The socio-cultural circumstances of a film significantly influence its manipulation of reality. The idealism of Modernists is evident in the straightforward, honest objectivity in the reality of the early “city symphonies,” Berlin and Man With A Movie Camera. The unprecedented affordability of goods in the Industrial Revolution, combined with the nationalist sentiment of a still-volatile Europe, resulted in utopianism and social reformation. The terrible atrocities of the second World War, however, revealed the dangers of extreme nationalism. As a result, existentialism began to challenge the Modern paradigm; for instance, Tarkovsky’s Solaris, questioned the limitations of humanity and what it meant to be human. Postmodernism, with its emphasis on introspection, experience, and memory, became the prevalent cultural paradigm.
The continued evolution of socio-cultural paradigms has led us to today’s experiential reality, which attempts to answer the existential questions of Postmodernism. Lisbon Story, for example, reconsiders the definition of ‘reality’: its inherently personal and subjective interpretation leaves the Modern definition behind entirely. We have moved from a cultural paradigm rooted in the perfection of the object to one that is less tangible but more personal, the experience of the subject. According to Pine and Gilmore, authors of The Experience Economy, “every experience created within the individual is real, whether the stimuli be natural or simulated” (36).
Therefore, films used to show you who you should be; now, they show you who you are. Yet, individuality is highly unstable; identity is a “malleable entity under (perpetual) construction rather than a fixed image” (Klingmann 284). The ability to transform reality, then, is paramount in the contemporary paradigm. Consider the 2006 film Paprika, directed by Satoshi Kon, which celebrates the power of one’s subconscious. Indeed, where experience appeals to who we are, transformations appeal to our innermost aspirations; as such, “people value transformation above all [...] it addresses the ultimate source of all other needs” (Pine and Gilmore 172). Reality was once manipulated, but is now transcended.