Direct Cinema

897 Words2 Pages

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 ... ... middle of paper ... ... 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.

More about Direct Cinema

Open Document