Direct Cinema.

Direct Cinema

The term 'direct cinema' was coined by American director Albert Maysles, to describe the style of documentary that he and his contemporaries were making in the 1960s as a result of a lightweight, portable 16mm camera and high quality lightweight audio recorders becoming available. The introduction of these, together with film-stock which was sensitive enough to give a good quality close-up monochrome picture under most lighting conditions

(Including hand-held lights) led to a revolution in Documentary filmmaking, allowing film crews to be much more flexible. Gone were the days of bulky, virtually immobile 35mm cameras; now manufacturers improved their 16mm stock and accepted it as a professional format.

In 1959 a group comprising graduates from Drew Associates, a company formed by Robert Drew (an ex journalist) and Richard Leacock, joined forces. Their ethos was to record events as they happened, without interfering and in an attempt to transfer the style of photojournalism to their filmmaking. The group - comprising Pennebaker, Leacock and Maysles - was a key feature of American direct cinema throughout the 1960s and the 1970s. Together with Drew they made a total of nineteen pioneering films for television, beginning in 1960 with Primary. In this documentary, for the first time, the audience was able to follow a person (in this case presidential hopefuls John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey) moving from a car, through a corridor, into a hall where he is about to give a speech and all in one shot! Drew saw direct cinema as a 'theatre without actors' and so the group concentrated on subjects who were so absorbed by their work that they almost forgot the camera.

The group's aim was a sense of objectivity, whereby the targeted events and people could speak for themselves without being interviewed or the conventional need for a voice-over. Ideal subjects for documentaries according to the direct cinema ethos were:

1) A person who is interesting;

2) A person who is in an interesting situation which s/he cares deeply about;

3) A subject where a conclusion can be arrived at in a limited time; and

4) A subject where there is easy access to events.

The group believed that the cameraman, the director and the sound recordist were ...

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1) A person who is interesting;

2) A person who is in an interesting situation which s/he cares deeply about;

3) A subject where a conclusion can be arrived at in a limited time; and

4) A subject where there is easy access to events.

The group believed that the cameraman, the director and the sound recordist were all equal in status and were all film-makers, playing a role in an integrated process. They felt that the filmmaker's relationship with the subject was personal and one of equality, and that an audience was active in its engagement with the film. Direct cinema practitioners wished the audience to be presented with sufficient evidence to enable them to make up their own minds and not be mere passive observers.

'... the degree to which the camera changes the situation is mostly due to the nature of the person filming it...’ Richard Leacock.

Direct cinema was conceived with TV in mind. In the 60s TV had poor picture quality, the black-and-white image being frequently fuzzy with viewers reliant on good quality sound. Image quality such as this fitted in perfectly with direct cinema's stance on camera framing and editing; anything more complex than jerky hand-held camera shots would have been futile for the intended medium.

The group's techniques have been increasingly employed by current affairs programmes such as World in Action and more recently institutional documentaries such as jimmy's, as well as the Video Nation series.

Cinema verite

Originally coined by Russian documentarist Dziga Vertov, this term came to prominence when used to describe a type of European filmmaking in the early 1960s (e.g. the work of Jean-Luc Godard and Jean Rouch). The term cinema verite loosely refers to any type of filmmaking that uses documentary techniques, hand-held camera, a single sound microphone and interview techniques. The basic premise is that a camera and a microphone should be as near to an event as possible and the tape should be allowed

to run continuously in an attempt to capture actual reality (according to Branston and Stafford the shooting ratio for verite documentaries is twenty to thirty hours of film for a one hour programme). Rouch believed that by putting a camera and a microphone in front of a person and recording, the person was being given a public forum and consequently their reactions would be more sincere; it was for the filmmaker to know how to take advantage of this. Verite filmmaking can actually be traced back as far as the work of the Lumiere Brothers, whose actualities recorded the streets of Paris in a relatively unmanipulated way. Later in post-war Europe the neo-realism of filmmakers such as Roberto Rossellini, VIttorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattini, inspired filmmakers to use reallocations and attempt a greater sense of realism. This can be seen in such American films of America as The Naked City’ Jukes Dassin, 1948) and On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954), as well as in the work of British directors Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson.

In 1960, when the portable, sync-sound was developed, verite film-making really began to take off and feature length films using these techniques began to be made, such as John Cassavetes 'Shadows’ (1960) and Morris Engle's ‘Weddings and Babies’ (1960).

The phrase 'cinema-verite' is often used interchangeably with 'direct cinema'. Both were developed during the late 1950s/early 1960s and both make use of lightweight, portable cameras and sync-sound equipment to capture events as they happen on location, without the use of a script. The filmmakers sought to use the camera in such a way as to reveal a deeper level of truth about the world than what Vertov called the 'imperfect human eye'. In terms of cinema verite Rouch believed that a filmmaker ought to present an argued point of view in their work and was able to do so because the camera was far more accurate than a human eye and it also had a better memory. This led to what he called 'cinema-sincerity' in that filmmakers were asking their audience to have faith in their work and the evidence being presented to them.

'[You] say to the audience, this is what I saw. I didn't fake it, this is what happened. I didn't pay anyone to fight, I didn't change anyone's behaviour. I looked at what happened with my subjective eye and this is what I believe took place. ' Jean Rouch

Few filmmakers practised cinema verite in its most pure form. However, its influence can be seen in the work of several contemporary documentarists, such as Molly Dineen and Nick Broomfield. These days 'cinema-verite' is frequently used as a blanket term to describe the documentary film-making style rather than the principles of the film-makers themselves.