Cinéma Vérité
Many film historians consider the French documentary filmmaker and ethnographer Jean Rouch as the forerunner to the French New Wave (emerging in the late 1950s and lasting up to the mid 1960s). Although he had started making his earlier ethnographic films with a less stylized, less narrative, more realistic, and more naturalistic techniques, he later, in collaboration with sociologist Edgar Morin, moved radically to what was called “Cinéma Vérité.” The term was coined by Rouch and Morin as homage to Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Pravda – both are translated as “film-truth.” Cinéma Vérité shares similar fondness and interests for Vertov with another contemporary documentary filmmaking movement known as “Direct Cinema.” Each school, however, appropriates Vertov differently. Filmmakers of Cinéma Vérité followed Vertov’s advocation of cinema without actors, narrative, or staged mise-en-scene; they are interested in revealing the truth of life rather than representing it; this truth can be achieved only by exposing first the truth of the cinema. The techniques they employed corresponded to Vertov’s self-reflexive formalist cinema that acknowledges the presence of the filmmaker, the camera, and the cinematic apparatus. It a cinema that is “concerned with exposing its own process of seizing improvised life and simultaneously commenting on its own form of seeing, hearing, and organizing.”(1) The techniques used by Cinéma Vérité filmmakers included, for example, the use of handheld camera, modified jump cuts, extreme close-ups, staged editing, and montage-style constructions. However, early works of Cinéma Vérité, unlike Vertov’s, were not involved or engaged with political issues. This political tendency was taken by other film groups that acquired the techniques of Cinéma Vérité, most notably the Medvedkin Group (led by Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard), and the Dziga Vertov Group (led by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin). These group were formed in the wake of the May 1968 protest as leftist and activist film groups.
Notes:
(1) Rouch, Jean, and Steven Feld. Ciné-Ethnography. 13 Vol. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Print.
Bibliography:
- Reisz, Karel and Gavin Miller. "Cinema Verité and the Documentary Film of Ideas." The Technique of Film Editing. London: Focal Press, 1968: 297-321.
- Alison Smith, French Cinema in the 1970s: The Echoes of May (MU Press, 2005)
- Julia Lesage, “Godard-Gorin’s Wind from the East: Looking at a film politically” in Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 1974
- Serge Daney, “Theorise/terrorise (Godardian pedagogy)” in in ed. David Wilson, Cahiers du Cinema, Volume 4: 1973-1978: History, Ideology, Cultural Struggle
(Routledge, 2000)
- Julia Lesage, “Godard-Gorin’s Wind from the East: Looking at a film politically” in Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 1974
Notes:
(1) Rouch, Jean, and Steven Feld. Ciné-Ethnography. 13 Vol. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Print.
Bibliography:
- Reisz, Karel and Gavin Miller. "Cinema Verité and the Documentary Film of Ideas." The Technique of Film Editing. London: Focal Press, 1968: 297-321.
- Alison Smith, French Cinema in the 1970s: The Echoes of May (MU Press, 2005)
- Julia Lesage, “Godard-Gorin’s Wind from the East: Looking at a film politically” in Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 1974
- Serge Daney, “Theorise/terrorise (Godardian pedagogy)” in in ed. David Wilson, Cahiers du Cinema, Volume 4: 1973-1978: History, Ideology, Cultural Struggle
(Routledge, 2000)
- Julia Lesage, “Godard-Gorin’s Wind from the East: Looking at a film politically” in Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 1974