The documentary tradition in cinema is rich and full of history; though it might be easy to assume that it is entirely different from narrative filmmaking, the two influence each other more often than one might think.
Documentary history
The quickest way to misunderstand documentary cinema is to fall into a trap—that narrative feature filmmaking is fictional, and documentary films are by definition non-fictional. Often, however, documentary becomes a shorthand way of referring to films that cover real subjects, real people, and real situations. Embedded in this shorthand is the assumption that documentaries are not manipulated in the same way that fiction films are. You know fictional film techniques—dramatic lighting, sweeping camera moves, highly expressive editing. These techniques are generally associated with the embellishment of fictional storytelling, like flowery language in literature. However, documentary cinema has all of these tools available to it as well. When you consider documentary in light of its cinematic properties, the boundaries between fictional and non-fictional film don’t seem so clearly delineated.
Since its beginning as an art form, cinema has long been used to capture the real world. Think about its origins in photography for a second—photographs were seen as a technological innovation, in some ways an improvement upon painting, which, no matter how skilled the artist, was ultimately an interpretation of reality, not reality itself. Photographs allowed people to see a rendering of reality, frozen for a moment in time. Cinema expanded upon that idea by making the pictures move, drawing attention to two key things: movement and duration of time. Film images captured how people, animals, and other subjects moved, but it also recorded how long those movements took. Some of the first filmmakers were fascinated by the apparatus’s ability to record, and then play back, an image of reality as it was perceived by the human eye. The Lumiere Brothers, the French pioneers of cinema, first turned their camera on their own workers leaving the factory they owned. They documented what an ordinary event, the end of a work day, looked like as anyone standing across the street might see it. You can find it, and many other Lumiere films, on YouTube. As you watch, pay close attention to the way the camera stays at a remove, simply watching what happens in its everyday quality of life, rather than interrupting or chopping the event into pieces.
This early French film demonstrates how deeply the realist impulse embedded itself into filmmaking around the world. Some sixty-plus years later, Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s Chronicle of a Summer (1961) would likewise illustrate the compelling pull of realism. Working in the documentary form, Rouch and Morin further stretched the limits of what even the non-fiction film could accommodate, popularizing a style of filmmaking that would come to be known as cinema verite. They directly interview a number of French people about their lives, their homes, their jobs, their hopes, their dreams, their disappointments; they also observe the participants in their natural environments or in conversation with one another. The goal is to approach the truth more fully than the medium had ever shown possible.
Verite - Realism
Betsy A. McClane, in her history of documentary cinema, argues that these filmmakers are bound by some specific constraints. She says “Documentary filmmakers limit themselves to extracting and arranging from what already exists rather than making up content. They may recreate what they have observed, but they do not create totally out of imagination as creators of stories do.” This is an interesting definition when considered in the context of Chronicle of a Summer: the documentarians are not necessarily only recording what happens as neutral observers, but instead posing the questions to the interview subjects. The answers the subjects give only come as a result of the filmmakers’ interference. This is made more obvious by the presence of the filmmakers in the image itself—they appear on screen, asking their subjects questions and becoming a part of the documentary. This approach would inspire a number of subsequent documentarians, most notably, the American filmmaker Michael Moore, who is a constant presence in his own work, appearing on screen and narrating the films; his personality shapes how audiences see his films.
And yet, we would not go so far as to say that the film is fictional—it clearly deals with real persons instead of characters, and contains no overall narrative drive. It is not scripted. But it is shaped. In documentary cinema, editing becomes arguably even more important than it is in narrative cinema because of the sheer amount of footage that documentary filmmakers have to sift through in order to make a coherent cinematic experience. Narrative filmmakers begin with a story, characters, and a blueprint for the film they want to make in a screenplay. The production process becomes the act of bringing the screenplay to life through interpretation. Documentary filmmakers are not so fortunate. Because they discover the subject matter through the act of gathering footage, the loss ratio is much higher. They will shoot far more footage than will eventually appear in the final film by an order of magnitude. The sheer amount of film to sift through magnifies the importance of editing both as a practical task and as a technique for shaping the footage itself. What is placed in the film and what is removed becomes of paramount importance. Though documentaries tend to have a reputation for telling the truth, the highly selective editing process of generating a coherent film calls that reputation into question. Whenever you see a documentary, you are seeing an interpretation of reality, not the real thing.
