If the contrast between theatre and films doesn’t lie in the materials represented or depicted in a simple sense, this contrast survives in more generalized forms. According to some influential accounts, the boundary is virtually an ontological one. Theatre deploys artifice while cinema is committed to reality, indeed to an ultimately physical reality which is “redeemed,” to use Siegfried Kracauer’s striking word, by the camera. The aesthetic judgment that follows from this venture in intellectual map-making is that films shot in real-life settings are better (i.e., more cinematic) than those
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