Eastman Kodak introduced the 16mm gauge in 1923, chiefly for home movies and educational films. During the 1930s, some American avant-gardists began using the gauge for experimental work (p. 318). During World War II, 16mm came into wider use. It was well suited for combat filming, and 16mm prints of educational and propaganda films circulated among military stations and on the home front. The U. S. government donated 16mm projectors to schools and civic organizations so they could screen government releases. After the war, documentary and experimental filmmakers around the world eagerly took up the format.
Television arrived in Europe and North America in the early 1950s. In those prevideotape days, the cheapness and flexibility of 16mm made it the standard gauge for reportage, commercials, and TV films. Manufacturers began to produce professional 16mm cameras. These usually had zoom lenses and reflex viewfinders, which allowed the filmmaker to sight directly through the lens during filming. In 1952, the Arriflex 16 established a new standard for ease of operation and became the model for most professional 16mm. In addition, Eastman and other companies developed a range of 16mm film stocks, often "fast" emulsions that permitted filming in relatively low light.
Two further developments led to Direct Cinema. Before the mid-1950s nearly all professional 16mm cameras were so heavy that steady shots could be obtained only if the camera was anchored to a tripod. Yet attaching a standard camera to a tripod was time-consuming; by the time the camera was set up, the action had usually passed. The drawbacks of using a tripod encouraged documentarists to restage events. In addition, the bulky camera made subjects aware of the act of filming. Only filmmakers using amateur equipment, such as Rouch in his ethnographic shorts and Stan Brakhage in his experimental Desistfilm (1953), could easily shoot hand-held.
Around 1958, several manufacturers introduced lighter 16mm professional cameras. The Auricon Cinevoice and the Eclair Cameflex each weighed around sixty pounds, light enough to be anchored on a shoulder brace. An improved model of the Arriflex 16 weighed just twenty-two pounds. The prototype KMT Coutant-Mathot Eclair, made available to Rouch for Chronique d'un ete (1961), weighed
Another Drew cameraman can be glimpsed waiting to capture a reverse angle.
Shortly afterward, Drew and Leacock were commissioned to make several films for ABC television, notably Yanki, No! (1960), an examination of anti-u. S. feelings in Latin America, and The Children Were Watching (1960), a study of school integration. Between 1961 and 1963, Drew Associates made twelve more films, including Eddie (1961), Jane (1962), and The Chair (1962). Ten of these films became known as the “Living Camera” series. By now they fully exploited direct sound.
Drew, who exercised editorial control over most of the films made by the company, saw documentary as a way of telling dramatic stories. “In each of the stories there is a time when man comes against moments of tension, and pressure, and revelation, and decision. It’s these moments that interest us most.”2 For Drew, Direct Cinema gripped audiences through what came to be called its crisis structure. Most Drew-unit films center on a high-stakes situation to be resolved in a few days or hours. The film arouses the viewer’s emotion by showing
Less than twenty pounds. Holding such a camera, the filmmaker could pan quickly, walk with the subject, ride in a car, follow the situation wherever it led.
Just as important were improvements in sound recording. Documentaries had relied on voice-over narration partly because filmmakers could not easily record lip-synchronized sound outside the studio. It was far less trouble to add music, background noise, and commentary to a string of images than to let the participants speak for themselves. Only in highly prepared circumstances—a politician giving a speech before a microphone, a person interviewed in a studio—was it possible to record lip-sync sound during filming. Even the relatively spontaneous Free Cinema films suffered from the limitations of sound recording.
During the early 1950s, both fiction and documentary filmmakers began to replace optical sound-on-film recording with magnetic sound, recorded on tape. Documen-tarists consequently tried to capture sound on-site with a portable tape recorder. The Swiss company Nagra introduced a tape recorder for filmmaking in 1953 and made an improved version available four years later.
The problem now was synchronizing the picture track with sound recorded on the spot. Around 1958, engineers devised the Pilotone system, by which an electric pulse is sent from the camera to the recorder and registered on one track of the tape. In playback, the pulse automatically adjusts the speed of the tape to correspond to the picture. Most early versions of the Pilotone system used a cable to connect the camera to the recorder. This umbilical cord hampered the freedom of movement that Direct Cinema sought, so engineers created radio-transmission systems. A quartz crystal or a tuning fork in the camera emitted a pulse that the recorder picked up and recorded as a guide for synchronization. The wireless system, first used extensively in the United States, became standard internationally by the mid-1960s.
