We have grown accustomed to expecting certain elements from documentaries, including unscripted, real conversation, real locations with real people, and a direct address to the camera, to mention a few. Moreover, we expect documentaries to tell us the truth. But how did these standardised practises for documentaries come to be? Answers to these questions can be found in ‘cinema verité’ (also known as observational cinema), which translates to ‘truthful cinema.’
Cinema verité was able to have a huge impact on the global film industry. The demand for realistic action and real language in films that depicted people’s daily lives forced the film industry to pay more attention to these elements. It is a realistic filmmaking approach that is typically used for documentaries and avoids any artificial embellishments through moving images.
The demand for cinema verité began with the French film movement in the 1950s and 1960s. It was developed by Egdar Morin and Jean Rouch in the late 1950s. These two French philosophers were inspired by Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Pravda, a collection of brief documentary films released in 1922, to create a new cinematic philosophy. The moral, structural, and practical concerns that underlay footage involving real people, places, and things were explored further in Vertov’s film Kino-Pravda.
Examples of French cinema verité are Jean Rouch’s Chronique d’un été (1961; Chronicle of a Summer) and Chris Marker’s Le Joli Mai (1962).
In the US, cinema verité was known as Direct Cinema and was founded by Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker, Albert and David Maysles. The main goal of this movement was to clearly portray a person’s facial expressions and movements. This movement was in opposition to the camera’s rearranging. In Britain, Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, and Tony Richardson spearheaded the Free Cinema movement.
Filmmakers used to independently record interviews, actual conversations, and footage before these movements. Typically, the camera was carried in the hand. Following an examination of the video, they would remove everything. The ability to create realistic-looking movies, however, was beyond the scope of this approach. Rather than displaying the artist’s expressions, it was more reportage-oriented.
The main goal of cinema verité was not to inform or clarify its audience about its subject. Instead, it allowed viewers to merely watch through the lenses of the camera and the filmmakers. It was shot on location, using unprofessional actors, and included handheld shots that focused on the daily lives of the characters, unscripted dialogue, and action, using natural lighting, frequently showing some overlap between the filmmaker and his subject. The shots are long, shot with shaky camerawork, and occasionally without many cuts or narration. The idea behind cinema verité was that the presence of the camera would eventually change the scene being captured.
The cinéma verité movement, however, sought to steer the film business towards greater realism as its main goal. The approach allowed for a significant impact to be made on documentary filmmaking, which is still evident today.