Test Your Knowledge on Direct Cinema with Our Quiz!

Direct Cinema: A Style of Documentary Filmmaking

• Direct cinema is a documentary genre that originated in North America and was developed in France by Jean Rouch, employing lightweight portable filming equipment, hand-held cameras and live, synchronous sound.
• The advent of lightweight cameras allowed hand-held camera and more intimacy in the filmmaking, which was further improved with the use of pilottone sync-sound and the 1961 Nagra III.
• Direct cinema emerged from a desire to compare common opinion with reality, to show how things really are outside the studio, far from the editorial control of the establishment.
• Direct cinema had more to do with ethical considerations in documentary filmmaking than with technology.
• The movement began in two North American societies that were in social and ideological mutation, French Canada (Quebec) and the United States, before spreading to South America and France.
• In Quebec, direct cinema began in 1958 at the National Film Board of Canada, at the dawning of the Quiet Revolution, a period of intense social and political change.
• In the United States, Robert Drew founded Drew Associates, which included Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker, Terence Macartney-Filgate, and Albert and David Maysles, and started experimenting with technology, syncing camera and sound with the parts of a watch.
• Cinéma vérité has many resemblances to direct cinema, but direct cinema has been seen as more strictly observational.
• The NFB pioneers of the form, Michel Brault, Pierre Perrault, and others, preferred "Cinéma Direct" over cinéma vérité to describe their work.
• Examples of direct cinema documentaries are Primary, Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment, Salesman, and Grey Gardens.
• Direct cinema techniques were also incorporated into a number of key fiction films of the period, such as The Cat in the Bag (Le Chat dans le sac) (1964) and La vie heureuse de Léopold Z (1965).
• Direct cinema and cinéma vérité rely on the power of editing to give shape, structure and meaning to the material recorded.