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This chapter discusses the influence of the naturalist tradition on early French cinema, covering the pictorialist naturalist school of the 1920s, the cycles of Zola adaptations that appeared between 1902 and 1938, and the ‘social-realist’ cinema of Renoir. The categorical map of the significant realist French film production of the 1930–8 period is meant to be neither exhaustive nor definitive. The chapter emphasizes that La Bête humaine focuses on a disturbing and morally corrupt social order, which conforms closely to one of the most important features of the critical realist/naturalist tradition in its employment of an indeterminate aesthetic style. It concludes by accounting for Renoir's La Bête humaine in terms of the model of critical realism.

Chapters 6 and 7 are linked in their exploration of artists’ readings, literary sources and subjects, and in their focus on paintings of women and water: from the drowned ‘fallen woman’ in George’s work to the empowered mermaids in Evelyn’s work. Chapter 6 explores the Wattses’ private library, their conjugal reading practice, and Mary’s engagement with contemporary feminist writers and writings, before discussing George’s series of female-focused social-realist paintings inspired by poetry, in order to show how the couple engaged with, were inspired by, and contributed to early feminist literary and visual culture. It focuses specifically on Mary Watts’s readings of early feminist writings and on George Watts’s paintings provoked by articles and contemporary debates on ‘fallen women’, female suicide and the exploitation of women. The author aims to show how the Wattses were influenced by writers engaging with issues at the heart of Victorian feminism, and to reveal Mary’s interactions with writers of New Woman fiction. This further reveals the Wattses’ progressive socio-political positions, and especially Mary’s keen – if largely private – interest in early feminist writing and culture during her marital years, to which she more actively contributed in widowhood.

This chapter explores how the thorny issue of inter-Republican conflict is represented in Land and Freedom/Tierra y Libertad, an overtly political cinematic engagement with the period that resurrects the conflict's revolutionary dimension. It explores the capacity of non-self-reflexive cinema to foster a historical consciousness in audiences, arguing that the social realist film form utilised by the filmmakers is an entirely valid one for representing the past cinematically and considering the political controversy surrounding the film's release. The chapter also examines some of the pitfalls in representing complex events through the medium of cinema, but concludes that in resurrecting the revolutionary aspects of the fight against fascism, Land and Freedom is one of the most important films dealing with the period.