase of working-classconsciousness and action has been significant in British politics;it is perhaps the most significant contemporary action within it,and undoubtedly, I think, Garnett - who has spoken about this -would see the film as a whole (leave aside the dramatic hypothesiswithin the naturalist fiim) as a hypothesis within this larger rela-tion of the work and the television audience. It is in that sense,feeling very much on the side of the makers of this film - th atis to say sharing with them evident general political values, generaldramatic intentions that the problems, both the technical prob-lems within the realist and naturalist modes and the problems ofconsistency within them, seem to me to deserve this kind ofanalysis.

What I have done is fairly preliminary, raising questions ratherthan answering them. But I wanted first to take the discussionof realism beyond what I think it has been in some danger ofbecoming - a description in terms of a negation of realism assingle method, of realism as an evasion of the nature of drama,and the tendency towards a purely formalist analysis to showhow the methods and intentions are highly variable and havealways to be taken to specific historical and social analyses, andthen with that point established, to begin to approach this verydifficult task of analysing what are at once the significant realistworks and the quite unresolved problems of this kind of work.In our own immediate situation, if I have one final emphasis tomake, it is that we live in a society which is in a sense rottenwith criticism, in which the very frustrations of cultural productionturn people from production to criticism, to the analysis of thework of others. It is precisely because these makers are con-temporaries engaged in active production, that what we need isnot criticism but analysis, and analysis which has to be more than



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74 analysis of w hat they have done: analysis of a historical method,analysis of a developing dramatic form and its variations, but thenI hope in a spirit of learning, by the complex seeing of analysisrather than by the abstractions of critical classification, ways inwhich we can ourselves alter consciousness, including our ownconsciousness, ways in which we can ourselves pro.duce, ways inwhich indeed if we share the general values which realism hasintended and represented, we can ourselves clarify and develop it.

31st Edinburgh International Film FestivalSpecial event, August 22-28, 1977:

Historical Materialism and the CinemaA Series of Seminars and Group Discussions. Topics toinclude: Popular Memory/Eal ing Studios/Vertov/Bri t ishPolitical Cinema in the 1930s/Technology and Ideology.Detailed programme to fol low. General information from:Edinburgh International Film Festival, Film House,3 Randolph C rescent, Edinburgh EH3 7TJ. Te l: 0 3 1 -

2251971.

V V I V Glasgow GroupWEEKEND SCHOOLTelevision and th e ' Real W orld 'The aim of the school wijl be to investigate television'smediat ion of the ' rear"world ' (news, documentary,educational programmes etc), and to come to an under-standing of the forms of that mediation, and of theideological background and consequences. Some time willbe devoted to considerations of approaches to televisionwithin the specific context of education. It is also hopedthat, since this will be the first SEFT weekend school inScotland, there will be discussion of the role which SEFTmight play in Scottish film and television education, bothformal and inform al. The school w ill be held in Glasgow onthe weekend of June 1 1-12,197 7. It w il l not be residentialbut it is hoped that an advisory and/or booking servicecan be provided if necessary.Further information and application forms from:SEFT Glasgow Group, Department of Drama, Universityof Glasgow, 77 Lilybank Gardens, Glasgow G12 8RZ.



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A Lecture on Realism RW