novel, The Lying Days, appeared in 1953; Father Panchali, in 1955. Ray said that Bicycle Thieves?and the photography of Henri Cartier-Bresson? inspired him to become a filmmaker; but the tone, scope, and themes of most Italian neorealist films set them apart from the domestic tradition I've focused on here: they are masterpieces certainly but less pure, less inno cent than Pother Panchali, Vermeer's Lacemaker, or Gordimer's story "Is There Nowhere Else Where We Can Meet?" On the other hand there are much more sophisticated movies in which one can see frame after frame immediately reminiscent of Vermeer. I am thinking, in particular, of Woody Allen's Interiors (director of photography: Gordon Willis) and Phil Morri son's Junebug (director of photography: Peter Donahue). Just as Hopper and Porter remained true to their vision during a period when their work was well-nigh obliterated by the rage for abstract art, pop art, op art, there are writers and filmmakers who have not been deterred from doing relatively modest realist work at a time when the market is flooded by fantasy, escapist epic, and neomythologies. We seem to be living in a time of highly selective realism. We have access in one form or another, often graphic, to the realities of war, of disease, of intolerance, of crime? and yet life's everyday realities that might help to sustain us remain largely uncelebrated. Our attention deficits, our world-weariness, admit only the sensational or the momentarily exotic. By contrast Ruskin deplored the "vul garity" of Dutch painting because he found it ordinary, secular, less than grandiose. Similarly Bosley Crowther, then the powerful film reviewer for the New York Times, dismissed Pother Panchali as "amateurish" because he took as the ultimate standard Hollywood's slick and shiny entertainments. One can of course simply shrug and murmur "chacun ? son go?t," or one can insist that some kinds and degrees of willed blindness approach malpractice and malfeasance.