Direct Cinema

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Direct cinema is a documentary genre that originated between 1958 and 1962 in North America, principally in the Canadian province of Quebec and the United States, and developed by Jean Rouch in France. [1] It is defined as a cinematic practice employing lightweight filming equipment, hand-held cameras and live, synchronous sound that was available to create due to the new ground-breaking technologies that were being developed in the early 1960s. This offered early independent filmmakers the possibility to do away with the large crews, studio sets, tripod-mounted equipment and special lights in the making of a film, expensive aspects that severely limited these low-budget early documentarians. Similar in many respects to the cinéma vérité genre, it was characterized initially by filmmakers' desire to directly capture reality and represent it truthfully, and to question the relationship of reality with cinema. [2]

Documentary film Nonfictional motion picture

A documentary film is a nonfictional motion picture intended to document reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction, education, or maintaining a historical record. "Documentary" has been described as a "filmmaking practice, a cinematic tradition, and mode of audience reception" that is continually evolving and is without clear boundaries. Documentary films were originally called 'actuality' films and were only a minute or less in length. Over time documentaries have evolved to be longer in length and to include more categories, such as educational, observational, and even 'docufiction'. Documentaries are also educational and often used in schools to teach various principles. Social media platforms such as YouTube, have allowed documentary films to improve the ways the films are distributed and able to educate and broaden the reach of people who receive the information.

North America Continent entirely within the Northern Hemisphere and almost all within the Western Hemisphere

North America is a continent entirely within the Northern Hemisphere and almost all within the Western Hemisphere. It is also considered by some to be a northern subcontinent of the Americas. It is bordered to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, to the west and south by the Pacific Ocean, and to the southeast by South America and the Caribbean Sea.

Quebec Province of Canada

Quebec is one of the thirteen provinces and territories of Canada. It is bordered to the west by the province of Ontario and the bodies of water James Bay and Hudson Bay; to the north by Hudson Strait and Ungava Bay; to the east by the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and the province of Newfoundland and Labrador; and to the south by the province of New Brunswick and the US states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York. It also shares maritime borders with Nunavut, Prince Edward Island, and Nova Scotia. Quebec is Canada's largest province by area and its second-largest administrative division; only the territory of Nunavut is larger. It is historically and politically considered to be part of Central Canada.

Contents

Origins

"Direct cinema is the result of two predominant and related factors—The desire for a new cinematic realism and the development of the equipment necessary to achieving that desire" [3] (Monaco 2003, p. 206). Many technological, ideological and social aspects contribute to the direct cinema movement and its place in the history of cinema.

Lightweight cameras

Direct cinema was made possible, in part, by the advent of light, portable cameras, which allowed the hand-held camera and more intimacy in the filmmaking. It also produced movements that are the style's visual trademark. [4] The first cameras of this type were German cameras, designed for ethnographic cinematography. The company Arriflex [5] [6] was considered the first to widely commercialize such cameras, that were improved for aerial photography during World War II. Easily available, portable cameras played an important part, but the existence of these cameras in itself did not trigger the birth of direct cinema.

Hand-held camera

Hand-held camera or hand-held shooting is a filmmaking and video production technique in which a camera is held in the camera operator's hands as opposed to being mounted on a tripod or other base. Hand-held cameras are used because they are conveniently sized for travel and because they allow greater freedom of motion during filming. Newsreel camera operators frequently gathered images using a hand-held camera. Virtually all modern video cameras are small enough for hand-held use, but many professional video cameras are designed specifically for hand-held use such as for electronic news-gathering (ENG), and electronic field production (EFP).

World War II 1939–1945 global war

World War II, also known as the Second World War, was a global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. The vast majority of the world's countries—including all the great powers—eventually formed two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis. A state of total war emerged, directly involving more than 100 million people from over 30 countries. The major participants threw their entire economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities behind the war effort, blurring the distinction between civilian and military resources. World War II was the deadliest conflict in human history, marked by 70 to 85 million fatalities, most of whom were civilians in the Soviet Union and China. It included massacres, the genocide of the Holocaust, strategic bombing, premeditated death from starvation and disease, and the only use of nuclear weapons in war.

