The Three Hubs of Direct Cinema: France, Canada and the United States - Text 3
In their reaction to the tradition of government documentaries, the filmmakers of the National Film Board of Canada, founded by John Grierson in 1939, overturned the institution’s practices in favour of the new methods brought by television. Colin Low, Wolf Koenig, Terence Macartney-Filgate and Roman Kroitor, the filmmakers behind the series Candid Eye (1958-1961), rejected scripts, camera tripods and the use of commentary. The French-speaking filmmakers at the NFB dove into this liberating breach to make the tools of cinema in tune with the movement to assert Frencg speakers’ identity in Quebec, known as the Quiet Revolution. This movement was at odds with the ideal of national unity underlying a national institution such as the NFB. It was thus by hijacking a commission that Michel Brault, Marcel Carrière and Gilles Groulx made Les raquetteurs in 1958, often seen as the first direct cinema film, even though technically it is only its “zero degree,” as just one sequence in it was shot with synchronous sound. This initial attempt, and the rejection of the telephoto lens, demonstrated the filmmakers’ desire to “get closer to people with the image and sound, to know them in their acoustic world.”[2]
