Direct Cinema
Direct Cinema is a form of documentary film that originated in North America in the late 1950s.
history
The origin of "Direct Cinema" is usually traced back to the invention of lighter 16mm cameras and portable synchronous devices, but this has also been criticized as technological determinism . The film historian Claire Johnston believed this form of documentary film to be possible even without synchronous devices much earlier: “In fact, the light camera [but not the portable synchronous sound machine ] was developed for propaganda purposes in Nazi Germany in the 1930s; the reasons why it was only used in general in the 1950s remain unclear. ” The pioneers of“ Direct Cinema ”, on the other hand, considered portability of the equipment to be decisive, but only the trust and well-being of those portrayed in the filmmakers would have the quality enables their work.
A pioneering work of the new form was Les Raquetteurs (1958) ( The Snowshoers ) by the Québecois Michel Brault and Gilles Groulx . Direct cinema techniques were also used in early feminist cinema. In the United States, Robert Drew founded Drew Associates , for which Richard Leacock , DA Pennebaker , Terence Macartney-Filgate, and Albert and David Maysles worked. In 1960 this group produced three films for Time Life Broadcast: Yanqui, No! , Eddie (On the Pole) , and Primary . Primary , in particular, is considered to be a style-defining element for “Direct Cinema”. Primary documents the primary campaign between the Democratic Senators John F. Kennedy and Hubert H. Humphrey in Wisconsin in 1960.
Direct Cinema and Cinéma vérité
A distinction is often made between “direct cinema” and cinéma vérité . Film historians have presented the direct cinema movement as a North American version of the “Cinéma vérité” - an idea that emerged in France with Jean Rouch's Chronicle of a Summer (1961). Cinéma vérité uses the power of the camera to provoke reactions and discover something. “Direct Cinema” is more strictly oriented towards “pure observation”. It is based on an agreement between the filmmaker, the subjects in the film and the audience, as if the presence of the camera did not (substantially) change the filmed event. In “Direct Cinema” the filmmaker tries to be like a “fly on the wall”. However, Claire Johnston's striving for neutrality was also rated as illusory: “It is clear that if cinema consists of the production of characters, then the idea of non-intervention is pure mystification . What the camera actually captures is the 'natural' world of the dominant ideology. "
In a 2003 interview (Zuber), Robert Drew explained how he saw the difference between “Cinéma vérité” and “Direct Cinema”: “ I had made Primary and a few other films, then I went to a conference in France [ with Leacock Meeting in 1963 sponsored by Radio Television Française ]. I was surprised to see the cinéma vérité filmmakers addressing people in the street with a microphone in their hands. My goal was to capture real life without interference. There was a contradiction between us. It was pointless. They had a cameraman, a sound engineer, and six others - eight people huddled around. It was a bit like the Marx Brothers . My idea was to have one or two people who unobtrusively capture the moment. "(Ellis, Chapter 14)
Jean Rouch claimed in 1963 that everything that happens in France in the «Cinéma vérité» comes from the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). On the other hand, today the “Cinéma vérité” can also be seen as a French further development of the “cinéma direct” by Brault and his French-speaking colleagues in the NFB:
"Il faut le dire, tout ce que nous avons fait en France dans le domaine du cinéma-vérité vient de l'ONF (Canada). C'est Brault qui a apporté une technique nouvelle de tournage que nous ne connaissions pas et que nous copions tous depuis. D'ailleurs, vraiment, on a la "needite", ça, c'est sûr; même les gens qui considèrent que Brault est un emmerdeur ou qui étaient jaloux sont forcés de le reconnaître. "
" Translation: You have to admit, everything that we in France have made in the area of cinéma vérité, comes from the ONF (National Film Board of Canada). Brault developed a new technique of turning that we did not know and that we have copied ever since. By the way, you really have the Brault virus, that's for sure; even the people who consider Brault to be a pain in the ass or who were jealous are forced to admit it. "
As pioneers of form, Brault , Perrault and others never used the term cinéma vérité to describe their work because they found it too pretentious. They preferred “cinéma direct”. And even if they sometimes acted as catalysts for situations (e.g. by asking people to start fishing again) they always worked in small crews that were close to the people filmed.
“Cinéma vérité” and “Direct Cinema” are both based on the priority of film editing in order to give the recorded material a shape and a structure. It was not uncommon to work with a ratio of finished film to cut material of 1:40 or even 1: 100. Because of this, the editors are often viewed by the filmmakers as co-authors of the work.
bibliography
- Mo Beyerle (ed.): The American documentary of the 1960s. Direct Cinema and Radical Cinema (= Campus. Research. Series of publications by the Center for North America Research. Vol. 659). Campus-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main et al. 1991, ISBN 3-593-34413-0 .
- Jean-Louis Comolli : The detour via the direct. 1969. In: Eva Hohenberger (Ed.): Images of the Real. Texts on the theory of documentary film (= texts on documentary film. Vol. 3). Vorwerk 8, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-930916-13-4 , pp. 242-265.
- Jack Ellis: The Documentary Idea. A Critical History of English-Language Documentary Film and Video. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs NJ 1989, ISBN 0-13-217142-2 .
- Claire Johnston : Women's Cinema as Counter-Cinema. 1975. In: Sue Thornham (Ed.): Feminist Film Theory. A reader. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh 1999, ISBN 0-7486-0959-8 , pp. 31-40.
- Bill Nichols: Representing Reality. Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Indiana University Press, Bloomington IN et al. 1991, ISBN 0-253-34060-8 .
- Dave Saunders: Direct Cinema. Observational Documentary and the Politics of the Sixties. Wallflower Press, London et al. 2007, ISBN 978-1-905674-15-2 .
- Sharon Zuber: Robert Drew, Telephone Interview, June 4, 2003. In: Re-Shaping Documentary Expectations. New Journalism and Direct Cinema. Unpublished dissertation. The College of William and Mary in Virginia, Williamsburg VA 2004.
See also
Web links
- Direct Cinema: The Stories of the Class from 1960. FAZ , June 6, 2008
- Direct Cinema. Article at the Allary Film Movie College
swell
- ^ Claire Johnston : Women's Cinema as Counter-Cinema. 1975. In: Sue Thornham (Ed.): Feminist Film Theory. A reader. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh 1999, ISBN 0-7486-0959-8 , pp. 31-40.
- ^ "Direct Cinema: The Stories of the Class from 1960" , FAZ , June 6, 2008