Jeff Holley
ENGL 342
Prof. Richard Simpson
October 28, 2020
Cinema of Truth
The ushering in the new handheld camera with the sound capability built in the '60s became a new era for observational film documentaries. The idea started in the mid-fifties with films like Lionel Rogosin's On The Bower (1956), where the filmmaker follows a decent looking younger alcoholic who struggles on the streets of New York, coasting from shelters, cheap hotels, and the sidewalk trying to get a grip of his life (Barnouw, 234). Rogosin's film, although heavily scripted, set a stage for the future. The cinema Vérité found its way into documentarist exploration when the French filmmaker Jean Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morin created Chronicles of Summer (1961). This two-hour unscripted film questionnaire asked the simple question, "are you happy," which was tremendously successful as it turned out. The new style went further than just the "fly on the wall" documentary. This film documentary engaged its subjects and explored the provocative questions in real-time. In one moment, a middle-aged French man smoking a cigarette, who knows he's being filmed and talking into the camera, says, "happiness, unhappiness, it shouldn't be in the dictionary." The film's people became the film, the footage was raw and lacked the cinematic qualities of lighting and stability in the shots, but that was part of the charm that made it so successful.
HighSchool (1968), by Fredrick Wiseman, was another shining example of this documentary freestyle cinematography that on a high school campus filmed interactions of teachers, the principle of the school along with the students to capture the essence of what it was like to be in school during that era. The authoritative, demanding nature of the principle and a conversation with a student who didn't want to go to the gym class says, "do you get dressed in the morning?" "do you get undressed?" "then you can go to gym class," he said. The awareness that these faculty members and students of the camera and being filmed was apparent; however, the magnitude and dialogue were real. That's what made it so exciting and watchable.
Hello Jeff,
ReplyDeleteThanks for bring the scene about the man who said "happiness, unhappiness, it shouldn't be in the dictionary" to our attention. This was a scene that I had contemplated on for a long time after watching the film, because I wasn't exactly sure what he meant. But, it occurred to me recently that he was talking about how these are such broad words, and when we have options to use more specific words, why should these ever exist? I think this scene was one of the ones that best represented the indifference that Rouch discussed at the end of the film.
~Shaelene Moler
Jeff, great work incorporating quotes from the film to identify the formal features of Observational and Participatory documentary modes. Both direct cinema and cinema verite responded to the anti-authoritarian climate of the 60s by developing a unique mode of filmmaking that aimed to foreground above all experimentation rather than scripts. They each came up with a different solution. Which one was more compelling to you?
ReplyDeleteShaelene, Great connection between the quote on the indefinable notion of happiness and what Rousch proposes as a kind of indifference at the end. Can cinema verite be defined, and at the same time, be a mode of documentary filmmaking?