[Shaos]

Well, foreign movies and literature are not my hobby horse. So I want to write here about some Russian cultural event. Maybe you have some other examples – in the English-language culture I mean.

There is a trendy tendency – hyperrealism in movies and theatre. Gory histories, blood, dramas and the terrible scenes from everyday life are rated highly in different festivals. Everybody talks gushingly about movies like the “Small Wolf” (http://www.film.ru/a...sp?code=VOLCHOK, sorry for my direct and incorrect translation)or performances like the “Pillow Man”. It is so trendy, moreover – it is a criterion of your good taste. In my opinion all these talks are so ridiculous and empty! Of course, I'm not speaking about parody cynical Tarantino movies, they are sharp and comically bizarre. On the other hand, there are lots of really powerful and amazing performances. Despair and hopelessness is a very urgent and timely subject now. But there is no hope in these stories. You are totally depressed after these performances and you hate the world around you.
It would seem that both modern technologies and this dramatic hyperrealism hide the senselessness of some cultural events calling “modern art” by their creators. I think that art as a part of culture must be humanistic. The major purpose of art is the making life better. Art must give us the moral experience and the hope. The real art does give us the sense. Speaking of the sense, a really sad and dramatic story in its art realization must be full of something good, light. The sadness must be uplifting and inspiring, I believe!
I can find some examples. The first one is “Forrest Gump”. It is a really great movie where a history of a difficult life shows us that everybody is different, but you can save a lot of good in your heart and make somebody's life better.
Now, about Russian movies. I've watched the “One War” (may be the “Common War” is more correct) by Vera Glagoleva. I can't describe the beauty of this movie where each shot shouts about the conflict of beautiful nature and people`s grief. I think it`s one of the most stirring of recent movies. Then, another movie is the “Priest” with S. Makovetsky in the principal role. It is a terrible and very hard story but having watched it you smile and you believe that good conquers evil.
But the most amazing and staggering was a new performance in the Moscow Arts Theatre “The Damned and Murdered” based on Victor Astafiyev novel. I wondered how this scary, sharp, killing with its horror truth novel could be staged in the theatre. I thought, it would be something boring or gory. But I was smiling whole two hours! Of course it was not funny, absolutely! It`s a very hard play, but after the play I feel something that seemed relief.

Do you need this inspiring sadness in your life?

[Old Toby]

You raise several interesting points in your post. The first is the obvious misuse of the word "realism". It has been noted many times that from the late nineteenth century onward the word "realism" was virtually hijacked by those who wanted to write (or, more recently, make movies) about nasty things. I don't think we should let them have it all their own way. Of course, anything is realistic as long as it faithfully portrays any part of reality, no matter how small or how bizarre. In this sense, Cinderella's story is just as realistic as the latest art house movie about suicidal neurotics. The story of Cinderella does make a few assumptions which make everything else possible (such as the fairy godmother and her magic), but so, of course, does the art house movie (in which morbidity and hopelessness are usually taken for granted and pave the way for all that follows). But modern proponents of "realism" are seldom satisfied with this definition of realism - which is, indeed, too broad to be useful to anybody. They claim to faithfully represent not merely a particular sliver of reality, but reality as a whole. They do not describe their latest chef d'oeuvre as providing a "down-to-earth, realistic view of some rare cases of manic-depressive disorder among homosexuals." They describe it as providing a "down-to-earth, realistic view of life." And this is precisely where we must beg to differ. There is nothing that makes stories about dysfunctional people doing nasty things intrinsically more realistic than stories about sane people trying to do the right things. One cannot claim to describe "life" when one is, in fact, taking a very limited view of it.

I'm not sure that anyone can claim to have described life as a whole - the order is obviously too big. But if anyone can be said to have come close to doing so, it is the great novelists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as Fielding and Dickens, and certainly not present-day "realists" with their small stock-in-trade of obsessions and morbidities. They are beaten even on their own ground - no one who has seen human evil and perversion described by a real realist like Dickens can take modern "realism" seriously.

So, to come to your second point about sadness, I think we must begin by refusing to be persuaded that sad stories are "more realistic" merely by virtue of being sad. Sadness is certainly a real emotion, but so is joy, or love, or pride, or envy. Why single out just one of the many things that constitute life as somehow "more real" than others? It's like saying that events which happen on Wednesdays are more real than those which happen on Thursdays.

As to the element of sadness in stories exercising an uplifting influence on the audience, I'm not sure that sadness alone can do it, or has ever done it. Sadness is a negative feeling, it is caused by the realization of a loss. Negation by itself is hardly inspiring. I think that whenever we feel a sad story to have an overall uplifting effect, this effect is produced not by the element of sadness but in spite of it, by other elements in the story trying to overpower the sadness. For example, the very strong life-affirming quality of Forrest Gump does not stem from the undoubtedly sad fact that Forrest is retarded. If it did, a documentary about retarded people would have an immeasurably greater effect. The truth is, there is nothing uplifting or life-affirming about a retarded person. It is merely sad, and nothing else. What is uplifting is the kindness, the courage, the faithfulness, the selfless simplicity of Forrest, which make the solemn comedy of his life so full of human interest. It is these things that provide the inspiration against the background of sadness.

But let us stay away from works which are all about sadness and nothing else. They are usually created either by madmen or by people whose moral spine is broken, and are completely powerless to move our hearts or minds in any worthwhile direction.

[Autevielle]

To put it quite simply, a sad story (or a tragic one) makes sense only if it's clear that it's these characters who failed to obtain resolution or salvation (or redemption), but that those things are obtainable. A story that makes it clear that life is a soulless hopeless wormhole is a far worse lie than any Disney cartoon.

[Maladict]

Shaos, on 03 October 2010 - 08:23 PM, said:

It`s a very hard play, but after the play I feel something that seemed like relief.

Of course you did, Shaos. Here's why:

“Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action of high importance, complete and of some amplitude; in language enhanced by distinct and varying beauties; acted not narrated; by means of pity and fear effectuating its purgation of these emotions.” (Aristotle, the L. J. Potts translation, 24).

[Shaos]

Actually, I did not wish to remove sadness from the entire emotional pallete (sorry for my confusing reasoning). I just wanted to mark the dialectics of each human emotion and to share my recent impressions about the way how to offer an uplifting feeling in a very sad and hard story.
As you pointed out, any correlation between “realism” and some emotions are groundless. And the uplifting effects might be presented not just because of sadness but in spite of it.