Cinéma-Vérité in America (I): A Happy Mother's Day

Abstract

Primary (1960), the first of the Drew Associates productions that are usually considered the earliest examples of cinema-verite in America, was made simultaneously with Chronicle of a Summer in France. Cinema-verite on both sides of the Atlantic – because the distinction between “cinema-verite” and “direct cinema” is not a viable one, I have no qualms about using “cinema-verite” as a general term to cover a wide range of films – was inspired and influenced by Canadian filmmakers working under the auspices of the National Film Board, who were the first to venture into the “real world” with portable synch-sound equipment to capture unscripted, undirected “reality.” (The National Film Board of Canada was founded in the forties by John Grierson, who coined the term “documentary” in the twenties, defining it as the “creative treatment of reality,” and presided over the British documentary film movement in the thirties. The National Film Board filmmakers inherited, but also fundamentally revised, Grierson's understanding of documentary as primarily playing a social or political role.) Nonetheless I associate cinema-verite primarily with the United States. It is in the United States that the grandest hopes for cinema-verite have been harbored. It is in the United States that cinema-verite filmmakers have created the most extensive and impressive body of work. And, although it has not ordinarily been thought of in this way, cinema-verite in the United States has been perhaps the fullest inheritor of the classical American cinema of the thirties and forties.