Cinema Verite Direct Cinema Free Cinema

1. Cinema VeriteDirect CinemaFree Cinema

2. Cinema Verite • Cinéma Vérité is a style of documentary filmmaking, combining naturalistic techniques with stylized cinematic devices of editing and camerawork, staged set-ups, and the use of the camera to provoke subjects. It is also known for taking a provocative stance toward its topics. • In French the term means, roughly, "truth cinema". • As historian Bill Nichols points out, the reality effect of a new mode of documentary representation tends to fade away when "the conventional nature of this mode of representation becomes increasingly apparent” • In other words, new filmmaking modes initially appear to be unvarnished "reality" on the screen, but as time goes by, that mode's conventions become more and more obvious. Such is certainly the case with cinéma vérité, whose conventions can now appear quite mannered and open for critique.

3. Cinema Verite - Dziga Vertov • Key Names • Dziga Vertov (Russian: 2 January 1896 – 12 February 1954) was a Soviet pioneer documentary film, newsreel director and cinema theorist. His filming practices and theories paved the way to Cinema Verite style of documentary moviemaking. • Vertov's brothers Boris Kaufman and Mikhail Kaufman were also notable filmmakers, as was his wife. • In 1922, the year that Nanook of the North was released, Vertov started the Kino-Pravda series. The series took its title from the official government newspaper Pravda. "Kino-Pravda" (literally translated, "film truth") continued Vertov's agit-prop bent. "The Kino-Pravda group began its work in a basement in the centre of Moscow" Vertov explained. He called it damp and dark. There was an earthen floor and holes one stumbled into at every turn. Dziga said, " This dampness prevented our reels of lovingly edited film from sticking together properly, rusted our scissors and our splicers."

4. Kino-Pravda – Vertov • Kino-Pravda ("Film Truth") was a newsreel series by Dziga Vertov, , and Mikhail Kaufman. • Working mainly during the 1920s, Vertov promoted the concept of kino-pravda, or film-truth, through his newsreel series. His driving vision was to capture fragments of actuality which, when organized together, showed a deeper truth which could not be seen with the naked eye. In the "Kino-Pravda" series, Vertov focused on everyday experiences, eschewing bourgeois concerns and filming marketplaces, bars, and schools instead, sometimes with a hidden camera, without asking permission first. • The episodes of "Kino-Pravda" usually did not include reenactments or stagings (one exception is the segment about the trial of the Social Revolutionaries: the scenes of the selling of the newspapers on the streets and the people reading the papers in the trolley were both staged for the camera). The cinematography is simple, functional, unelaborate — perhaps a result of Vertov's lack of interest in either "beauty" or "art". Twenty-three issues of the series were produced over a period of three years; each issue lasted about twenty minutes and usually covered three topics. The stories were typically descriptive, not narrative, and included vignettes and exposés, showing for instance the renovation of a trolley system, the organization of farmers into communes, and the trial of Social Revolutionaries; one story shows starvation in the nascent Marxist state. Propagandistic tendencies are also present, but with more subtlety, in the episode featuring the construction of an airport: one shot shows the former Czar's tanks helping prepare a foundation, with an intertitle reading "Tanks on the labor front". • Vertov clearly intended an active relationship with his audience in the series — in the final segment he includes contact information — but by the fourteenth episode the series had become so experimental that some critics dismissed Vertov's efforts as "insane". • The term kino pravda, though it translates as "film truth", is not to be confused with the cinéma vérité movement in documentary film, which also translates as "film truth". Cinéma vérité was similarly marked by the intention of capturing reality "warts and all", but became popular in France in the 1960s

5. Cinema Verite – Jean Rouch • Key Names • Jean Rouch (Paris - 31 May1917, Niger - 18 February2004) was a French filmmaker and anthropologist. • He is considered to be one of the founders of the cinéma vérité in France, sharing the aesthetics of the direct cinema in the US pionered by Richard Leacock,D.A. Pennebaker and Albert and David Maysles. • Rouch's practice as a filmmaker for over sixty years in Africa, was characterized by the idea of shared anthropology. Influenced by his discovery of surealism in his early twenties, many of his films blur the line between fiction and documentary, creating a new style of ethnofiction. • He was also hailed by the French New Wave as one of theirs. His seminal film Me a Black (Moi un Noir) pionered the technique of jump cut popularized by Jean-Luc Godard. • Godard said of Rouch in the Cahiers du Cinéma (Notebooks on Cinema) n°94 April 1959 "In charge of research for the Musée de l'Homme(French, "Museum of Man") Is there a better definition for a filmmaker?". Along his career, Rouch was no stranger to controversy. He would often repeat "Glory to he who brings dispute".

