Direct and Mediated - Text 1
The term “cinéma direct” was proposed by Mario Ruspoli as an alternative to “cinéma-vérité”[1] in the report he wrote for UNESCO in October 1963. The term suggests an analogy between the shooting equipment in the process of coming to fruition, which he called the “lightweight synchronous cinema group,” and the direct injection found in the engines of Formula 1 race cars. This direct injection is unique in that it turns together the two camshafts (primary and secondary) which constitute the drive train in order to improve the performance of the transmission, just as the synchronous audiovisual crew must record the sound and the image together and act “like a single person.” In both cases, the mechanism at work should make it possible to adapt quickly and without interruption to the vagaries of the terrain. As Gilles Marsolais would write, it was thus a case of a cinema “with a direct connection to lived experience”[2] which defined an attitude and methods and techniques. The term thus describes changed relations between lived experience and cinema.
Contrary to what the adjective “direct” suggests, however, the aesthetic of the cinema of this name draws on film techniques associated with a gap, with disjunction, even with the deferred. Louis Marcorelles insisted on this peculiarity when he wrote:
It is not enough to film people and things directly for them to be filmable, it is not enough to show them for them to be interesting. Meaning that direct is the opposite of the merely immediate: it restores the real mediation which develops in any authentic knowledge endeavour.[3]
During its experimental period (1958-1965), developments in direct cinema made possible the exploration of the dialectical possibilities of film technology. In this way, it came to question the relations between distanciation and fraternization,[4] identification and otherness, truth and mystification. This reflexive project gave rise to specific methods – clean feed circuit, staging by selection, scripting in the editing, feedback – which introduced the idea of doubling up, distance or feedback of a kind which render relations with reality more complex.
The Sound-Image Disjunction
The earliest experiments in on-site sound recording using the double system made possible by the use of magnetic tape were, paradoxically, the source of a productive rift: the sound recorder – the Nagra for the most part – and the camera – KMT Coutant-Mathot, Arriflex 16, Auricon (modified to be double system) or Éclair 16 – recorded the sound and image separately. The camera operator and the sound recordist worked together on two distinct materials, as indicated by the use of a clean feed circuit by the camera operator.
