Reflection: The Illusion of ‘Reality’ in Movies

Questioning the importance of ‘reality’ in media in terms of whether a movie depicts events in a realistic way to make the viewer feel and think about what happened or rather to simply entertain people, I think, we have to clearly distinct between different kinds of movies. A series like Homeland, for example, which is set in the real world and based on real and traumatic events, most likely uses the realistic depictions of brutal interrogations and murder to make the viewer put himself in the victim’s position rather than seeing it as mere entertainment with nothing more to it.

Since I haven’t seen Homeland yet, I can’t really say much about it, but the example which stuck in my head during the whole session was a scene from the HBO-series Band of Brothers, where a group of American soldiers enters a death camp after just freeing it from the Nazis. The viewer is confronted with a terrifyingly realistic depiction of barely alive and even dead Jews. Having visited two concentration camps, seeing this scene was definitely more than mere ‘entertainment’ to me and I think it is really important that, if such real events are presented in movies, the viewers realize that this is much more than just a realistic presentation of something – that this, in fact, tries to represent reality in a way.