Objective truthfulness

The idea of cinema as an objective space has been present since its birth. The Kino-Pravda (literally "Cinema Truth") practice of Dziga Vertov, which can be traced back to the 1920s, gave an articulated voice to this notion, where one can also see the influence of futurism.

Kino-Pravda was a series of 23 newsreels by Dziga Vertov, Elizaveta Svilova, and Mikhail Kaufman launched in June 1922. Vertov referred to the twenty-three issues of Kino-Pravda as the first work by him where his future cinematic methods can be observed.

Dziga Vertov Soviet director

Dziga Vertov was a Russian Soviet pioneer documentary film and newsreel director, as well as a cinema theorist. His filming practices and theories influenced the cinéma vérité style of documentary movie-making and the Dziga Vertov Group, a radical film-making cooperative which was active from 1968 to 1972.

Futurism artistic and social movement

Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century. It emphasised speed, technology, youth, violence, and objects such as the car, the airplane, and the industrial city. Its key figures were the Italians Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Gino Severini, Giacomo Balla, and Luigi Russolo. It glorified modernity and aimed to liberate Italy from the weight of its past. Cubism contributed to the formation of Italian Futurism's artistic style. Important Futurist works included Marinetti's Manifesto of Futurism, Boccioni's sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, Balla's painting Abstract Speed + Sound, and Russolo's The Art of Noises.

Before the 1960s and the advent of direct cinema, the concepts of propaganda, film education and documentary were loosely defined in the public. Cinema in its ontological objectivity was seen by many viewers as reality captured and a means of universal education, as had been photography in its early period. Documentaries from the 1950s provide insight into the level of understanding that viewers of that day had of manipulation and mise-en-scène in films shot on "documentary sets." Direct cinema gained its importance in the perspective of the popular evolution of ideas about reality and the media.

Sound before the 1960s

Before the use of pilottone (invented in 1954) and the 1961 Nagra III, sound recording machinery was either extremely heavy or unreliable. Many attempts were made to solve this problem during the 1950s and 1960s. At the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), for example, a system called "Sprocketape" was designed, but was not implemented.

Pilottone and the related neo-pilottone are special synchronization signals recorded by analog audio recorders designed for use in motion picture production, to keep sound and vision recorded on separate media in step. Before the adoption of timecode by the motion picture industry in the late 1980s, pilottone-sync was the basis of all professional magnetic motion picture sound recording systems, whereas most amateur film formats used pre-striped magnetic coating on the film itself for live-sound recording.

Nagra series of audio recorders produced by Kudelski SA

Nagra is a brand of portable audio recorders produced from 1951 in Switzerland. Since 1997 a range of high-end equipment aimed at the audiophile community was introduced as a diversification into a hitherto unknown market.

National Film Board of Canada Canadas public film and digital media producer and distributor

The National Film Board of Canada is Canada's public film and digital media producer and distributor. An agency of the Government of Canada, the NFB produces and distributes documentary films, animation, web documentaries, and alternative dramas. In total, the NFB has produced over 3,000 productions since its inception, which have won over 5,000 awards. The NFB reports to the Parliament of Canada through the Minister of Canadian Heritage. It has English-language and French-language production branches.

In the best case scenario, documentary sound was recorded before, in interviews, or much later on location, with a portable studio located in a sound-proofed truck. The sounds that were captured were later synched (synchronized) in sound editing, thus providing the film with sound. In other cases, the soundtrack was recorded, as in fiction films: with layers of ambient sound, archival sound effects, foley, and post-synced voices.