It is important then to think about how films like Chronicle of a Summer are structured, because the structure represents the clearest indication of what the filmmaker is trying to say. How scenes are ordered changes their impact on us as viewers. Documentary filmmakers, because of the production conditions McClane outlines above, are more at the mercy of circumstance than narrative filmmakers. They can shape the reality they capture, but the reality they decide to shoot in the first place must be invested with some kind of inherent drama or excitement. Documentary filmmakers are largely free from the chain of causality than dominates classical narrative cinema, so they can use their structures to express ideas, create links between scenes through association, and expose contradictions by juxtaposing characters are scenes that clash with one another. From a structural standpoint, McClane describes Chronicle of a Summer as “a choreographed sampling of individual opinions, attitudes, and values of Parisians in the summer of 1960.” She suggests that the film’s value gives audiences “a chance to understand something of the interviewees and of their culture, their positions within it, and their feelings about it.” Working together, Rouch and Morin are seeking “interior discovery and revelation,” in her estimation, structurally “resembling an anthology of essays and short stories.” However, that does not imply total disconnection: “Links among the sequences are made through groupings of persons and topics of conversation and the approach is persistently self-reflexive: the people on camera and the audience are continually reminded that a film is being made. The penultimate scene is of the subjects discussing themselves as they have appeared in the film they, and the audience, have just seen.” Such self-reflexivity indicates the degree to which Chronicle of a Summer, though it is a different form from narrative cinema, shares concerns with other films of the French New Wave. Many of the New Wave filmmakers wanted to draw attention to the stylistic intervention of the camera; they chose unconventional shots that deviated from generally accepted best practices for framing and disrupted the clarity of continuity editing in favor of jump cutting. Such innovations drew attention to the act of watching a film in a narrative context; Rouch and Morin are more or less up to the same kind of thing, experimenting with documentary form in the same way that their fictional New Wave counterparts are doing with their narrative work.
From a stylistic vantage point, Rouch and Morin’s film inspired a number of subsequent filmmakers through their use of the camera, which creates an incredibly realistic impression. The style Rouch and Morin use would later come to be known as cinema verite, and began its life as a documentary technique used to capture reality in as unvarnished a way as possible. The movements of the camera, with seemingly improvised, reactive pans and tilts, its shakiness, all of these characteristics lend the film authenticity. The movements are not smooth, but rough, as if the camera were held by an amateur; the filmmakers wanted audiences to feel like they were not being given some polished version of reality that professional studio filmmaking tended to inspire. When it became a common practice, according to Christopher Williams, “cinema verite allowed or encouraged the intervention of the filmmaker as part of the ‘truth’ being presented.” Verite means truth—uses of this style in films like Chronicle of A Summer convey the film’s authenticity.
Films like Chronicle of a Summer demonstrate how much cinema is a medium shaped by its technology, which paves the way for stylistic innovation. The technological advances in cinema are of little interest in and of themselves, but how filmmakers use those advances matters a great deal—those innovations help push the medium forward by expanding its possibilities. According to Sam Di Iorio, “By using new technology to frame developing events, Rouch and Morin capture two profound transformations. On the one hand, they offer precious images of a nation moving from postwar promise to postcolonial reality. On the other, they position their portrait as the first example of a new form. It is not simply France that is changing here, it is the medium itself: though like-minded attempts at filming contemporary life were taking place around the world at that time, it was Rouch and Morin’s idea, cinéma-vérité, that allowed those experiments to converge and become visible.” Di Iorio’s insight is an important one—through films like Chronicle of a Summer, we see the intersection of a number of currents shaping film history. Technological developments give way to stylistic innovation, which enterprising filmmakers then use to disrupt established norms, often in moments of great societal upheaval. France would be rocked by protests in the summer of 1968, as students took to the streets to protest economic inequality and the American war in Vietnam. Verite techniques like those pioneered by Rouch and Morin would be employed by a number of filmmakers who would capture the protests in France; just a few months later, verite-style footage of the social unrest at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago would come to shape the world’s perception of similar events in the United States. American director and cinematographer Haskell Wexler was working on a narrative film at the time of the convention, and shot actual footage in Grant Park during the event; when the film, eventually titled Medium Cool, appeared in 1969, it contained Wexler’s documentary footage, blurring the lines between narrative, fictional filmmaking and documentary cinema. The bridge was the verite technique. Medium Cool asks crucial questions, according to writer Thomas Beard: “When one is tasked with representing a subject, what kinds of obligations does one have to that subject? When is intervention appropriate, even necessary?”
