verism

That is the source of a debate over the film's veracity and verism -- a controversy echoing the rumpus over The Last Temptation of Christ, but with politics, not theology, as the sticking point.

Verism and naturalism have since afforded the spectacle of a confusion of the aesthetic fact with the processes of the natural sciences, by aiming at some sort of experimental drama or romance.

They accused each other of sham writing and sham culture, and hurled at each other's heads the words "idealism" and "materialism," "symbolism" and "verism," "subjectivism" and "objectivism."