22 - Eternal Véritées: Cinema-Vérité and Classical Cinema

Summary

1960 was a watershed year in the history of film in America. I think of the release of Psycho in 1960 as marking the definitive end of the classical era of American movies. 1960 was the year the French “New Wave” broke on American shores. Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, 1960 also marks the emergence of what has been called “cinema-vérité.” (This term is hopelessly inadequate, of course, yet I persist in the habit of using it. I find alternatives such as “direct cinema” no less inadequate and far more misleading. These days one is far less likely to fall into the error of supposing that cinema-véritè films are guaranteed to be truthful than the error of taking them to be “direct,” that is, unmediated.)

Cinema véritè, of course, is a form of documentary film, or a method of making documentary films, in which a small crew (often a cameraperson and sound recordist, sometimes only a solitary filmmaker) goes out into the “real world” with portable synch-sound equipment and films people going about their lives, not acting.

Jean Rouch, collaborating with the sociologist Edgar Morin and taking instruction from the great French Canadian cameraman Michel Brault, made Chronicle of a Summer in France simultaneously with the earliest cinema-vèritè films in America, such as the Drew Associates productions, of which Primary is perhaps the most famous. Nonetheless, for a number of reasons, I think of cinema-vèritè as an essentially American phenomenon, not a European one.