Verite style eventually found its way into narrative cinema, often to lend the proceedings an easy signifier of authenticity. Contemporary action films use verite style to simulate the experience of an action hero on the run; director Paul Greengrass brought this immediate approach to his entries in the Jason Bourne series, where the camera follows the action hero (Matt Damon) as he evades capture or fights off would-be assassins in real locations. Police shows on network and cable television tend to adopt this camera style, which makes the cases they investigate seem immediate and of-the-moment. However, we see the legacy of Rouch and Morin’s film even in basic nightly news broadcasts, which make liberal use of ‘man-on-the-street’ interviews that share an essential convention with Chronicle of a Summer: ordinary people reacting to events, offering their unvarnished thoughts. The nightly news uses this tactic to suggest reality; of course, like Rouch and Morin, they have carefully chosen the clip that they broadcast. They likely interviewed several potential subjects, and put the most interesting one on the air. Late night talk show hosts have even parodied this convention, using interview subjects’ ignorance of basic facts to generate laughs. As you watch documentary cinema, it is important to take note of stylistic conventions; their use demonstrates that most stylistic techniques have little inherent meaning, but can be manipulated to suit a filmmaker’s needs. However, documentary cinema also offers an interesting area of overlap with narrative filmmaking; it is best not to see the two as oppositional, but drawing from the same collection of cinematic tools, and using them to different degrees of emphasis.
clip quiz - cinema verite
Review the following clips and answer the questions on Blackboard.
PRIMARY (1961, Drew)
The filmmakers behind verite were trying to get to reality. Where do you see reality represented in as unfiltered a way as possible in this clip from Primary? |
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A MARRIED COUPLE (1969, KING)
The attraction of verite was to get the subjects to forget the camera was there. Where do you see an unmediated look at the people in this scene from A Married Couple? |
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DON'T LOOK BACK (1966, Pennebaker)
Verite cinema offered a raw, unfiltered look at the subject it followed. How does rock and roll star Bob Dylan come across in this clip from the foundational verite film Don’t Look Back? |
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GIMME SHELTER (1970, Maysles, Maysles, and Zwerin)
When we say “cinema verite,” we’re describing a particular look and feel to the images and sound. How do you describe this style, based on this scene from Gimme Shelter? What do the images look like? What does the film sound like? |
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Harlan County USA - Direct Cinema
In America, the cinema verite approach is often called Direct Cinema, but the goals of the two movements are very much in line; in essence, direct cinema privileges the subject of the film above all, and attempts, as much as possible at least, to minimize the interventionist force of the filmmaker. In direct cinema, the determinative authorial voice of the director is marginalized in favor of the realism that comes from the close, unvarnished depiction of the subjects.
If not for director Barbara Kopple’s documentary Harlan County, USA (1976), the coal-producing southeastern Kentucky municipality might not have developed a national reputation. It might have remained another relatively anonymous place in the Appalachian Mountain range, like other numerous coal-rich counties in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio. Coal has long been a way of life in this part of the United States, with its legacy as a vital fuel for powering the modern industrial world stretching back into the 1800s.
Though coal is just one of several fossil fuels now being phased out in response to a changing climate, Harlan County, USA captures what feels like the beginning of the end, at least when watching it in retrospect. The central conflict of the documentary follows the decision by a group of coal miners, working for the Brookside Mine and Prep Plant in Harlan County, to stage a strike for better wages and working conditions, largely in response to the increasing cases of black lung many workers are suffering.
In documenting the strike and its aftermath, Kopple’s purpose is to achieve a kind of total immersion in the environment of the miners, which is usually the primary goal of Direct Cinema as an approach. She aims to have her camera disappear entirely, simply placing the camera amongst the miners and their bosses as they struggle to resolve the labor dispute.
The idea behind Harlan County, USA is to achieve a kind of ethnographic detachment—Kopple doesn’t want her camera to change the subjects, but capture them as they are, whether the camera is there or not. One way that the film tries to achieve this goal is through its soundtrack, which is made up of traditional recordings of folk songs that originate in the rough geographic area, many of which are about mining and life in a union. Florence Reece’s “Which Side Are You On?” is one of several songs used in Harlan County, USA that force a kind of confrontation with the culture the film depicts.
“Which Side Are You On?” is a traditional labor song that has long propelled unions fighting for their workers—the question it asks might as well be taken as Kopple’s question to the audience of Harlan County, USA, as well. While there is no objective, detached narrator who tells us what is happening throughout the documentary, the camera itself, as well as the editing choices and soundtrack interventions like this one, serve a narrational function, guiding us through the story, posing critical questions, and asking us, by virtue of what we’re watching, to take sides.
While it’s sometimes hard to tell whether the presence of a camera alters the behavior of the subject it observes, in some moments in Harlan County, USA, the camera appears to truly be a neutral observer, capturing a moment of labor strife that presaged a long decline in the power of unions to advocate for better wages and working conditions. Those moments reveal something about the nature of Direct Cinema at its highest aspirations.
The promise of documentary cinema, and especially of cinema verite and direct cinema, is that the camera will reveal what people try to hide. However, we should not have any illusions about what we are seeing—because of the nature of editing, any documentary film is a manipulation. If they contain truth, it is in what their filmmakers have discovered and attempted to give to us. But, we must always remember that whatever truth they may reveal is filtered through someone’s point of view.