Abstract
Since its origin, the audiovisual documentary has played an important role in recording not only certain historical events, but also the ways of life of local communities. In this paper we will present an historical reading on the exploration of topics from everyday life in documentary filmmaking. This is something that cuts across the entire history of cinema, from the earliest recordings by the Lumière brothers in the late 19th Century to the experiences created on the crowdsourcing model in the early 21st Century. As the documentary gained momentum as a film genre, important filmmakers like Flaherty and Vertov presented their distinct views on the everyday lives of people. In the 1930s, the sociological and anthropological research project called Mass Observation created an observatory on the daily lives of the English. Later, in the 1950s and 1960s in France, the United Kingdom and the United States, avant-garde movements emerged in documentary cinema: respectively, Cinéma Vérité, Free Cinema and Direct Cinema. From these movements, the work of a group of filmmakers and anthropologists who made documentary films about native populations and about the everyday lives of urban communities of the time will be highlighted, taking special attention to the work of Jean Rouch and his self-reflective approach to cinema that lead him to explore the inclusion of the subject filmed in the actual process of constructing the film.
Highlights
Since its origin, the audiovisual documentary has played an important role in recording certain historical events, and the ways of life of local communities
Com Janice Loeb e James Agee, Levitt co-realizou os documentários In the Street (1948) (Fig. 7) e The Quiet One (1948) nos quais foram usadas câmaras escondidas para captar o dia-a-dia nas ruas de Nova Iorque
Segundo McLane, Rogosin preocupava-se em captar “‘from the inside’ of ordinary people in their everyday surroundings, carrying out their lives as they would without the presence of a camera.” (McLane 2012, 212) Contudo, apesar da semelhança no interesse pelo quotidiano, os filmes mencionados não seguiam declaradamente um movimento específico comum
Summary
A documentação tem sido um dos principais instrumentos utilizados por antropólogos e etnógrafos na preservação do património cultural imaterial, já muito antes da própria UNESCO dedicar uma convenção a este assunto. Na década de 1920, quando ainda Eisenstein estava a descobrir a potencialidade da montagem no cinema, Dziga Vertov propõe uma nova forma de olhar para a realidade que não através da sua simulação. No final da década de 1920, o cinema documental enquanto expressão artística deu ainda origem ao estilo city symphony film, no qual se aliavam técnicas inovadoras de captação de imagem em movimento a uma visão poética e ritmada da paisagem urbana. Este estilo teve em Ruttman com Berlin, Symphony of a Great City[3] (1927) (Fig. 4), e Vertov com Man with a Movie Camera[4] (1929), as suas principais referências. O género documental de propaganda política viria a atingir o seu auge com Riefenstahl, que utilizava o cinema para assinalar as celebrações das vitórias do regime nazi, como é exemplo o seu filme Triumph of the Will[7] (1935)
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