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A Documentary Aesthetic of Helplessness

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The Introspective Realist Crime Film

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Abstract

The chapter analyses a second aesthetic of this crime film trend: a documentary look that mobilizes introspection to voice helplessness or the struggle against injustice and violence. Michael Winterbottom’s A Mighty Heart and Jacques Audiard’s Un prophète illustrate the attempt to work with the codes of realism by evoking past forms or suggesting truthfulness, while constructing an introspective subjectivity. Shorter analyses of such related films as Steven Spielberg’s Munich, Fernando Meirelles’ The Constant Gardener, Pablo Trapero’s Leonera, and Uli Edel’s Der Baader Meinhof Komplex bring to light the prominence of a subjective realism connected with art cinema, the Dogme 95 movement or the cinema of the Dardenne brothers, which adds a transnational dimension to films that function as testimonies of the real.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain

    Luis M. García-Mainar

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  1. Luis M. García-Mainar
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García-Mainar, L.M. (2016). A Documentary Aesthetic of Helplessness. In: The Introspective Realist Crime Film. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49653-9_5

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