Foley (filmmaking) reproduction of sound effects in filmmaking

Foley is the reproduction of everyday sound effects that are added to film, video, and other media in post-production to enhance audio quality. These reproduced sounds can be anything from the swishing of clothing and footsteps to squeaky doors and breaking glass. The best Foley art is so well integrated into a film that it goes unnoticed by the audience. It helps to create a sense of reality within a scene. Without these crucial background noises, movies feel unnaturally quiet and uncomfortable.

In other cases the documentary subject was brought into a studio. Sound taken directly from the studio made the documentary nature of the recording arguable. For example, a production might reconstruct a stable in the studio, with a sound engineer close by in a soundproof booth. This mimics the production of some studio films and TV series, but often results in surreal situations, such as cows being in a studio for a documentary on farming, rather than in their natural habitat.

Synchronized sound was used by French filmmaker Jean Rouch in 1960 when he shot Chronicle of a Summer , a landmark film in direct cinema history, in style of cinéma-vérité , using a 16 mm camera connected through pilottone with a prototype of Nagra III, a transistorized tape recorder with electronic speed control, developed by Stefan Kudelski.

Ideological and social aspects

With improved sound, lighting and camera equipment available, the technical conditions necessary for the advent of direct cinema were present. The social and ideological conditions that led to direct cinema also appeared.

Direct cinema seemed to reflect this new attitude. It emerged from a desire to compare common opinion with reality. It attempted to show how things really are, outside the studio, far from the editorial control of the establishment—be it governmental or big press. What was noteworthy was that the desire to test common opinion and show reality was constantly kept in check with an acute awareness that it is easy to lie with sound and image. This tension was at the center of direct cinema and resulted in its formal style and methodology.[ citation needed ]

The elusive recipe of reality captured

The awareness of cinema's potential to lie would result in filmmakers' trying precise ways of shooting. For Michel Brault of the National Film Board of Canada, who pioneered modern hand-held camera work, it meant the ability to go amidst the people with a wide angle. [7] Other filmmakers would develop different methods. Some insisted that their subject needed to get used to them before they started any real shooting, so it would seem the camera was being ignored [8] Still another group of direct cinema filmmakers would claim that the most honest technique was for a filmmaker to accept the camera as a catalyst and acknowledge that it provoked reactions. This allowed filmmakers to feel free to ask their film subject to do something they would like to document. [9]

The desire to capture reality led to some questioning the ability of filmmakers to properly film someone whom they could not fully understand. As an example, Jean Rouch went so far as to hand the camera to the "subject" (and co-author) of Moi, un Noir .

Regardless of these practices, one thing is certain: direct cinema had more to do with the ethical considerations in documentary film making than with the technology. This could explain why the movement began in two North American societies that were in social and ideological mutation, French Canada (Quebec) and the United States, before spreading to South America and France. [ citation needed ]

Regional variants

Quebec

Direct cinema began in 1958 at the National Film Board of Canada in Quebec, [10] at the dawning of the Quiet Revolution, a period of intense social and political change.

At that time, a university education was a rare thing for a Québécois. The people of Quebec were seen by its young emerging intelligentsia as alienated and abused. This period of complex cultural and economical change for French-speaking Quebecers can be summarized by the convergence of three phenomena:

The consequences of these three movements deeply modified Quebec society and resulted in a myriad of perspectives by intellectuals and artists in their colonized society. Filmmakers would simultaneously try to share their social conscience, improve the living conditions of the Québécois and attempt to bring national independence—provoking, documenting this transformation, and at the same time keeping a record of disappearing traditions in a rapidly changing society. The landmark film Les Raquetteurs (1958), co-directed by Michel Brault and Gilles Groulx, is a key example, [10] as is Groulx's 1961 Golden Gloves . [13]

Direct cinema techniques were also incorporated into a number of key fiction films of the period, such as The Cat in the Bag (Le Chat dans le sac) (1964) and La vie heureuse de Léopold Z (1965). [14] [15]

United States

In the United States, Robert Drew, a journalist with Life magazine after the war, decided to apply the photojournalist method to movies. He founded Drew Associates, which included Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker, Terence Macartney-Filgate, and Albert and David Maysles. [16] ) They started experimenting with technology, syncing camera and sound with the parts of a watch. In 1960, this group produced three films for Time-Life Broadcast: Yanqui, No!, Eddie (On the Pole), and Primary .

