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Retrospectives: Cinéma Vérité: by Peter Wintonick |
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"The documentary impulse originates with the desire to capture something that can only be experienced spontaneously and directly. In other words, to work responsibly in the documentary form means that you are taking an enormous chance: you are essentially putting faith in reality. … ..In many ways the tension between documentary and fiction lies at the heart of cinema. It's as if the two forms have a pact to keep each other honest." "The idea of an objective cinema is a complete fallacy to me. So the whole idea that cinéma vérité came out of, which i think was fair at the time — that you could be a fly on the wall, that you could observe and not condition the events — i think we know now is not true.“These are auspicious times for the form/style movement known as Cinéma Vérité. Herzog denounces it in favour of ecstatic truth. Wiseman thinks the term in pretentious. On the one hand we have the style imitated and emulated and emasculated across all media platforms, up to and including mass market teevee and the internet. The style attacked by cinematic purists and poets who would rather be informed by the extreme personalism, obcurantism and formal formalism which characterize most interesting post-modern non-fiction film essays and the DVdocs which are the rage and flavour of the festival and critical set. On the other hand, most of the socially relevant contemporary documentaries which are successful and do reach large audiences, in cinemas and broadcast, are mutant cousins to a cinematic style which began more than forty years ago. But how can one give the One World audience today a foretaste of why they should care about an audio-visual revolution which is more than 40 years old? Not wishing to stand in for my filmfriends like Maysles, Pennebaker and Leacock who can speak for themselves and eloquently defend the form, let me make a case here for Cinema Verité, the revolutionary film movement which has as much to do with human rights and humanism as any more overtly political or social constructed film movement. The visual language of film created our view of the 20th Century, that most 'wonderful and horrible' of centuries. What we saw were two quite different visions of the world: the 'imaginary' world of Hollywood and fiction film, and the 'real' world of documentary and non-fiction film. The first one hundred years of the Seventh Art - Cinema - were marked by a handful of defining moments. Perhaps only three or four times during the last century have technological advances allowed the creative expressions of innovative individuals to shift the whole landscape and 'language' of film-making. The result was a completely new way of understanding the medium, and by extension, the world. The first revolution came with the invention of Lumiere's 19th century 7 kilo camera; the second with the arrival of the optical soundtrack in the 1920s when movies began to 'talk, but the third, and single most important revolutionary development in the history of film, whether fiction or non-fiction, was the Cinéma Vérité revolution of the late 'fifties and early 'sixties. Like creative spontaneous combustion, the Cinéma Vérité movement caught fire simultaneously in several loci — England, France, the US and Canada. Some called it Free Cinema, Direct Cinema, Candid Eye, or Cinéma Vérité. But in all languages it meant that cinema was finally liberated from the umbilical cord of the heavy tripod-bound camera. A free-wheeling, on-the-shoulder film camera was coupled with a portable, transistorized tape recorder which could capture live, synchronized sound. Documentary was finally liberated from stilted formalism. It was free to become both a social actor and a voyeuristic eye-on-the-wall. For me the Cinéma Vérité Revolution was an upheaval of an old order of image-making which had a tremendous impact on both sides of the camera. It has also had a tremendous impact on current media practice and, in many ways is a precursor to the fourth cinematic revolution, the current 21st Century Digital Age. Vérité has shown its marks all the way up to Dogma95, „The Blair Witch Project“, „Elephant“, „Bowling for Columbine“ and TV's „Survivor“ and „Big Brother“ shows and all their reality-based off-spring. Cinema Vérité was a pro-active movement but it began as a re-active response to a static and dry past, a film practice which had given documentary a bad name where real people seemed more like stilted actors in a bad Griersonian screen dream. The youthful practioners of Cinéma Vérité, saw that the exhilarating possibilities of the re-invented form of cinema seemed endless. Michel Brault and Pierre Perrault in Montreal. Wolf Koenig, Roman Kroiter, Terrence Macartney-Filgate and Beryl Fox in Ontario. Jean