Oscar Wild once said, “The truth is rarely pure and never simple” and he is right. But no matter what the outcome is, or how complex the truth is, we will always strive for the truth. The concept of truth is no stranger to film documentaries, and one filmmaker that certainty was aware of that was Dziga Vertov. During the 1920’s Vertov created a newsreel series to promote the concept of ‘Kinopravda” which translated to English mean “Film truth.” Unfortunately, Vertov was ahead of his time, and this concept disappeared along the filmmakers’ path. It wasn’t until the 1960’s that other filmmakers around the world once again recognized the importance of the truth. Two movements with the purpose of revealing the truth of life, emerge in different parts of the world, Direct Cinema in North America and Cinema Vérité in France. Although, both had the same purpose, their approaches towards getting the truth make them completely different. Cinema Vérité’s approach gave the filmmakers a chance to manipulate and distort reality by participating and observing at the same time, while Direct Cinemas approach was strictly observational, and there is no better way to find out the truth than observing without interfering.
Direct Cinema and Cinema Vérité are often confused and categorized as one movement, since in both movements filmmakers take the role of observers to uncover the truth, they are very different and have different approaches towards finding the truth. Direct Cinema filmmakers would most likely to take a passive and objective approach, while Cinema Vérité filmmakers would take a participative and subjective approach towards their search for the truth. Some argue that Direct Cinema’s approach is dishonest, because their subjects attitu...
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...f truthfulness when they are interviewing their subjects. In the film “Chronicle of a Summer” we can see how Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin appear in the frame in more than one occasion, their participation on the film was clear specially because the would give biased opinions, and ask subjective questions. This method is quest
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Callison, Candis . "DOCUMENTARY FILM FOR ALL." DOCUMENTARY FILM FOR ALL.
N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Nov. 2013. verite-or-direct-cinema/>. Stangl , Oliver . "Direct Cinema and Cinéma Vérité – Guide to the Genres." The Documentary
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Films are necessary in our time period because the human eye can articulate the message intended through sight allowing visual imagination to occur. In the book, world 2 by Max Brooks, he creates a character by the name Roy Elliot who was a former movie director. Roy Elliot manages to make a movie titled “Victory at Avalon: The Battle of the Five Colleges” and some how it goes viral. Similarly, Frank Capra’s film, “Why we Fight” expresses a sense of understanding the meaning of wars. Films do not inevitably portray truth because they display what the film director views as important and beneficial for people to know.
Braudy, Leo and Marshall Cohen, eds. Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, Fifth Edition. New York: Oxford UP, 1999.
This report aims to make light of certain elements of documentary making that are perhaps more susceptible to influence on the director’s part, and once again explore the effect of these decisions on the audience’s reaction to the information presented.
The innovative theories and filmmaking techniques of Dziga Vertov revolutionized the way films are made today. Man With a Movie Camera (1929), a documentary that represented the peak of the Soviet avant-garde film movement in the twenties, displayed techniques in montage, creative camera angles, rich imagery, but most importantly allowed him to express his theories of his writings of Kino-eye (the camera). The film has a very simple plot that describes an average day in Russia, yet the final pieces of this film emerge a complex and fast-paced production that excites the audience. Vertov's ability to use radical editing techniques with unconventional filming to present ordinary things has inspired many directors around the world. And still now modern avant-garde movies apply many of these same techniques to dramatize simple and complex stories.
One can gather that socialism was on the rise and supported by many of the working class. From the co-op in The Crime of Monsieur Lange to the Communist party’s support of Madame Nozière, public opinion was shifting away from supporting a patriarchal society. What was once taboo became more popular topics of discussion, such as the pornography in Baptiste’s possession, Estelle’s miscarriage of Batala’s child, fathers taking their daughters’ innocence, and ousting men of unnecessary power. A film, while not necessarily factual, focuses on culture and values. Cinema is an art form that reflects what the directors and actors, and by extension, the general public, believe.
