Sounds like Canada: A Reexamination of the Development of Canadian Cinema-Verite

It is well known that within the kingdom of nonfiction film, the order of documentary, regardless of genus (cinema-verite, Direct Cinema, Free Cinema, Candid Eye), did not emerge fully formed from the brow of any of its progenitors no matter how organic its evolution may appear in hindsight. It developed through a confluence of factors (technical, aesthetic, authorial) marshaled by filmmakers in France, the U.S., England, and Canada. Throughout the mid 50s and early 60s we see an exchange of ideas, equipment, and even personnel between these camps. Technology alone did not enable these films, and there is evident a large variation in terms of how the technology was deployed. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] For example, in Canada, the National Film Board's federal mandate and funding opportunities, guided by producer Tom Daly's benevolent leadership at Unit B, created a unique kind of documentary laboratory. Daly, who had apprenticed with John Grierson and Stuart Legg at the Board during the war years, was a gifted film editor, and his years at the helm of Unit B offered those more ambitious or visionary filmmakers a strong sense of structure. Beyond the cinematic texts themselves, trouble-shooting new technical and aesthetic challenges offered unparalleled training to the filmmakers working under Daly, and those skills would be exported abroad. French director jean Rouch perhaps not-so-famously credited his partnership with NFB director-cameraman Michel Brault with creating Chronique d'un ete (1961): Everything that has been done in France in the field of cinema-verite comes from the NFB and from (1) Around the same time another NFB director-cameraman, Terrence Macartney-Filgate, quit the confines of Unit B to go the U.S. and join the Drew Associates. Macartney-Filgate worked with Robert Drew, Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker and Albert Maysles shooting the first Direct Cinema feature, Primary (1960). This is not to suggest that Canadians single-handedly invented cinema-verite. Rouch's comments may be as much indicative of his personal and professional generosity as a recognition of Brault's talent and input. Although Rouch was familiar with the NFB's output and was even something of an expert, he had considerable ethnographic documentary experience and had already made The Human Pyramid (1960) as a kind of test-run prior to his brief collaboration with Brault. And whatever Macartney-Filgate's contribution to Primary, and he claims it is substantial, (2) Drew had already been producing short-form news documentaries in the direct style for American television. Back home at the NFB, Roman Kroiter credited earlier British Free Cinema documentaries, like Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson's Momma Don't Allow (1956), as fueling his own desires to make verite. (3) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Yet what emerges is not a Utopian direct documentary movement, since we see that filmmakers immediately used the emerging technologies and techniques to different ends. As has been well documented, back in the 60s the Americans saw themselves doing something quite distinct from their gallic brethren across the Atlantic. Charlie Michael provides a good, quick summary of the two camps' positions: As the story goes, the American cinema of Drew and associates (first exemplified by Primary) strives to capture events without allowing the presence of the camera or the filmmaker to distort the situation ... of real events on-screen. Conversely, the French cinema-verite of Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin, first exemplified by Chronique d'un ete, confronts the invasive nature of the new equipment by actively signaling its presence on-screen with the filmmakers and their subjects. (4) Thus the debate is framed around issues of authenticity, or which mode is more real: not interfering (Direct Cinema) or acknowledging its presence (cinema verite). …

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