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Cinema Verite: Defining The Moment

2000, Movie, NR, 103 mins

Cinema Verite: Defining The Moment: Review

CINEMA VERITE: DEFINING THE MOMENT
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It's funny how the French term for a documentary filmmaking movement has become so commonplace in our cultural vocabulary. Describe THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT or TV's Cops and The Real World as "verité" and it's surprising how many people know exactly what you mean: shaky handheld camera, few edits, unscripted action. But that's only part of the story. Peter Wintonick's informative and richly illustrated history of cinema verité gives a solid overview of a revolution in filmmaking so absolute that it changed not only the language of cinema itself, but redefined the way we perceive "reality" in motion pictures. Remember how many people came away from BLAIR WITCH completely convinced it all really happened? Starting in the 1950s, filmmakers on both sides of the Atlantic began experimenting with different ways of breathing life into the stilted, argument-driven documentary and wound up redefining the form itself. Such filmmakers as Life magazine journalist Bob Drew, who dreamed of setting photo essays into motion and would later direct the groundbreaking PRIMARY with "direct cinema" pioneer Richard Leacock. England's Lindsay Anderson, Tony Richardson and Karel Reisz, who formed the "free cinema" movement; Wolf Koenig, who, inspired by Henri Cartier-Bresson's photographs, helped produce the proto-verité Candid Eye series for the National Film Board of Canada. France's Jean Rouch, who adapted Dziga Vertov's notion of Kino Pravda and coined the phrase "cinema verité." And, of course, in the U.S., where the Maysles brothers (SALESMAN), D.A. Pennebaker (DON'T LOOK BACK), Frederick Wiseman (TITICUT FOLLIES) and Barbara Koppel (HARLAN COUNTY, USA) produced some of the best known verité films. Wintonick also notes such crucial technical innovations as mobile cameras and portable recorders that made this new "shoot first, find the story later" approach possible, and does so in a manner that, like the rest of his film, is clear, concise and thoroughly entertaining. leave a comment --Ken Fox
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