Rossa Ó Muireartaigh (asker) Mar 26, 2007:

That's it, well done. Contract to transform, as the man himself would say. The kernel in a nutshell. ;-)

Joyce A Mar 26, 2007:

One last note...it should be Rumsfeld!

Joyce A Mar 26, 2007:

Most definitely, Rossa. 'Staffhappens'asRunsfieldwouldsay. ;-)

Rossa Ó Muireartaigh (asker) Mar 26, 2007:

That's it Joyce A. ('Staff happens' as Rumsfield would say.) Do you think you could repeat all that in one word?　:-)

Joyce A Mar 26, 2007:

I get it now, Rossa! It's kind of like the accumulation of all that "stuff" of life (a take-off on the delicious "staff of life") which lends that special realness to our lives! :-)

Rossa Ó Muireartaigh (asker) Mar 26, 2007:

In the end I used the not so prosaic phrase, 'sense of actual life/living', as I felt it was a key concept that needed to be explained, even at the expense of an eloquent rendition. All the answers here were very helpful, but because the concept, in this context, tends to emphasise materiality, physicality, and so on, 'authenticity' was the probably the most suitable, as one word answers go, this time round.

Rossa Ó Muireartaigh (asker) Mar 26, 2007:

To all: Sorry for providing such an elliptical sample and for not clarifying things sooner. The sample sentence refers to recreating the sense of people having lived in a place (in this case a street) for two hundred years. The film director was talking about the difficulty of expressing mise en scene material realism. He talks later about how it is possible to recreate 生活感 in contemporary dramas by having discarded cardboard boxes lying around rooms and so on, whereas in period drama, were everyone was poor, such material props are less available.
Anyway, what is 生活感?- a native speaker explained to me that a room can 'have' a 生活感 on account of people actually living there and this 生活感 expressed through the resultant flotsam of human domesticity- the mess, the odours, the wear and tear and so. The difference between my living room as I live in it and a showroom version of my living room in a department store is the 生活感がありof the former and 生活感がないof the latter.

Joe L Mar 22, 2007:

Hi.
About that "through 200 years of living/daily life":
is this a referring a culminating point where this film is then set,
or, is this film a sweeping piece that will encompass 200 years of time?
If the former, I like Will's "zeitgeist".