The Oxford Handbook of Global Realisms (In Progress) Katherine Bowers (ed.), Margarita Vaysman (ed.) https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197610640.001.0001 Published: 22 May 2024 Online ISBN: 9780197610671 Print ISBN: 9780197610640 Search in this book CHAPTER https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197610640.013.22 Published: 19 September 2024 Abstract Keywords: cinematic realism, world cinema, ethics, new wave, new cinema, neorealism, Chinese independent cinema Subject: Literary Studies - World, Literature Series: Oxford Handbooks Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism  Lúcia Nagib This chapter argues that an ethical engagement with material reality denes world cinema’s creative peaks. After a survey of the debates surrounding the concepts of “world cinema,” “realism,” and “ethics,” it looks at the cinematic impression of reality that takes place majorly on the representational realm of verisimilitude and narrative suture. In focus are lms from Iran, China and Saudi Arabia, all of which draw on Vittorio De Sica’s foundational masterpiece, Bicycle Thieves (1948). The analysis then denes a physical approach to lmmaking through which presentation of reality takes the upper hand over representation, culminating in some radical examples from China’s independent production, in which the eort toward the decentering of the human being takes the extreme form of self-sacrice. Setting these trends within a context marked by convergent tropes and recurrent motifs, the chapter proposes realism as an ethical commitment to truth, which binds together peoples across the globe. This chapter argues that an ethical engagement with material reality denes world cinema’s most creative peaks. It therefore sits on the intersection of three major scholarly elds—world cinema, realism, and ethics—all of which have been the subject of renewed attention in recent years. A concise review of the debates surrounding these concepts is thus in order, before I delve into the study of the consequences of realism within and beyond the realm of cinematic representation, from the worldwide echoes of Italian neorealism to some life-defying physical experiments in independent Chinese cinema. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/56841/chapter/481621516 by University of Reading user on 27 January 2025