Yanqui, No! focused on South America and its tense relations with the U.S. It documented the underlying anti-American sentiment in the population. Primary (a documentary about the 1960 Wisconsin Democratic presidential primary campaign between Senators John F. Kennedy and Hubert H. Humphrey), helped define direct cinema style and made it known to a wide public with the help of Time-Life Broadcast. The film reveals how primary elections worked in the U.S. at the time and raised the profile of direct cinema. After these hotly debated experiments, Time Life Broadcast withdrew from its agreement with Drew Associates. Drew Associates would continue on its own.

On June 11, 1963, the Alabama Governor George Wallace [17] blocked the entrance of the University of Alabama to oppose integration. His defiance of court order rapidly became a national issue in the U.S. Drew Associates had a cameraman in the Oval office and recorded the meetings over the crisis. The result played on TV in October 1963. Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment not only fueled discussions over the Civil Rights Movement, it also triggered a profound questioning over the political power of direct cinema. Politicians became more cautious about allowing access by documentary filmmakers.

Direct cinema and cinéma vérité

Cinéma vérité has many resemblances to direct cinema. The hand-held style of camera work is the same. There is a similar feeling of real life unfolding before the viewer's eyes. There is also a mutual concern with social and ethical questions. Both cinéma vérité and direct cinema rely on the power of editing to give shape, structure and meaning to the material recorded. [18] Some film historians have characterized the direct cinema movement as a North American version of the cinéma vérité movement. The latter was exemplified in France with Jean Rouch's Chronicle of a Summer (1961). For these historians cinéma vérité is characterized by the use of the camera to provoke and reveal.

Direct cinema, on the other hand, has been seen as more strictly observational. It relies on an agreement among the filmmaker, subjects and audience to act as if the presence of the camera does not substantially alter the recorded event. Such claims of non-intervention have been criticized by critics and historians. [19]

Filmmakers' opinions

In a 2003 interview (Zuber), Robert Drew explained how he saw the differences between cinéma vérité and direct cinema:

I had made Primary and a few other films. Then I went to France with Leacock for a conference [the 1963 meeting sponsored by Radio Television Française]. I was surprised to see the Cinema vérité filmmakers accosting people on the street with a microphone ( Chronicle of a Summer ). My goal was to capture real life without intruding. Between us there was a contradiction. It made no sense. They had a cameraman, a sound man, and about six more—a total of eight men creeping through the scenes. It was a little like the Marx Brothers. My idea was to have one or two people, unobtrusive, capturing the moment. [20]

Jean Rouch claimed cinéma vérité came from Brault and the NFB. [21] Yet the NFB pioneers of the form Brault, Pierre Perrault and the others, never used the term cinéma vérité to describe their work and, in fact, found the term pretentious. They preferred "Cinéma Direct". Cinema vérité, the phrase and the form, can thus be seen as France's spin on the idea of the Cinéma Direct of Brault and his colleagues of the French section of the NFB in Canada.

Cinéma vérité came to be a term applied in English to everything from a school of thought, to a film style, and a look adopted by commercials. [22]