Although synchronization and camera noise still posed problems, by 1958 portable 16mm cameras and recorders, along with smaller microphones and faster film stocks, had triggered a revolution in filmmaking practice.
Conflict, suspense, and a decisive outcome. Primary exploits the crisis structure, as does The Chair, which shows lawyers’ struggles to save a rehabilitated convict from execution. The crisis puts the participants under stress and reveals their personalities. Often, as in Eddie or Jane, the protagonist fails to achieve the goal, and the film ends with a scrutiny of his or her emotional reaction.
Drew used multiple crews on most films, tracing out several lines of action and intercutting between different forces racing against the clock. He encouraged each cameraman to efface himself, to accustom the subjects to his presence, and to respond intuitively to the developing drama. The approach was that of feature journalism, in which the reporter balances respect for the facts with subjective judgments about selection and emphasis.
Soon Drew’s filmmakers left the unit to form their own companies. The Maysles brothers departed to make Showman (1962), a study of film producer Joseph E. Levine, and What’s Happening! The Beatles in New York
(1964). Far more episodic than the Drew films, the Maysleses’ projects avoided the crisis structure and offered casual, sketchy portraits of show-business celebrities. What’s Happening!, the first Direct Cinema film in the United States to omit voice-over narration entirely, was simply a diary of the Beatle’s tour, rousing one professional television producer to complain, “As most documentary filmmakers understand the film, it was hardly a film at all.” 3
Don Pennebaker and Richard Leacock also left Drew Associates, forming their own firm. Pennebaker made a study of handicapped twins (Elizabeth and Mary, 1965) and specialized in films documenting American popular music (Don’t Look Back, 1966; Monterey Pop, 1968; Keep on Rockin’, 1970). Leacock went on to make Happy Mother’s Day (1963), showing how the birth of quintuplets disrupts a small town; A Stravinsky Portrait (1964); and Ku Klux Klan—The Invisible Empire (1965).
Leacock, the most proselytizing of U. S. Direct Cinema filmmakers, advocated what he called “uncontrolled cinema.” The filmmaker would not interfere with the event; the filmmaker simply observed, as discreetly and responsibly as possible. Leacock believed that a self-effacing crew could become so integrated into a situation that people would forget they were being filmed.
Television was also a major impetus for the emergence of Direct Cinema in Canada. The creation of national broadcasting in 1953 encouraged documentarists at the National Film Board (NFB) to shoot in 16mm and rapidly make topical works. Two movements emerged at about the same time, one among English-speaking Canadians, the other among Francophones in Quebec.
The NFB’s “B unit” made several films for Candid Eye, an English-language series broadcast in the fall of 1958 and 1959. These films took a candid-camera approach, with hidden cameras and telephoto lenses. With a few exceptions—notably the first film in the series, The Days before Christmas (1958)—they did not employ lip-sync sound. Terence Macartney-Filgate encouraged use of the hand-held camera in this film, in his study of the Salvation Army (Blood and Fire, 1958), and in his examination of the plight of migrant tobacco pickers (The Back-Breaking Leaf, 1959).
Avoiding scripts and letting the structure emerge from editing, the “Candid Eye” directors shared Drew’s belief in an objective, observational cinema. Whereas Drew was influenced by Life photojournalism, the Canadian group looked instead to British Free Cinema and to photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, who sought the exact moment of insight that illuminates everyday, unspectacular incidents. Thus the “Candid Eye” films lack the crisis structure of the Drew unit’s work.
The “Candid Eye” series ended by 1960, but filmmakers associated with it went on to other documentaries. The most distinctive was Lonely Boy (1962), a portrait of singer Paul Anka by Wolf Koenig and Roman Kroitor. This ironic expose of how popular music exploits both its stars and its public showed how Direct Cinema techniques could be used to slant the viewer’s attitudes. In one sequence, we hear Anka explain how he calculates a gesture while we see him onstage making the gesture, which might have seemed spontaneous without his voice-over. The filmmakers present Anka as confessing to manipulating his fans.
