Realist Aesthetics In Man On Wire

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Man on wire is a documentary on how a young man named Philippe Petit refused to accept the limitations and boundaries that the world had created around him. He was a very gifted and talented wire walker, and wanted to do something that was unthinkable at the time. He challenged himself to somehow rig a wire between the twin towers, and then walk across. The film shows the many challenges that Petit faced, and how he overcame them. Realist aesthetics is a slippery concept, but John Grierson helped bring a better understanding to the table. He basically said that realist aesthetics is describing something that is real, in an English sense. He created “the creative treatment of actuality”. There are four main aspects to the “creative treatment” which consist of mise-en-scene and montage, creative use of sound, narrative structure, and re-creating events. Mise-en-scene is essentially what the director shoots, and how he shoots it. There are many different choices that a director must choose from related to lighting, length, framing, and shot composition. Montage is the art of editing, more specifically how to compare an array of shots. Directors are compelled to make decisions related to: type of cuts, relationship between shots length of shot, and rate of…show more content…
Before this time, documentary films were considered to be apart of the silent era. The best way the directors thought to compete with other films was to add soundtracks. Soundtracks consist of four main “sounds” which are: Scripted narrative (which is a Narrative voiceover, that is supposed to compliment the images seen by the audience), music (which is recorded music that is used to compliment the images as well), dialogue (which is intended to contrast the general atmospheric sound, instead of a narrative device), and atmospheric sound (Which is the natural sound of a given

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