Examples of direct cinema documentaries

"Direct cinema" fiction

See also

Related Research Articles

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References

  1. Aitken, Ian (2013-10-18). Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film 3-Volume Set. Routledge. ISBN   9781135206277.
  2. "The type of cinema that poses the most profound and difficult problems concerning illusion, irreality and fiction, is indeed the cinema of the real, its very task being to face the most difficult problem asked by philosophy for two thousand years, that of the nature of reality." (In the 1980 festival catalog of Cinema du Réel, Centre Pompidou, Paris) Original text of Edgar Morin on this topic here Archived 2004-01-25 at Archive.today (in French)
  3. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2009-04-01. Retrieved 2009-10-23.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  4. "Archived copy" (PDF) (in German). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2007-09-25. Retrieved 2007-06-20.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  5. Original interview (in French) Archived 2007-09-28 at the Wayback Machine . "But in order to go and film people, to really go with them, amidst them, they must know you are there. They must accept the consequence of the presence of the camera and that means using a wide angle. The only legitimate process is one that relies on a tacit contract between the one who films and the one who is filmed, where there is a mutual recognition of the other."
  6. Albert and David Maysles Archived 2006-10-22 at the Wayback Machine
  7. Like Pierre Perrault's Moon Trap
  8. 1 2 Melnyk, George (2004-01-01). One Hundred Years of Canadian Cinema. University of Toronto Press. ISBN   9780802084446.
  9. Roman Catholic Church was a very powerful institution in Quebec society up until the '60s. Article in The Canadian Encyclopedia Archived 2007-08-29 at the Wayback Machine
  10. Intellectuals were using Fanon's decolonialisation discourse to explain their situation. See this article in The Canadian Encyclopedia for reference on 'Nègres blancs d'Amérique' (White Niggers of America) (1968) by Pierre Vallières. Also Front de libération du Québec
  11. Goyette, Louis (2001-07-30). "Golden Gloves". In Peter Harry Rist (ed.). Guide to the cinema(s) of Canada. Greenwood Press. pp. 82–83. ISBN   0-313-29931-5.[ citation needed ]
  12. Loiselle, Andre (June–Sept 2004). "Le Chat dans le sac". Take One . Canadian Independent Film & Television Publishing Association.Check date values in: |date= (help)
  13. Pallister, Janis L. "Québec film as a mirror of society". The cinema of Québec: Masters in their own house. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. pp. 231–233. ISBN   0-8386-3562-8.
  14. "The Hollywood film is an escape of one sort or another. But our films make it damn near impossible to escape. We're interested in what you can't escape from and presenting it... Some people get a little edgy when they see something that is so personal. They don't know where to turn to look for the kind of buffer that most movies give them. In fiction you can say 'it's only a movie' and forget it. You can't do that with reality." —Albert Maysles to The New York Times, 18 October 1987
  15. "Wallace in the Schoolhouse Door", National Public Radio
  16. "Cinema Verite or Direct Cinema? | DOCUMENTARY FILM FOR ALL". filmeditor.wordpress.com. Retrieved 2018-07-19.
  17. "Clearly, if we accept that cinema involves the production of signs, the idea of non-intervention is pure mystification. The sign is always a product. What the camera in fact grasps is the 'natural' world of dominant ideology." — Johnston
  18. See also, Ellis, Chapter 14
  19. "It must be said, all that we have done in France in the area of cinéma vérité comes from Canada. It is Brault who brought a new technique of filming that we had not known and that we copied ever since. In fact, truly, there is a "brauchitis" spreading, it is certain. Even the people who consider that Brault is a nuisance, or were jealous, are forced to recognize it." Jean Rouch, June 1963 Cahiers du Cinéma No. 144.
  20. "Today, we see the influence of vérité in everything from music videos to feature films to TV news. Yet these things are not vérité films. The key difference, I think, is that today's contemporary image industry is almost wholly devoid of thoughtful content; it is pure image (even, or maybe especially, the news) without the sense of social self and social responsibility that vérité filmmakers brought to their work. "I am proud that filmmakers in Quebec and the rest of Canada and institutions like the National Film Board of Canada were able to give voice and vision to the vérité movement. Perhaps the next wave of documentarians and their audiences can re-visit some of the lessons learned from cinéma vérité, and adapt them to the challenges of the future." Filmmaker Peter Wintonick, about his film Cinéma Vérité: Defining the Moment Archived 2007-09-09 at the Wayback Machine

Further reading