The NFB’s move to Montreal in 1956 had created more French involvement in the agency. In 1958, three French filmmakers shot Les Raquetteurs (“The Snow-shoers”), a humorous and affectionate report on a convocation of snowshoe enthusiasts. Although shot in 35mm without direct sound, the film was a landmark for Direct Cinema in Canada. The cinematographer Michel Brault plunged into the action in a manner that looked forward to the Drew unit’s wide angles and fluid camera (21.23-21.25).
Praise for Les Raquetteurs encouraged the NFB to establish a French-language unit consisting of Brault, Gilles Groulx, Claude Jutra, Marcel Fournier, and others. La Lutte (“The Match,” 1961), Golden Gloves
(1961), and Quebec-USA (1962) revealed the French team’s proficiency with the new equipment and the members’ dedication to a committed version of Direct Cinema. Unlike the Candid Eye group, which embraced an aesthetic of objectivity, the French team identified with the people and their urban popular culture.
The urge to explore the social identity of the Francophone community came to the fore in the feature-length Pour la suite du monde (“For the Rest of the World,” aka Moontrap, 1963). Cameraman Michel Brault, the poet Pierre Perrault, and their sound recordist lived for a year in an isolated French Canadian village where a variant of seventeenth-century French was still common speech. Consisting primarily of interviews with people recalling the community’s history, Pour la suite du monde illustrates what Perrault called cinema vecu
21.26 “Are you happy?” [Chronique d’un etc).
21.27 Marcelline’s walk through Les Halles: as the camera tracks further back, she recites her memories of the war into a portable tape recorder in her handbag.
21.28 Marcelline explains that despite the camera’s presence, she behaved sincerely in her scenes.
(“lived cinema”). “Nothing is more real than an old man telling of an event he has lived through. Often the facts themselves may not have any value but the telling of them has.”5 Perrault brought to light the history and customs of the French Canadian population through several later films.
In France, Direct Cinema emerged not out of television but out of Jean Rouch’s ethnographic inquiries. The key film, and the most influential work of Direct Cinema in any country, was Chronique d’un ete (Chronicle of a Summer, 1961), which Rouch made in collaboration with the sociologist Edgar Morin. Out of their collaboration came yet another model of Direct Cinema—one in which the filmmakers did not simply observe or sympathize but rather prodded and provoked.
After a prologue in which Rouch and Morin interview Marcelline, a market researcher, Chronique d’un he shows her asking people on the street, “Are you happy.?” (21.26). In the cliched and defensive responses of the passersby, the sequence reveals the superficiality of casual poll taking. The rest of the film scrutinizes the opinions and memories of a group of Parisians (21.27). Students and working people discuss their lives with Morin, who presses them to explain themselves. Gradually the interviewees come to know one another, a process that the film documents.
In an extension of Rouch’s technique in Moi un noir, the last portion of Chronique d’un he shows the subjects discussing the film that Rouch and Morin have made. Their comments—the footage is said to be boring, truthful, embarrassing, even indecent—become part of the film (21.28). In an epilogue, Rouch and
Morin appraise the success of their enterprise and anticipate the reaction of the public.
Chronique lacks the suspenseful drama of the Drew films. The film centers on ordinary people explaining their lives, while Morin’s insistent questioning makes Direct Cinema a provocative force. Rouch and Morin did not accept Leacock’s demand that the camera efface itself. Viewers of Chronique are given occasional shots of equipment or technicians. For Rouch, the camera was not a brake on the action but an accelerator: “You push these people to confess themselves. . . . It’s a very strange kind of confession in front of the camera, where the camera is, let’s say, a mirror, and also a window open to the outside.”6 An inquiry into personal history and psychology, Chronique encourages its subjects to define themselves through performances for the camera.
Chronique’s prologue calls the film “a new experiment in cinema-truth (cinema verite).” The important word is new, since Morin believed that the emerging technology and the willingness to explore everyday life permitted filmmakers to go beyond Vertov’s Kino-Pravda (“film-truth”; p. 185). But the label got applied to far more than Chronique, and even American filmmakers began to call their work cinema verite. A 1963 conference of filmmakers found it too biased a term, but up to the present, cinema verite remains a synonym for Direct Cinema.
