Direct cinema is a documentary genre that originated between 1958 and 1962 in North America—principally in the Canadian province of Quebec and in the United States—and was developed in France by Jean Rouch.
[1] It is a cinematic practice employing lightweight portable filming equipment, hand-held cameras and live, synchronous sound that became available because of new, ground-breaking technologies developed in the early 1960s.
These innovations made it possible for independent filmmakers to do away with a truckload of optical sound-recording, large crews, studio sets, tripod-mounted equipment and special lights, expensive necessities that severely hog-tied these low-budget documentarians.
The company Arriflex[5][6] was considered the first to widely commercialize such cameras, that were improved for aerial and battlefield photography during World War II.
The Kino-Pravda (literally "Cinema Truth") practice of Dziga Vertov, which can be traced back to the 1920s, gave an articulated voice to this notion, where one can also see the influence of futurism.
Synchronized sound was used by French filmmaker Jean Rouch in 1960 when he shot Chronicle of a Summer, a landmark film in direct cinema history, in style of cinéma-vérité, using a 16 mm camera connected through pilottone with a prototype of Nagra III, a transistorized magnetic-tape recorder with electronic speed control, developed by Stefan Kudelski.
What was noteworthy was that the desire to test common opinion and show reality was constantly kept in check with an acute awareness that it is easy to lie with sound and image.
For Michel Brault of the National Film Board of Canada, who pioneered modern hand-held camera work, it meant the ability to go amidst the people with a wide angle.
This could explain why the movement began in two North American societies that were in social and ideological mutation, French Canada (Quebec) and the United States, before spreading to South America and France.
[citation needed] Direct cinema began in 1958 at the National Film Board of Canada in Quebec,[10] at the dawning of the Quiet Revolution, a period of intense social and political change.
Filmmakers would simultaneously try to share their social conscience, improve the living conditions of the Québécois and attempt to bring national independence—provoking, documenting this transformation, and at the same time keeping a record of disappearing traditions in a rapidly changing society.
[14][15] In the United States, Robert Drew, a journalist with Life magazine after the war, decided to apply the photojournalist method to movies.
His defiance of court order rapidly became a national issue in the U.S. Drew Associates had a cameraman in the Oval office and recorded the meetings over the crisis.
Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment not only fueled discussions over the Civil Rights Movement, it also triggered a profound questioning over the political power of direct cinema.
Both cinéma vérité and direct cinema rely on the power of editing to give shape, structure and meaning to the material recorded.
It relies on an agreement among the filmmaker, subjects and audience to act as if the presence of the camera does not substantially alter the recorded event.
[19] In a 2003 interview (Zuber), Robert Drew explained how he saw the differences between cinéma vérité and direct cinema: I had made Primary and a few other films.
Cinema vérité, the phrase and the form, can thus be seen as France's spin on the idea of the Cinéma Direct of Brault and his colleagues of the French section of the NFB in Canada.