Cinema Verite's Fly On The Wall

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Cinema verite is a “fly on the wall” documentary style that attempts to capture the essence of reality by holding to the tenet that actual situations produce a different kind of cinematic truth than contrived ones by being unobtrusive and watching the situation. Stephan Mamber describes the essential element of Cinema Verite as the act of filming people real people in uncontrolled situations. Here the people are not actors and the situations are not scripted. This leads to a situation in which, as Wiseman highlights in “You start with Bromide”, instead of allowing the story to dictate the footage, the footage is allowed to dictate what narrative can come out of it. High School (Wiseman, 1968) employs the use of cinema verite to capture essence of reality through the theme of …show more content…

This opens up space for influence of filmmaking in such situations. Similar notions of influence of media are visible in Citizen Four (Poitras, 2014). Even though she gets involved by asking Snowden questions like “how do you feel?” and “are you nervous” she maintains the principles of cinema verite by documenting her encounter with Snowden. What is interesting here then is that she herself is put into a similar situation as Snowden. Having to go to Hong Kong and having an air gapped laptop shows the personal investment of the Poitras in ensuring Snowden’s and her safety. She employs shots of Snowden’s day to day activities and shots of him saying “it’s scary, but at the same time it’s liberating to show that” to show what happens when human existence is reduced to digital traces without much say of those being surveillanced. As Lisa Parks describes it in Cover your Webcam, Poitras uses a long Edward Snowden reflected in a Hong Kong hotel room mirror to privileges the performativity and temporality of speaking, questioning, writing, witnessing, and

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