Test Your Knowledge of Cinéma Vérité

Cinéma Vérité: A Style of Documentary Filmmaking

• Cinéma vérité is a style of documentary filmmaking that combines improvisation with the use of the camera to unveil truth or highlight subjects hidden behind reality.
• It is sometimes called observational cinema, mainly without a narrator's voice-over, and is concerned with the recording of events in which the subject and audience become unaware of the camera's presence.
• The filmmaker's intention was to represent the truth as objectively as possible, freeing the viewer from deceptions in how those aspects of life were formerly presented to them.
• Cinéma vérité can involve stylized set-ups and interaction between the filmmaker and the subject, even to the point of provocation.
• The camera is always acknowledged, for it performs the act of filming real objects, people, and events in a confrontational way.
• Feminist documentary films of the 1970s often used cinéma-vérité techniques.
• Edgar Morin coined the term around the time of such essential films as 1960's Primary and his own 1961 collaboration with Jean Rouch, Chronicle of a Summer.
• Many film directors of the 1960s and later adopted use of handheld camera and other cinéma vérité aspects for their scripted, fiction films.
• Cinéma vérité was also adapted for use in scripted TV programs, such as Homicide: Life on the Street, NYPD Blue, both the UK and American versions of The Office, Parks & Recreation and Modern Family.
• The techniques of cinéma vérité can also be seen in fiction films from The Blair Witch Project to Saving Private Ryan.
• Cinéma vérité is concerned with anthropological cinema and with the social and political implications of what is captured on film.
• It has also been a subject ripe for parodies and spoofs such as the mockumentary film This Is Spinal Tap and Emmy Award-nominated TV series Documentary Now.