Cinéma vérité

:This article is about a type of documentary. Cinéma Vérité is also an album by Dramarama.

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Cinéma vérité is a style of filmmaking, combining naturalistic techniques that originated in documentary filmmaking, with the storytelling elements typical of a scripted or semi-scripted film. The name is a French phrase meaning, literally "true film". The term comes from the literal translation of Dziga Vertov's Kino-Pravda series of the 1920s. While Vertov's announced intention in coining the word was to use film as a means of getting at "hidden" truth, largely through juxtapostions of scenes, the French term refers more to a technique influenced by Vertov than to his specific intentions.

Related Topics:
Naturalistic - Documentary film - French - Dziga Vertov - Kino-Pravda - 1920s

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Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922) is also often seen as an ancestor to cinéma vérité, in that it was a partially scripted film that used the techniques of documentary filmmaking. As a silent film, it was immune from a problem that would arise with the advent of sound: for many years it was impossible to record sound in an unstructured environment, requiring documentaries to rely on narration.

Related Topics:
Robert Flaherty - Nanook of the North - 1922 - Narration

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The aesthetic of the movement, which began in the 1950s and flourished in the 1960s was essentially the same as that of the mid-1950s "free cinema" in the UK and the Direct Cinema movement in the United States, introduced by the Drew Associates. Incongruously in France and Quebec it is usually called "cinéma direct".

Related Topics:
1950s - 1960s - UK - Direct Cinema - United States - Drew Associates - France - Quebec

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Borrowing techniques from documentary film (but eschewing the use of voiceovers) cinéma vérite aims for an extreme naturalism, using non-professional actors, nonintrusive filming techniques, frequent use of hand-held camera, the use of genuine locations rather than sound stages, and naturalistic sound without post-production. The movement was fueled as much by technological as artistic developments. Cameras had become small enough to be portable and unobtrusive. Even more important cameras were now quiet so that natural sound could be recorded at the same time as filming. Technologies linking cameras and recorders made the clapboard obsolete, further freeing the filmmaker.

Related Topics:
Hand-held camera - Sound stage - Post-production - Clapboard

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As Bill Nichols pointed out, the reality effect of a new mode of documentary representation tends to fade away when "the conventional nature of this mode of representation becomes increasingly apparent".

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"In 1967 Shirley Clarke directed a 90-minute Cinéma vérité interview with a black homosexual. Portrait of Jason is an insightful exploration of one person's character while it simultaneously addresses the range and limitations of cinema-verité style." (Lauren Rabinovitz)

Related Topics:
Shirley Clarke - Portrait of Jason

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Early Second Wave Feminist documentary films often used cinema-verité techniques but very soon this sort of 'realism' was criticized for its deceptive pseudo-natural construction of reality. In 1978 Michelle Citron directed Daughter Rite, a feminist pseudo-documentary which deconstructs the conventions of cinema verité.

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John Cassavetes is credited with developing an American style of cinéma vérité.

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In principle, the film movement Dogme 95 features similar tenets, but in practice most Dogme 95 films show far more indications of the scripting and direction than is typical for cinéma vérité.

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Filmmakers generally associated with cinéma vérité include:

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• Richard Leacock
• Michel Brault and Gilles Groulx (Les Raquetteurs, 1958)
• Robert Drew
• Jean Rouch
• D.A. Pennebaker
• The Maysles Brothers (Albert and David Maysles)
• Fred Wiseman
• Barbara Kopple
• Scott Shaw
 
Cinéma vérité: Cinéma vérité films ►