Direct cinema

Direct cinema

Direct cinema

Direct cinema is a typology of documentary cinema that began in North America, Canada and the United States between 1958 and 1962. If, in its initial meaning, it is characterized by a desire to directly capture the real and to transmit the truth, it will be in the cinema, in a more sustainable way, a way of posing the problem of reality, even to try to act in the cinema by discussing in the film the ability of the medium to grasp or provoke the emergence of the "truth" intimate filmed people.

Origins 

Various technological, ideological and social aspects must be developed in order to capture this phenomenon of the history of moving images. Here are the main historical milestones needed to understand it.

Light cameras 

For there to be direct cinema, it is necessary to have portable cameras, allowing the work of the camera to the shoulder. The first cameras of this kind were probably German cameras for ethnographic reports. The German company Arriflex generally credited with the invention of these first small cameras, perfected for aerial surveillance during the war. But the existence of these cameras, which allows a new form of documentary to emerge, will not lead to the creation of direct cinema.

Sound before the 60s 

The sound in the cinema before the arrival of the Nagra tape recorder is made on devices that are either bulky or unreliable, both in terms of scroll speed and quality. Between 1950 and 1960 many devices attempt to solve this problem. At the NFB, for example, the Sprocketape system will be developed, but it will not be necessary.

In the best case, it is thus sounds seized a posteriori on the same places and recalled to editing that served as a soundtrack documentary, a soundtrack also often built like that of fiction film, from sounds of atmosphere, sound archives, sound effects, music, post-synchronized voice, comments out of the field. Really rhyme then with the truth.

In other cases, the "documentary" subject is filmed in the studio. If the sound recording is then direct, the documentary nature of the recording made remains very questionable. For example, the barn is rebuilt in the studio, under powerful lighting. The sound engineer's sound-box, which directs the work of the pole vaulter, is located nearby, as on a fictional stage during studio shooting, or like today, still sometimes, on television. It is this work situation that is known to have caused the young technician Michel Brault, then working at the NFB, to become more aware.

From the technical point of view, the appearance of the 16 mm Éclair-Coutant portable camera at the end of the 1950s, and its improvement in the following years is an important step for the future of direct cinema. Synchronized with the Nagra, the Eclair-Coutant makes it possible to report shots closer to the reality of the event. Jean Rouch will use it often.

The advent of Direct Cinema 

With the arrival of Nagra and light cameras, the technical conditions for the emergence of direct exist. But what about social conditions, what about the development of ideas? Here too the ground is ready, and it is moreover at this level that the revolution brought by the direct is great.

Indeed the direct is born from a desire to say and act in the world, without mediation, while having a keen awareness of the fragility of this position and the ease with which a camera can produce distortions, lies, manipulations. Thus the novelty attributable to the direct is as much in the material conditions of production, as in an ethical desire for a sincere documentary look which, by coming into contact with things in order to draw the (filmic) representations, seeks to escape from the previous discourses, from ideological. This will be done in two American companies in the midst of change, making the oil spread further south.

National Film Board of Canada and the Province of Quebec 

Direct cinema, properly speaking, was born in Montreal ( province of Quebec ), at the headquarters of the NFB, in the "French studio", and this, in full historical synchronicity of what will be called the " quiet revolution". This period of cultural and economic emancipation can be understood succinctly by the convergence of three phenomena: the current of world decolonization, the development of the welfare state accompanied by an institutional laïcisation, together made possible by the economic growth of the Thirty Glorious and the Quebec baby boom.

The result of these three movements that completely shake up Quebec society is a myriad of contradictory points of view, as reported in the article on Les Raquetteurs by Michel Brault (1958). The contribution of Quebec cinema to live is probably the most important contribution made to world cinema by this national cinematography.

In the early 1960s, important friendships were formed between Quebec and French filmmakers. Claude Jutra who stays in France will be close to François Truffaut. For his part, Gilles Groulx maintains a link with Jean-Luc Godard.

United States 

American filmmakers, such as Don Alan Pennebaker, Richard Leacock, and Frederick Wiseman, are part of the broad social challenge of the post-war generation in the United States, as civic and social movements of the United States an empire in deep questioning. Here too, the gaze on the real is complex, at once patriotic and revolutionary, engaged and perplexed.

Latin America 

The direct current will also have a very real importance in Latin America where it will be most clearly associated with the movement of decolonization and political activism, of which Fernando E. Solanas ( The Hora de Los Hornos, 1968) is an emblematic figure.

France 

The blur of the direct after 

It is in response to this strong critical view of the institutions and our societies during the 1960s and 1970s, a view to which the documentary strongly concurs, that a new kind of institutional discourse appeared in the 1980s-90s, heir to marketing and public relations: political correctness.

As in response to this new propaganda, the cinema is the invention of the documentary ( false documentary, mockumentary, not to be confused with the docu-fiction that intertwines fictional elements in a legitimate documentary framework). Artistic proposal exploiting the codes of the documentary, the documentary proves invariably a fiction often difficult to separate from the documentary. The identity of each and the truth of everything appear as fictitious creations in a world of computer and media representation. The current of self-fiction documentary proceeds from the same movement. This reflection on the cinema medium seems to call into question the very distinction between documentary and fiction, reflecting as much the new skepticism of TV children as their need to believe.

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