A more hybrid version of Direct Cinema was explored in two films by Mario Ruspoli, shot by Michel Brault (cameraman on several French Canadian films as well as Chronique). Les Inconnus de la terre (“The Unknown Ones of the Land,” 1961) studies the poor peasants of the Lozere region, observing peasants discussing their problems. Regard sur la folie (“A Look at Madness,” 1962) visits an asylum in the same area.
21.29, left The long lens films from a distance as a doctor, wearing a microphone, consoles an old woman in Regard sur la folie.
21.30, right Referring to the end of Chronique d’un he, Ruspoli’s camera leaves a conversation behind and confronts the viewer.
21.31, left Le Joli mai: “The others don’t count much for you, do they?” “The others? What others?”
21.32, right In the shooting-gallery scene that opens “The Return of Fan-tomas,” Le Joli mai builds up the atmosphere of political menace pervading “happy” Paris.
Ruspoli’s films lie midway between the American “observational” method and the Rouch-Morin “provocational” one. At times, the camera style is discreet, even surreptitious (21.29). Yet, even more than Rouch, Rus-poli flaunts the act of recording, showing his crew and ending Regard sur la folie with the camera turning from a conversation between doctors to advance toward us
(21.30). We are continually aware of the filmmaker’s presence even if the subjects are not.
A direct criticism of Rouch and Morin’s method is to be found in Chris Marker’s Le Joli mai (“The Pretty May,” 1963). Marker could not embrace the Direct Cinema trend, preferring always to retain the voice of a narrator who reflects on the images before us. Le Joli mai absorbs Direct Cinema techniques into a larger meditation on freedom and political awareness.
The first part of the film inquires into the state of happiness in Paris in May 1962, the moment when the Algerian war ended. Marker’s aggressive questioning of smug or oblivious people pushes the camera-as-catalyst tactic to the point of rudeness. He also criticizes the limited, apolitical notion of happiness from which Chronique began. (Marker ironically dedicates his film “To the happy many.”) A clothes salesman says that his goal in life is to make as much money as possible; a couple in love are indifferent to social issues (21.31). Part two, opening with mysterious evocations of terrorism and right-wing reprisals (21.32), consists of interviews with people who seek political solutions to contemporary problems.
Harsh and acerbic, shot through with Marker’s quirky humor and poetic digressions, Le Joli mai asks cinema verite to recognize the complexity of life and the political forces governing French society at a historical turning point. Yet Marker’s meditation has its base in Direct Cinema; his evidence consists partly of his lip-sync interviews. “Truth is not the destination,” he conceded, “but perhaps it is the path.”7
The American, Canadian, and French exponents of Direct Cinema were keenly aware of each others’ work. Many of them first met at a 1958 seminar. At a conference at Lyon in 1963, Direct Cinema documentarists debated their differences. Should the camera observe, empathize, or challenge.? Is it more authentic to film with several cameras at once.? Should the director be the camera operator.? Above all, what is the responsibility of the director to the people, their lives, and the event recorded.? Direct Cinema, apart from its technical and technological innovations, raised perennial issues of the ethics of documentary film.
By the mid-1960s, several sophisticated 16mm and 35mm cameras offered all filmmakers the flexibility of Direct Cinema. The trend revolutionized documentary; after the early 1960s, most documentarists utilized the hand-held camera to snatch bits of arresting action (21.33). Direct Cinema also gave ethnographic filmmaking a new flexibility. It shaped the course of several national cinemas: the French Canadians Groulx and
Jutra moved into features on the basis of their NFB work, while directors in Third World countries made Direct Cinema central to their style (see Chapter 23).
The open-ended, episodic narratives of Direct Cinema also reinforced tendencies in the fiction films of the art cinema. Stylistically, most of the new waves from 1958 to 1967 pledged themselves to the hand-held camera, available light, and apparently off-the-cuff shooting (see Chapter 20). (Few directors, however, undertook the harder task of recording direct sound.) More mainstream films, such as Dr. Strangelave; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1963), Seven Days in May (1964), and A Hard Day’s Night
(1964) invoked Direct Cinema techniques when a sense of spontaneous action was required. Even fiction films set in the distant past or the future could intensify their realism (21.34). And Direct Cinema became a central tool of western militant cinema of the 1960s, which relied on unstaged interviews, footage shot on the fly, and the ease of taped sound. In both technology and technique, Direct Cinema exercised a powerful international influence throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
World History
