Direct cinema: History and Key Facts

Direct cinema is a documentary genre that originated between 1958 and 1962—principally in Quebec and 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. It has drawn comparisons with related ideas from other national cinemas and documentary movements like the French cinéma vérité genre and the contemporaneous British free cinema movement. As in cinéma vérité, 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.

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