The Three Hubs of Direct Cinema: France, Canada and the United States - Text 2
Of course the common goal was to radically alter the ways in which films are made, on the artistic, economic and professional levels, in the first place by taking on cinema’s technical limitations. This goal would be met with the advent of the “lightweight synchronous cinema group,” as it was described by Mario Ruspoli. But the choice of tools to be overhauled and the methods adopted depended on the aspirations of each hub. In the process, the filmmakers who initiated this movement collectively opened up a vast field of reflection deriving from their different practices and theories around staging reality, the role of the filmmaker, the relations between the person filming and the person being filmed, the connection between objectivity and subjectivity, and the question of truth.
In France, direct cinema grew out of the social sciences, alongside visual anthropology, in particular through the work of the ethnographer Jean Rouch. Before then Rouch had used portable yet silent amateur equipment (the spring-motor Bell & Howell camera) to film practices such as possession rituals. In order to bring about new relations with the Other – with African peoples – which was at the heart of his ethnographical work, he had to master the means to record speech on site. In this sense, his goal was to pass from the (colonial) demonstration film to the (post-colonial) exploration film, from observation to participation.[1] In so doing, he came up with the concepts “shared anthropology” and “film trance.” The salient moment in direct cinema in France was the film Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a Summer, 1961) by Rouch and Edgar Morin. Shot in part with a prototype camera, the KMT Coutant-Mathot, and thanks to the collaboration of the Quebec cinematographer Michel Brault, the film created a community out of the immediate environment of the two filmmakers, themselves present in the film, and used a variety of techniques, derived from sociology, around interaction (interviews, eating and drinking together). In this film, creating situations and putting oneself into the scene were explicitly adopted as vectors of a staged reality.
