The Ethics of Realism may be too tame a title for the rambunctious scholarship this book contains. 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. 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 The 400 Blows. Ultimately tying these to historical struggles of filmmakers and the societies they worked within, she does in fact make good on her title. This is a truly high-minded argument for cinema as the conscience of the past century. The films Nagib illuminates made and kept promises to the world they came from. This book honors the importance, not just the beauty of cinematic art. --Dudley Andrew, R. Selden Rose Professor of Film and Comparative Literature, Yale University

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. In the first instance, her surprising selection of films challenges existing concepts of world cinema. More radically, however, these films have a unifying aesthetic out of which Nagib's own approach to realism comes into focus. 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. 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. 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, Department of History of Art and Screen Media, Birkbeck, University of London