Direct cinema

For the film distribution company Direct Cinema Limited, see Mitchell Block.

Direct cinema is a documentary genre that originated between 1958 and 1962 in North America—principally in the Canadian province of Quebec and in the United States—and was developed in France by Jean Rouch.[1] It is a cinematic practice employing lightweight portable filming equipment, hand-held cameras and live, synchronous sound that became available because of new, ground-breaking technologies developed in the early 1960s. These innovations made it possible for independent filmmakers to do away with a truckload of optical sound-recording, large crews, studio sets, tripod-mounted equipment and special lights, expensive necessities that severely hog-tied these low-budget documentarians. Like the cinéma vérité genre, direct cinema was initially characterized by filmmakers' desire to capture reality directly, to represent it truthfully, and to question the relationship between reality and cinema.[2]

  1. ^ Aitken, Ian (2013-10-18). Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film 3-Volume Set. Routledge. ISBN 9781135206277.
  2. ^ "The type of cinema that poses the most profound and difficult problems concerning illusion, irreality and fiction, is indeed the cinema of the real, its very task being to face the most difficult problem asked by philosophy for two thousand years, that of the nature of reality." (In the 1980 festival catalog of Cinema du Réel, Centre Pompidou, Paris) Original text of Edgar Morin on this topic here Archived 2004-01-25 at archive.today (in French)