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Concept
Direct cinema
Summary
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. 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.
"Direct cinema is the result of two predominant and related factors—The desire for a new cinematic realism and the development of the equipment necessary to achieving that desire" (Monaco 2003, p. 206). Many technological, ideological and social aspects contribute to the direct cinema movement and its place in the history of cinema.
Direct cinema was made possible, in part, by the advent of light, portable cameras, which allowed the hand-held camera and more intimacy in the filmmaking. It also produced movements that are the style's visual trademark. The first cameras of this type were German cameras, designed for ethnographic cinematography. The company Arriflex was considered the first to widely commercialize such cameras, that were improved for aerial and battlefield photography during World War II. Easily available, portable cameras played an important part, but the existence of these cameras in itself did not trigger the birth of direct cinema.
The idea of cinema as an objective space has been present since its birth. The Kino-Pravda (literally "Cinema Truth") practice of Dziga Vertov, which can be traced back to the 1920s, gave an articulated voice to this notion, where one can also see the influence of futurism.
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