Will jpegs matter? Will the mass image make it possible to keep a snapshot of 2019? This too has a precursor in Blade Runner: the recovery of microscopic detail, the ability to catch what was around a corner at some moment in the past.
As Bazin said, realism can be an apotropaic against death, but that - as in RW Paul's 1896 Blackfriars film - will be transformed by those who cannot remember a horse-drawn London. The true miracle is the coincidence of picture and memory - this is what Barthes doesn't want to admit. We recall the dead as much from a handful of pictures as we do from life.
Poignant then, but are pictures worth recall for anyone but those who lived through the actuality? And for those who strive to forget . . .
The proximity of (social) realism and unrelentingness (as Eliza Cubitt reminded me) is witness to what we do not want to recall. Realism as apotropaic involves the opposite: it recalls beauty; but Realism as a school constantly evokes not memory but the future, a political goal based on sharing what has been, till now, hidden: ordinary life, as Watt argued, but also life (and death) as ordinary, and painful.
Faithful verisimilitude, scientific objectivity, social realism, are all at odds with phenomenological-affective sensuality and its inescapable nostalgia.
The question then is how certain techniques - pictorial and sonic realism - catch up all four programs of realism – and probably more.
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