Comment by Daub

Pieter Bruegel the Elder was, to my mind, the first of the realists. By that I mean and artist/filmmaker/photographer etc who address the every day and the here and now. Of courses, it still has the artifice of art, which is to say that it is a 'realism effect' rather than true realism. One can draw a straight line from Pieter Bruegel to the shakey cam of movies like Cloverfield, which is another class of realism effect.