Movies distort reality by creating an ideal conflictual ambience, from which all the subtle human emotions and the characters arise. Humans might appear as consensus beings, seeking conformation and avoiding alienation by “society”. However, referring back to Aristotle’s saying, “human beings are by nature political animals” (1999), humans continually strive for power and control inasmuch as they strive for pure oxygen to breathe. Movies unleash these “socially unacceptable” political animals, exposing the hidden moral corruption embedded within most humans. Movies accomplish such a task by distorting reality, by reshaping the truth into a collection of video shots, taken from different angles, creating different meanings to content; the true meaning. The three genres of literature – narratives, poetry and drama – establish the key to revealing the distortion, thus providing humans with the ultimate method of deciphering our reality through the eyes of a glass lens. In the movie Do the Right Thing, these genres come together to paint a “picture” of us.
Small, Pauline. (2005) New Cinemas: journal of Contemporary Film Volume 3, Queen Mary, University of London
It has been asked, "Are reflexive or cinema vérité documentary films more accurate at truthfully representing reality?” This question can be answered many ways. One obvious path is to side with reflexivity, because it is honest about the shortcomings of filmmaking. However, we cannot be so quick to assume to know what the question is asking. The question must be broken down first in order to come to a satisfactory answer.
The television's new “golden age” is now upon us. As the internet continues to make filmmaking more accessible to public, Hollywood will continue being one of the biggest and greatest influences on today’s society and politics. It is much easier to create and share your ideas through film than ever before. Independent studios before, greatly expanding the number of debates and arguments people have access to. Never has the power to express yourself and your views through film been so great, and we are better off for it.
Classic narrative cinema is what Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson (The classic Hollywood Cinema, Columbia University press 1985) 1, calls “an excessively obvious cinema”1 in which cinematic style serves to explain and not to obscure the narrative. In this way it is made up of motivated events that lead the spectator to its inevitable conclusion. It causes the spectator to have an emotional investment in this conclusion coming to pass which in turn makes the predictable the most desirable outcome. The films are structured to create an atmosphere of verisimilitude, which is to give a perception of reality. On closer inspection it they are often far from realistic in a social sense but possibly portray a realism desired by the patriarchal and family value orientated society of the time. I feel that it is often the black and white representation of good and evil that creates such an atmosphere of predic...
The statement Junger and Heatherington made with their film Restrepo was a powerful one. This is exactly the purpose of Cinema Verite, to give voice to the truth. Many argue that the verite style presents a manipulative version of reality because the editing is used to influence the audience, dramatizing the events on screen, focused on eliciting a certain emotional response. It is also often criticized for being more reportage that artistic expression. However, as with all modern art, especially that in the film industry because of its wide audience and influence, Cinema Verite reflects the zeitgeist in which it was produced. There is a thirst for the truth, even in the harshest of realities. Artists, no matter their medium, strive for this.
...use of documentary style lighting and discontinuous editing that diverges from the Hollywood “invisible” editing. Through understanding the historical climates these two seemingly similar French cinematic movements were in, the psychology of a generation can be visualized in a way truly unique to the indexicality of the cinematic medium.
Turner, Graeme. Film as a Social Practice. 3rd ed. of the year. London: Routledge, 1999.
Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction. 5th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997.
One of the integral things that must be addressed when making a film is the ethics involved. Ethics are a constant issue that have to be carefully considered when filmmaking. This difficult decision-making is highly prevalent in that of documentaries, because of the difficulties associated in filming ‘real people’ or “social actors, (Nichols, 2001).” More importantly, the issues faced by a filmmaker differ between each of the documentary modes. Each particular documentary mode poses different formal choices that must be made in order to operate in an ethical fashion. Two films that have been made both display examples of how ethics must be considered when embarking on a documentary are Etre at Avoir [To Be and to Have], (2001) and Capturing the Friedmans (2003). These films have been made in different documentary modes, highlighting that there is not one mode which is easier or has fewer ethical issues associated with it. Additionally, what must be considered is how these style choices in these different modes affect the power relationships between the filmmaker, the subject and its audience, (Nichols, 2001).