Direct Cinema, in one guise or another, continued to be the most powerful force in documentary. The veterans David and Albert Maysles made
One of the most important American cinema-verite films, Salesman (1969), a dogged chronicle of an unsuccessful Bible salesman begging, cajoling, and bullying prospective customers. For Allan King’s A Married Couple (Canada, 1969), the director and crew lived with a Toronto family and shot over seventy hours of film; observing a string of quarrels, the filmmakers documented the marriage’s disintegration.
The most widespread use of Direct Cinema was in the emerging genre of rockumentaries. With the success of Don Pennebaker’s Bob Dylan film Don’t Look Back
(1966) and Monterey Pop (1968), filmmakers realized that lightweight cameras and direct sound recording made it possible to shoot appealing films quickly and comparatively cheaply. Woodstock (1970) and Let It Be
(1970) were records of single, memorable events, while other films were structured around tours. Both tendencies met in the most provocative instance of the genre, the Maysleses’ Gimme Shelter (1970). The film intercuts a Rolling Stones tour with a single concert in which the camera records a Hell’s Angel fatally stabbing a member of the audience. The whole action is framed by the Maysles brothers’ reviewing of the footage at the editing machine while Mick Jagger looks on.
Mercilessly parodied in This Is Spinal Tap (1984), the rockumentary proved to be the most theatrically successful documentary genre. Aimed at young moviegoers, it offered performances and sound quality unavailable on broadcast television. By the time Jonathan Demme made Stop Making Sense (1984), the concert had become secondary to the filming; David Byrne story-boarded the Talking Heads’ performance for the shooting. Finnish fiction filmmaker Aki Kaurismaki pushed the rockumentary to its absurdist limit, scheduling a real rock band, the Leningrad Cowboys (“the worst rock ’n’ roll band in the world”), alongside the prestigious Soviet Red Army Ensemble in a concert filmed as Total Balalaika Show (1993).
The dominance of Direct Cinema techniques led filmmakers to extend and interrogate them. Norman Mailer’s Beyond the Law (1968) and Maidstone (1970) were semi-improvised narratives in the tradition of John Cassavetes’s Shadows, with Direct Cinema veteran Pen-nebaker supplying the cinematography. Some rockumentaries also included staged fictional scenes, as in 200 Motels (1971), Renaldo and Clara (1977), and Pink Floyd-The Wall (1982).
Jim McBride’s David Holtzman’s Diary (1967) was more critical: by using Direct Cinema techniques to treat a fictional man’s life, McBride suggests that they are purely conventional. Similarly, Shirley Clarke’s Por-
24.1 Assailed by his friends for “acting,” Jason breaks down {Portrait of Jason).
Trait of Jason (1967) at first seems an instance of pure Direct Cinema. Clarke records long monologues of a black homosexual prostitute, and, in the manner of Jean Rouch, she hovers offscreen asking Jason increasingly probing questions. But Clarke also criticizes Direct Cinema’s selectivity and invisible editing by keeping to a single camera position, using long takes, and acknowledging shot changes by letting the screen lose focus and fade to black. Thus Portrait of Jason resembles the work of Warhol: an exhibitionistic performer is berated by others (here, his friends offscreen) and collapses in psychic pain (24.1).
McBride and Clarke were exceptional in criticizing Direct Cinema, and standardized uses of the approach continued throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The technology and techniques proved well adapted to capturing the filmmaker’s personal experiences. Kazuo Hara’s My Intimate Eros: Love Song 1974 (Japan, 1974) records the filmmaker’s obsessive search for the woman who has left him. In Best Boy (1979), Ira Wohl traces how his cousin, a middle-aged man with a learning disability, leaves his family to enter a hospital. Michael Moore’s ironic Roger & Me (1989) chronicles his attempts to confront the chairman of General Motors with the effects of Michigan plant closings.
Direct Cinema attracted other directors because of its ability to capture the immediate texture of social and political processes. The most famous filmmaker to exploit this capacity was Frederick Wiseman, whose Direct Cinema documentaries since the late 1960s essentially defined the pure form of the style (see box).
World History
