However, physicality, in his case, seems to derive from an irretrievable loss of identity, a rupture between the human element and its environment through which the materiality of the former comes to the fore. Firmly rooted in the New German Cinema and akin to all New Wave movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the oeuvre of Werner Herzog also relies, perhaps more intensely than that of any of his contemporaries, on a physical approach to filmmaking.

It is typical of New Waves and New Cinema movements to resort to physicality as a means to establish a material link between cast/crew, the profilmic event, and the resulting film, so as to generate a sense of belonging and identity. Its groundbreaking scholarship takes film theory in a bold new direction. Drawing upon Badiou and Rancière, World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism revisits and reformulates several fundamental concepts in film studies, such as illusionism, identification, apparatus, alienation effects, presentation and representation. In all cases, making films is making history, entailing change in the real life of casts and crews, and therefore producing, rather than reproducing, reality. Starting from the premise that world cinema’s creative peaks are governed by an ethics of realism, Nagib conducts comparative case studies picked from world new waves, such as the Japanese New Wave, the French nouvelle vague, the Cinema Novo, the New German Cinema, the Russo-Cuban Revolutionary Cinema, the Portuguese self-performing auteur and the Inuit Indigenous Cinema. Traditional views of cinematic realism usually draw on the so-called classical cinema and its allegiance to narrative mimesis, but Nagib challenges this, drawing instead on the filmmaker’s commitment to truth and to the film medium’s material bond with the real. Nagib has successfully turned the theoretical kaleidoscope, reconfiguring the crucial concept of realism, its significance for film theory, into new, exciting, sometimes shocking, patterns of thought and perception.’ Laura Mulvey World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism is a highly original study. Nagib’s grounding for the aesthetic of realism is based on an ethical commitment to the living, temporal, spatial and dramatic exchange between the camera as mechanism and the extreme event it is filming.

These are films that privilege rawness and physicality, that place extreme demands on performers and producers, and inescapably work with the reality of event as well as the recording function of the medium itself. More radically, however, these films have a unifying aesthetic out of which Nagib’s own approach to realism comes into focus. In the first instance, her surprising selection of films challenges existing concepts of world cinema. This book honours the importance, not just the beauty of cinematic art.’ Dudley Andrew ‘Lúcia Nagib’s book World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism injects new vitality and energy into some important but familiar debates in film theory. The films Nagib illuminates made and kept promises to the world they came from. This is a truly high-minded argument for cinema as the conscience of the past century. Ultimately tying these to historical struggles of filmmakers and the societies they worked within, she does in fact make good on her title. You can sense her pleasure at relaying to us the cinematic power she has found in cast-off ‘failures’ like I am Cuba or that she resuscitates in films we thought we knew, such as The400 Blows.

Lúcia Nagib has a sharp eye for what, through her lens, become stupefying motifs and moments within films that she just as sharply cuts out of the vast herd of movies. ‘The Ethics of Realism may be too tame a title for the rambunctious scholarship this book contains.

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