Cinéma vérité
Cinéma vérité, translating to "truthful cinema," is a documentary filmmaking approach that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s across various countries, including Canada, France, and the United States. This style prioritizes capturing real-life events as they occur, often in uncontrolled environments, and emphasizes the filmmaker's engagement with the subject. It marks a departure from traditional documentary methods, which often relied on structured narratives, omniscient narration, and contrived editing techniques. By utilizing lightweight, handheld cameras and portable audio equipment, filmmakers could document spontaneous moments and foster a deeper intimacy between themselves and their subjects.
Cinéma vérité challenges the notion of objective truth in filmmaking, acknowledging that every decision made during filming and editing introduces a level of subjectivity. The editing process in this style seeks to minimize the filmmaker's influence, presenting events in a manner that appears organic and authentic. Notable films in the cinéma vérité tradition include "Primary," "Chronicle of a Summer," and "Titicut Follies," among others. The techniques of cinéma vérité have also permeated fictional filmmaking, influencing modern works that incorporate its stylistic elements. As a dynamic form of storytelling, cinéma vérité continues to evolve, with contemporary examples emerging into the 2020s, reflecting an enduring interest in capturing the essence of reality through film.
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Cinéma vérité
Cinéma vérité refers to a stylistic, technical, and philosophical approach to documentary filmmaking that aims to create heightened senses of immediacy, engagement, and truth between filmmakers, their subjects, and audiences. The term cinéma vérité is French and translates as "truthful cinema." During the 1950s and 1960s, cinéma vérité arose independently in multiple countries, including Canada, France, and the United States. It is usually understood as a reaction to the artifice of conventional approaches to documentary filmmaking. In the United States, the phrase direct cinema is often used in place of cinéma vérité.
Prior to the rise of cinéma vérité, documentaries were typically dominated by stylistic elements like omniscient voiceover narration, static "talking head" interviews with subjects, and a carefully framed structure guided by deliberate and manipulative editing. Cinéma vérité challenged these conventions by creating heightened senses of spontaneity and immediacy, which were primarily achieved by filming subjects in unplanned, uncontrolled real-life situations. Editing was used to re-create the events as they were witnessed by the filmmaker during shooting, as opposed to artificially framing or shaping the narrative.
Background
Film historians have noted that documentary filmmaking began when cinema began, as the first movies ever made used real-life people, places, and events as their subjects. Cinematic notions of truth have been the subject of much debate from the medium's very beginnings. The idea that there is no such thing as objective truth in filmmaking is unanimously accepted. All documentarians make decisions about where to point the camera, an act that necessarily omits everything outside the frame. Similarly, cutting to something inevitably means cutting away from something else. These formal elements, which are universal to all documentaries, impose subjectivity onto the filmmaking process.
During the first few decades of cinematic history, documentaries gradually evolved to embrace the necessary artifice and subjective editorializing of the stories they told. This was, in part, due to the limitations of early filmmaking technologies. Cameras were heavy and effectively stationary unless elaborate, labor-intensive tracks were built. Careful lighting was needed to properly illuminate subjects, giving filmmakers little leeway regarding movement and positioning. Within these confines, a distinctive documentary style emerged that placed subjects in highly controlled environments, leaving filmmakers to impose their authorial signatures onto their movies through extensive control and manipulation of the shooting and editing processes.
In the 1950s, a new generation of relatively lightweight, handheld motion picture cameras appeared. These cameras, along with the rise of portable audio recording equipment, freed documentarians from the constraints of legacy film technologies. They allowed films to be shot on location, with greater freedom and flexibility. By the late 1950s, documentary filmmakers in multiple countries were using them to explore the greatly expanded range of creative possibilities they offered.
Around the same time, the French New Wave filmmaking movement was gaining worldwide notoriety and popularity. The French New Wave represented an energetic break from the artificial pretenses of studio moviemaking, encouraging experimentation and inspiring documentarians to follow its example. Cinéma vérité can be viewed as the documentary movement that corresponds to the fictional movies made by French New Wave filmmakers.
Overview
The definitive aspect of cinéma vérité is its focus on having the camera go to the subject rather than having the subject go to the camera. It places a stylistic premium on capturing real-life events as they unfold, with a strong emphasis on filming subjects in uncontrolled environments. In its purest form, cinéma vérité also rejects all notions of preplanning, avoiding the use of even rudimentary story outlines. Rather, it simply follows its subjects, allowing situations to unfold organically while the camera stands by to capture the "truth" of the ensuing events.
One of the key elements of cinéma vérité is the increased intimacy it creates between filmmaker and subject. By their very nature, controlled approaches to documentary filmmaking can only approximate the actions, reactions, and emotions of their subjects. Prior to the rise of cinéma vérité, such elements could only be verbally described or dramatically re-created in documentary films. Portable camera and audio technologies allowed filmmakers and their crews to capture events as they happened, thus creating an unrehearsed final product derived from raw authenticity.
Similarly, the editing style used in cinéma vérité also seeks to limit or eliminate the intrusive authorial hand of the filmmaker. Rather than cutting for emphasis or using cuts to shape, guide, or distort the unfolding narrative, editing recedes to the background. The selection of a subject, the filming of that subject, and the editing of the footage are all seen as related steps in a single, unified process rather than separate processes assigned to the purview of individual crew members. This approach to editing is underpinned by the philosophical assumption that an independent editor who was not present during shooting would invariably distort the original character of the events captured on film. The cinéma vérité style demands that documentarians make every effort not to impose outside biases or preconceptions onto their material. Rather, the goal of the filmmaker is simply to present what actually happened as seamlessly and accurately as possible.
Well-known examples of documentaries in the cinéma vérité style include Primary (1960), Chronicle of a Summer (1961), Titicut Follies (1967), Don't Look Back (1967), Salesman (1968), Portrait of Jason (1968), Grey Gardens (1975), and The War Room (1993). Noteworthy cinéma vérité documentarians include the likes of Robert Drew, Robert Flaherty, Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker, Jean Rouch, and Frederick Wiseman. Flaherty and Rouch are often cited as the progenitors of the movement, although cinéma vérité concurrently developed in many countries and did not arise from the efforts of a single filmmaker or group of filmmakers. Documentaries in the cinéma vérité style continued to be produced throughout the early 2020s. Dick Johnson Is Dead (2020), Cow (2021), When We Were Bullies (2021), and Jeen-Yuhs (2022) were all shot in the cinéma vérité style.
Over time, fiction filmmakers began to draw on the techniques used in cinéma vérité, importing their formal and technical elements into fabricated narratives. Such approaches continue to be used by contemporary directors, with recent high-profile movies such as The Blair Witch Project (1999), Cloverfield (2008), District 9 (2009), as well as The Florida Project (2017) and Gasoline Rainbow (2023), using documentary-style cinéma vérité techniques to achieve specific stylistic effects.
Bibliography
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Barsam, Richard Meran. Nonfiction Film: A Critical History. Indiana University Press, 1992.
Brody, Richard. "The Godfather of Cinéma Vérité." New Yorker, 31 July 2014, www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/godfather-cinema-verite. Accessed 13 Dec. 2024.
"Cinéma Vérité vs. Direct Cinema: An Introduction." New York Film Academy, 20 Nov. 2015, www.nyfa.edu/student-resources/cinema-verite-vs-direct-cinema-an-introduction/. Accessed 13 Dec. 2024.
Kahana, Jonathan. The Documentary Film Reader: History, Theory, Criticism. Oxford University Press, 2016.
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