Cinema Verite / Direct Cinema

Cinema Verite / Direct Cinema

Beginning in the late 1950's a number of monumental technological breakthroughs occurred in filmmaking equipment.

These innovations were to change the course of documentary filmmaking...including

·  the look,

·  the approach,

·  and the content of documentaries

Before the late 50s, documentary filmmaking and filmmaking outside of a studio in general had historically been hampered by the weight and awkwardness of filmmaking equipment.

Altho portable equipment dates back to the Lumiere's cinematographe,

the necessity of using a tripod--a fixed point of view--remained until the 1920's.

The development of the 16mm camera in 1922 made the camera more portable,

but the problem of synchronizing sound and image remained for the next three decades.

·  Movies became talkies in the 1930's but this sound was accomplished via an optical sound track

in which the sound is recorded separately and then added to the film as a separate synchronized track.

·  Synchronous sound recording required equipment so cumbersome that location shooting was almost impossible.

AND

At least part of the preference for "Voice Over" narrative in pre-50's doc film was due to these restrictions.

---(one of the reasons that Edgar Anstey's HOUSING PROBLEMS was such an accomplishment"

In the late 50's and early 60's a number of technological innovations happened that radically changed all of this.

·  The development of 16mm cameras with plastic rather than metal parts,

made shoulder-mounted equipment even lighter and quieter than before.

·  Around the same time, lightweight, relatively quiet, battery-driven magnetic tape sound recorders were developed.

· 

·  Even more monumental was the development of a technology to obtain synchronous sound recording (I'll talk more about this next class)

·  Film stock was becoming increasingly sensitive--allowing the possibility of shooting in low light.

·  These new technologies held the unprecendented promise of allowing the filmmaker to circulate freely among his subjects without interrupting the action.

As early as 1958, at the National Film Board of Canada, two young filmmakers Michel Brault and Gilles Groulx used such a lightweight rig to more or less secretly film a snowshoe race in Quebec. Their film, Les Raquetteurs is in MRC if you want to check it out.

Equally momentous cinematic events were taking place in both the US and France.around this same time.

In France cinematic ground was being broken by a fellow named Jean Rouch.

Rouche was a filmmaker who had distinguished himself doing ethnographic films in Africa in the 1950s---mostly in Niger and Ghana. Films include Jaguar (shot in early 50s) and Les Maitres fous (1954) (the Haouka cult in Niger)

In 1960 Rouch was persuaded by French sociologist Edgar Morin, to undertake a film experiment closer to home.

Morin suggested that they jointly make a film focusing on the "strange tribes that live in paris."

(this harkens back to Grierson's comment to Flaherty about his preference for shooting the "savages of Birmingham" rather than the savages of far-off, exotic places.

Rouch had met Michel Brault in California a year earlier and had enlisted him in the project as cinematographer.

In undertaking this film, Rouch wanted to experiment with

a number of new approaches and theories about the documentary and ethnographic film forms

that he had been toying with for a number of years.

Troubled by the ethical and artistic problems encountered in attempting to document the life of another culture,

Rouch had experimented in several of his earlier ethnographic films with allowing individuals from the culture being filmed

to either

·  comment on the action taking place in the film in voice over,

·  or to use the filming as a way of enacting or performing their personal and cultural fantasy lives.

For Rouch, it became apparent that

·  any attempt to film a subject as if the camera were not there was an impossibility, a total lie.

·  The camera always created its own reality, it's own set of truths

which could be more revealing and interesting and true than unfilmed reality.

Instead of vainly attempting to act as a non-intervening "fly on the wall," The filmmaker could instead

serve as a kind of participant and agent provocateur and catalyst,

eliciting these personal crises and revelations.

Rouch called his particular brand of cinema cinema verite--literally cinema truth--as an homage to Vertov (Cinema Pravda)

This was a fairly radical contrast to the style of observational film being developed at the same time in the US (Direct Cinema)

As we'll see next class, the practitioners of that style were vehement in their belief that

the essence of life situations were most effectively revealed when simply observed without intervention.

Interesting that the terms cinema verite and direct cinema are often used interchangeably--initially, the philosophies and strategies of these two cinematic movement were poles appart, even if the surface look of the films was often similar.

Morin:

"Newscasts present us with life in its Sunday best--official, ritualized--men of state shaking hands, discussions. Once in a while fate, chance, will place in our field of vision a shriveled or a beaming face, an accident, a fragment of truth. This scene taken from life is most often a scene taken from death. As a general rule, the camera is too heavy, it is not mobile enough, the sound equipment can't follow the action, and what is live escapes close up. Cinema needs a set, a staged ceremony, a halt to life. And then everyone masquerades--equipped with a supplementary mask on the camera."

Show Chronicle of a Summer

--Shot in the midst of the Algerian War: how does that fact impact the film?

--In what ways is this film similar to NanooK…what is the role and participation of the subjects?

--How different from Grierson?

--How have the filmmakers organized their work? How do the sections/segments interrelate?

--Segment of marceline walking in the Place de la Concorde, Angelo getting up and eating breakfast… Are these straight recordings of "reality" what would have happened had the camera not been there to record? What are they?

--Why does rouch say to Marin: "We're in for trouble?"

Next class I'll be talking more about

In the US, similar experiments were going on.

Robert Drew, a photo editor and reporter for Life magazine, had been experimenting with candid photography for a number of years.

He became interested in doing similar things with motion pictures, in developing moving image news essays in a style which he called "candid drama" and which would later come to be known in the US as Direct Cinema.