Rouch and American Richard Leacock in Paris. Karl Reisz in London. Robert Drew, Al Maysles, Hope Ryden and D.A. Pennebaker in New York. Frederick Wiseman in Boston. Perhaps reflective of the times, the auteurs of the Cinéma Vérité movement, in the key period, were mostly male, white and Euro-american. Although there were many female collaborators who supported the movement, with the exception of Beryl Fox and Hope Ryden, women rarely were the filmmakers. And although the movement spread throughout the whole world in later years, its formative embryonic stages were unfortunately, Western. But the Cinema Vérité movement did produce some of the most amazing non-fiction films of all time. As is the case with most major shifts in human cultural expression, the 'products' of this particular period also speak to contemporary audiences with vigor, spirit and self-recognition. Because they generally deal with reality-in-situ, with real people in real situations, the films themselves have aged very little. As a young film student in the seventies, the films produced in the early years of the Vérité Movement made an indelible impression on me. They made me turn to documentary filmmaking. But in fact, i must, for the record, admit that purist vérité is not my favorite type of non-fiction film and i do actually prefer Chris Marker-esque essay films, experimental docs, and weird, wild and wired opinionated reality. But i think all filmmakers owe it to themselves to use every trick in their camera bag, every colour on their cinemartist's pallet, every part of the film prism's spectrum, and use Vérité as necessary, but not necessarily Vérité. I call my own current filmmaking practice neo-vérité, (notably Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, made with Mark Achbar in the early 1990's) an idea which, when it comes off, combines some of the lessons about energy and freedom and commitment which came with the Vérité Revolution, with a more layed and leveled, personal essay form. The Cinema Vérité Revolution opened a window onto real life and real issues. In the formalist sense, it was not encumbered by the baggage of pretension and the „Hey! Look-at-me" attitude which has characterized some latter day non-fiction filmmaking. The cinema vérité movement may have burst out simultaneously everywhere, but in all its variants it remained faithful to the 'Truth' of artfully filmed reality. It represented a two-way mirror on an increasingly mediated, one-way world. Cinema Vérité filmmakers were part of a wider, radicalized movement which challenged orthodoxy on all levels. They were committed interpreters of the modern, human condition, and informed and formed by their times. They took on social issues and political agendas, gave us impassioned, behind-the-scenes looks at institutions and at the extraordinary daily lives of so-called 'ordinary' people. They used their new found ability to record and create, in their own images, the visual memory of their era. In their quest to define their own truths, they might provoke situations to their own ends, or could remain as unobtrusive observers. It was not a machine, but filmmakers themselves, who breathed this new technology to life. And filmmakers and their intense, intimate access to open subjects are at the core and centre of interest of all CV film. In its current and latter day stages, Cinema Vérité has had important historical and cultural resonance. This image revolution was not born in isolation, but was part of a wider, radicalized movement which challenged orthodoxy on all levels. Perhaps it could be seen as a cinematic analogue to the Beat Movement in poetry, jazz or the new novel, or to the socially conscious essays in photojournalism, or as the political mirror to Kennedy's Camelot, and as the visual-track precursor to the social upheaval of the 1960's and early '70's. The Cinéma Vérité movement has had enormous implications for film, media, language and communications over the last half century. Contemporary audiences can identify, in visual terms, with that which is familiar, and Vérité's legacy is the great impact of a movement which began 2 generations ago. We can trace Cinéma Vérité's impact on fiction filmmaking, as Martin Scorsese has argued, on the realistic details which drive most fiction film-making in the nineties and the early part of this century. Certainly modern 'reality-based' TV shows, from Cops and Homicide, to the Dutch originated vérité game shows which are still all the range on TV in the fall of 2004 in Europe and North America… . „Survivor“, „The 1900 House“ „Big Brother“ „ The Race" all have Cinéma Vérité as a birth parent. The original movement has influenced investigative journalism and pseudo-vérité video-production. 