The Three Hubs of Direct Cinema: France, Canada and the United States - Text 4
This film’s discovery by Jean Rouch at the 1959 Flaherty Seminar inaugurated productive film connections between Quebec and France around direct cinema. Pour la suite du monde (1963), co-directed by Michel Brault and Pierre Perrault, was the fruit of the exchange of these new ideas. On the technical side, the NFB was the centre of innovation: its full-time filmmakers benefited from the help of the engineers in its integrated technical departments. Several lightweight synchronous sound prototypes were developed there using Auricon and Arriflex cameras, and Pour la suite du monde benefited from an experimental technique to “push” the film stock to make it possible to shoot indoors without additional lighting.
Pour la suite du monde foretold the rise of a Quebec film culture and the maturity of direct cinema by means of a form and method destined to provide the inhabitants of Isle-aux-Coudres, and the people of Quebec, with a cinematic memory. Perrault and Brault shared a desire to take part in the action being filmed; for Perrault, this was the meaning of the expression “lived cinema.” The entire film grew out of a created situation – a fishing expedition organized at the instigation of the filmmakers – but the filmmakers yielded to their characters and to the “spoken action” (the term used by Perrault). In this respect, French and Quebec filmmakers shared the use of a “participating camera”[3] which the Americans, for their part, vigorously rejected.
In the United States, “cinéma vérité” emerged through the initiative of Robert Drew, an editor and reporter at Life magazine who received funding from Time Inc. to construct the equipment which would make it possible to develop a counterpart in television to modern photographic reportage. Drew wanted to create an alternative to the documentary programs produced for American television: The March of Time, produced by Louis de Rochemont and characterized by a “voice of God” commentary; and See it Now!, based on interviews by the famous commentator Edward R. Murrow. To carry this project out he brought together a crew of film directors, technicians and engineers, including Donn Alan Pennebaker, Albert Maysles, Terence Macartney-Filgate and Richard Leacock, who had been Robert Flaherty’s assistant. They modified a 16mm Auricon camera and obtained near-synchronization with a Nagra sound recorder by means of a tuning fork from a Bulova Accutron watch.