In a bit, we'll be talking about Jean Rouch, a French ethnographic filmmaker who coined another term often used interchangeably with Direct Cinema--Cinema Verite (literally "Camera Truth")…

As we'll discuss, however, the approach and philosophy of Rouch and other French documentary filmmakers in the 60's was different from the makers of Direct Cinema in significant ways.

Drew eventually moved to Time Inc.'s Broadcast Division.

In 1957, Time provided him with support for his first film project and the funds for developing the first small sync sound camera unit,

which he worked on with filmmaker Ricky Leacock whose work Drew admired .

(Leacock had been an editor on Frontier Films' Native land we saw a few weeks back and had worked as an assistant on Robert Flaherty's last film--Louisiana Story).

Drew and Leacock experimented endlessly with existing equipment and

·  finally came up with a way of synchronizing sound and film by using the vibration of tuning forks.

·  This mechanism was later altered by using quartz movement of a wristwatch.

•  We were trying to get away from special solutions… we wanted something we could film and take sound … out in the desert or in an airplane or anywhere….And so when the Bulova Watch came out, the Accutron watch – the ad for it (I still have that ad somewhere) – I was kind of looking at the ad and they had said what the accuracy was. It was one point in 16,000. And something registered in my head. So I said, you know Ricky [Leacock], there’s only 16,000 frames in a 400 foot roll. That’s all you need. We don’t care if it’s less accurate than that.

· 

·  They also worked with ways to free the microphone and recorder from having to be attached to the camera by using wireless transmitters..

The other breakthrough made by Drew and others at this time was the development of the extended film magazine that would allow longer uninterrupted shoots…(400 instead of the standard 100 feet)

The camera displayed here is a considerably rebuilt Auricon. To convert the 100 foot load Auricon into a 400 foot camera, the top was sheared off and fitted with a plate to accept a 400 foot film magazine made by the Mitchell Camera Company. An Angenieux zoom lens is held to the front of the camera with a special mount milled from solid aluminum. Because this was not a reflex camera, a special viewfinder was made to allow the camera operator to see what the lens saw. A box was affixed to one side of the camera to allow, among other things, installation of a synchronous sound system controlled by a tuning fork. Not visible here are the battery and power supply, both specially built for the rig. Inside the camera the original metal gears, which made a loud and disturbing sound, were replaced by softer gears milled from teflon blocks. Unwieldy as this rig was--weighting in at over 35 pounds--it was used to power the Drew Associates breakthrough candid films, some 40 hours of them, between 1960 and 1966.

Around this same time, Drew formed his production company, Drew Associates, which enabled him to hire freelance cameramen and filmmakers,

·  including D.A. Pennebaker,

·  Leacock and

·  Albert Maysles

all of whom would go on to distinguish themselves independently.

In a way, this team approach was similar to the British Documentary movement of the 30's -- but unlike that movement, the backing was commercial rather than governmental--primary the TV networks at first.

They also messed around with the camera's viewfinding and lens...

Even tho the camera still weighed 35 pounds--it was revolutionary in its portability and flexibility.

This portable, synchronous sound camera provided the catalyst for a radically new way of thinking about documentary film.

Drew and other proponents of Direct Cinema

·  believed that Griersonian expository documentary was little more than an illustrated lecture.

·  What they were aiming for were films that were

·  less one-sided

·  and more directly engaged with the world in front of the camera.

The aim was, to quote Drew, to "crea[e] a new form of journalism which would take documentary into the street." (sound familiar? Grierson's "Life on the Doorsteps")

Proponents of direct cinema attempted to strip away the barriers between filmmaker and subject; between film subject and spectator.

The notion was to film real people in real, "uncontrolled" situations -- uncontrolled generally meant minimally scripted (if scripted at all) and with minimum intrusions of the director either in the act of filming or in post-production (for eg addition of music, voice overs, etc.).

It has been suggested that this movement in some sense reflected broader societal changes of the the 1960's…

a growing democratization of US society…and end to the political reaction of the McCarthy era.

The director would be an observer-- a "fly on the wall"…Interviews or other direct interactions between subject and filmmaker were assiduously avoided. The director would never ask the subject to do anything or to act in any way.

Leacock: . "No lights, no tripod, no microphone boom or pole, never wear headphones (they make you look silly, and or, remote) never more than two people, never ask anyone to do anything and most especially never ask anyone to repeat an action or a line. Allow lots of time, don't shoot all the time, if you miss something, forget it in the hope that something like it will happen again. Get to know your subject if possible in order to generate some kind of mutual respect, if not friendship.

What am I looking for? I hope to be able to create sequences that when run together will present aspects of my perception of what took place in the presence of my camera. To capture spontaneity it must exist and everything you do is liable to destroy-it... beware!

Often the kernel of cinematic truth, the drama, was found in shooting vast amounts of footage and

finding the connections and defining moments in the editing room.

But even here an attempt was made

·  to assemble footage in the order and relation in which they were shot.

·  to recreate the events as the filmmaker witnessed them.

Takes were long; scenes were often connected by jump cuts that swung from general scenes to closely focussed particulars. In many cases the filmmaker acted as editor…

Is this an attempt at cinematic objectivity? Not at all!

"Good films have to be subjectively made -- the viewer has to be seeing them subjectively. If he's seeing it objectively, it won't work as film. So, if the viewer needs a subjective experience, then the filmmaker has to render a subjective experience -- something that's from the viewpoint of the filmmaker…The filmmaker's job is to tell a story, but he doesn't want to stand off and not be involved or have the camera on a pedestal that doesn't move. The camera must go with the action or the characters, and to that extent, it's subjective."