'Real' advertising and real-politik. Obvious traces can be found in media forms as disparate as TV news, Music TV Clips and current affairs magazine shows like the USA's 60 Minutes. Its influence definitely extends to the current flavour-of-the-TV-season incarnation, the 'docu-pop' and docusoaps, a recently favoured form in Europe which is now also making its impact here around the world. In many ways the living laboratory of this new media movement was once The National Film Board of Canada, the world-renowned producing organization. Ideally placed at the nexus between cultures and continents, the NFB was the incubus for what was to be one of the most influential audio-visual revolutions of our times. Although American Pennebaker's Bob Dylan Film „Don't Look Back" and The Maysles Brothers Rolling Stone Film „Gimme Shelter“ were more famous, just look at a film like Koenig and Kroitor's „Lonely Boy“ which was made by the NFB several years before those It features a teen idol from Canada, Paul Anka, who makes his first inroads into American Pop culture, playing a big concert in New Jersey and at New York's famous Copa Club. This is a hilarious, revelatory experience, light years ahead of its time and any Music TV bio-portrait you might come across these days. Behind the scenes like you would not believe. And with that nice humour which has made Canadians famous. This film, and documentaries like it, are how the world has come to know Canada, and in fact, all Vérité no matter what its country of origina, is how the world has come to know itself. While still studied in film schools, Vérité is not to be studied but enjoyed. Now it is popular today in Prague. So, this is the concrete legacy of Vérité. Perhaps, as we approach a new age, the next wave of documentarians and their audiences can re-visit some of the lessons learned from cinema vérité, and adapt them to the challenges of the future. On balance, one can take a self-reflexive look at questions and critiques which lead out of the Cinéma Vérité movement itself. How valid is the claim that the reality they represented was more 'truthful' than fiction. How much did the flys on the walls alter what was being filmed? What are the problems of interpreting Cinéma Vérité's version of filmed history as actual history? How legitimate are the practices of current filmmakers who reject the CV movement for its dogma and for its nostalgic attachment to the false illusions of objective observational documentary? (Ironically, the concerns of this new generation echo those of the earliest Verité practitioners who also rejected the status quo in their own time.) But in the end, despite these questions, these days Cinema Vérité has a populist grin. One hopes the films in the One World Selection, and the other Verité style films sprinkled throughout the festival, will leave the audience with a feeling for the commited vision, the human stories and the fine original work of an important collection of filmmakers. These are influential artists who do not offer us the arcane and dogmatic details of a still-born movement, but who leave, as their legacy, an aural and visual history which is still very much alive and well, and living in us all.  Writer-co-curators's Biography-FilmographyPeter Wintonick has more than two dozen years as a professional writer, producer, director and editor of all manner of film, video and multi-media - feature films, theatrical documentaries, educational media, TV programmes and internet sites. He is most noted for co-producing and directing, with Mark Achbar, one of the most successful documentaries in Canadian history - Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, which has played theatrically around the world in 200 cities, won 22 awards in more than 50 international film festivals and has been broadcast in almost 30 markets in a dozen language versions. He directed, with the National Film Board of Canada on „THE definingMOMENT" about the Cinéma Verité revolution and Seeing is Believing: Handicams, Human Rights and The News. Wintonick has written for (inter)national cinema magazines and worked as executive producer and as a post-production consultant on many independent productions. He has programmed film festivals, created a global internet site for independent film, The Virtual FilmFestival and taught university-level film history. Unfathomably, Cinéma Verité's significance had gone completely unacknowledged in popular culture because there has never been any film or program made about this international movement until my film, Cinema Verité: Defining the Moment tried to set the record straight. Featuring interviews with all the major participants who were there at the inception and generous samples of some incredibly moving and timeless work, Cinema Verité: Defining the Moment looks at the history, resonance and contemporary legacy of Cinema Verité/Direct Cinema. You can also visit the website for more information www.nfb.ca/cinemaverite. | |||||||
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