6. Cinema Verite – D.A. Pennebaker • Key Names • Donn Alan "D. A." Pennebaker (born July 15, 1925) is an Americandocumentary filmmaker and one of the pioneers of Direct Cinema/Cinéma vérité. Performing arts (especially pop music) and politics are his primary subjects. • Pennebaker was born in Evanston, Illinois, the son of Lucille Levick (née Deemer) and John Paul Pennebaker, who was a commercial photographer. • In the early 1960s Pennebaker (known as "Penny" to his friends), together with Richard Leacock and Robert Drew, founded Drew Associates. In 1963 Leacock and Pennebaker left to found their own production firm. • Later he often worked with his wife, their company, has made a number of influential documentaries. Sometimes called "Pennebaker documentaries", these films, shot with an obviously hand-held camera, typically eschew voice-over narration and interviews in favor of a "simple" portrayal of events.

7. Direct Cinema – Maysles Brothers • Albert and David Maysles (rhymes with "hazels") were a documentary filmmaking team whose "Direct Cinema" works include Salesman (1968), Gimme Shelter (1970) and Grey Gardens (1976). Their 1964 film on The Beatles forms the backbone of the DVD, The Beatles: The First U.S. Visit. • David Maysles, the younger brother, was born on January 10, 1931, in Boston and died on January 3, 1987, in New York. • Albert Maysles was born on November 26, 1926, in Boston. Albert graduated in 1949 with a BA from Syracuse University and later earned a masters degree at Boston University. Albert has continued to make films on his own since his brother's death. • Jean-Luc Godard once called Albert Maysles "the best American cameraman".[1] In 2005 Maysles was given a lifetime achievement award at the Czech film festival AFO (Academia Film Olomouc). He is working on his own autobiographical documentary. • In 2005 he founded the Maysles Institute, a nonprofit organization that provides training and apprenticeships to underprivileged individuals. Albert is a patron of Shooting People, the filmmakers' community which created the Albert Maysles Glasses tribute website.

8. Direct Cinema - Leacock • Leacock (known to his friends as "Ricky") grew up on a banana plantation in the Canary Islands (the Leacock family, though English, have long been involved in the production of Madeira wine and bananas in the Spanish and Portuguese islands), until shipped off to School in England. He attended Bedales School, then Dartington Hall School from 1929 to 1938, where he helped form a student film unit, and made his first film, Canary Island Bananas, an eight-minute silent film. • To learn more about the technical basis of filmmaking, he studied physics at Harvard University. During the war he was a combat photographer for the U.S. army. • In 1946 Robert Flaherty hired him as cameraman for Louisiana Story. In the early 1960s Leacock, Robert Drew, D.A. Pennebaker and others founded Drew Associates. Pennebaker had also a technical background and Drew worked as producer. Together they developed a new style of filmmaking based on synchronous sound and the use of lightweight cameras. • Leacock left Drew Associates in 1963 to found his own production firm, together with Pennebaker. In 1969 he became head of the film department at MIT, which he chaired until 1988. In the 1980s he was still interested in the technical aspects of filmmaking and produced videos for French television.

9. Direct Cinema – Filmic Examples • Les Raquetteurs - Michel Brault, Gilles Groulx, 1958 • Pour la suite du monde - Michel Brault, Pierre Perrault, 1963 • Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment - Robert Drew, 1963 • The Chair - Robert Drew, 1963 • Tread - Richard Leacock, 1972 • Chiefs - Richard Leacock, 1968 • Gimme Shelter - The Maysles Brothers, 1970 • Meet Marlon Brando - The Maysles Brothers, 1966

10. Free Cinema • Lindsay Anderson • Lindsay Gordon Anderson (17 April 1923 – 30 August 1994) was an Indian-born Englishfeature film, theatre and documentarydirector, film critic, and leading light of the Free Cinema movement and the British New Wave. He is most widely remembered for his 1968 film if...., which won the Grand Prix at Cannes Film Festival.

11. The Works Of Anderson