Eight Presentations by James Blue

LECTURE SIX: July 27, 1977

DIRECT CINEMA: 1959-PRESENT: EXPERIMENTS IN UN-CONTROLLED FILMMAKING

Recap of Last Week’s Lecture (0:00 – 4:40)

Blue reiterates that The March, in spite of being a government-sponsored USIA film, was a personal film: “I can remember feeling like I was dealing with sacred material. And that translated itself into the editing and feeling of the picture.” He accepted the limitations imposed by the institution and the 35mm equipment, and didn’t see them as limitations, since he could express himself within them.

New Technologies Change the Game (4:40 – 1:12:41)

The emergence in the Fifties of lightweight 16mm cameras with longer shooting capacities, accompanied by lightweight sound recorders, permitted a different kind of documentary filming. Blue talks about the lighter equipment (Éclair, Arriflex, Nagra, etc.) that have become the tools of documentarians. A related benefit has been the overthrow of the macho cameraman model and the arrival of women as camerapersons, including “two right now who are absolutely tops in this country, Claudia Weill and Joan Churchill, a student of mine back at UCLA.”

The French called it Cinema Verité, while here it’s more often called Direct Cinema. Blue says that the Europeans and Americans have taken two different approaches: “One has been, let’s call it the ‘Protestant’ approach, which is American, which is to go out and try to film what’s there and not interfere, or keep interference to a minimum.” Ricky Leacock, for example has no interest in interviewing his subjects or having them restage events in their lives: “he just wants to be there and look.”  And then, says Blue, “there’s the European or ‘Catholic’ approach, which says that all approaches are good. So the Europeans, like Jean Rouch and Chris Marker, have attempted to probe and dig deeper into the people they’re filming.”

Leo Hurwitz’s initial efforts at CBS were picked up at Time/Life by Robert Drew, Ricky Leacock, Terry Filgate, and D.A. Pennebaker. For the early production, Happy Mother’s Day, the subject was the Fischer quintuplets, and the sponsor was Carnation. The footage Ricky Leacock brought back produced evidence of intense media exploitation of the family. Carnation wasn’t happy and recut the film. Joyce Chopra and Leacock got the footage back and recut it the way they preferred, and “the two films don’t look alike at all.”

Blue says there are two tendencies within verité filmmaking. The first is to observe and discover evidence to present an interpretation, as Leacock did in finding evidence of media exploitation while filming the quintuplets. The second is to gather images that present a pre-determined case, as Frederick Wiseman does in his films. 

Screens: High School (Frederick Wiseman, 1968)

Frederick Wiseman is interested in portraying institutions, the confines of which define each film, and presenting them as metaphors. Primate implies that testing labs are akin to concentration camps with their wanton testing, gets us to identify with the primates at the start, and provides no contextual information about why the testing is happening.   High School is shown to be “indoctrination centers for the big corporation” and militaristic breeding grounds, turning students into “little soldiers… and systematically paring down the students’ individualism.” Wiseman “sharpens our sensibilities to the idea of indoctrination going on by building in ideas through metaphor.”

Blue shows a scene from High School in which students are bossed around by a teacher: “That was certainly a scene that happened, and I get the feeling the guy is a bastard; but we don’t understand any of the extenuating circumstances. What kind of pressure is being put on that guy? The force of the scene is that the kids are being made to jump through hoops following the beat of the adult. And the two scenes before this set that logic. I say that is a metaphorical use of real image rather than an observational use to give you evidence.” Another example: “We don’t see them learning anything of any value. Obviously there must be some courses of substance somewhere. Wiseman is making his statement, what he honestly and truthfully feels…but he’s making it in a way that you cannot be any judge about that school.”

Blue says repeatedly that he admires the film, cheered the anti-establishment message when it came out, but now has serious qualms. Wiseman has said “these are not documentaries, they are my personal visions,” but Blue wishes that was made clearer to viewers in the film itself. Viewers are made “to see the meaning as being a part of the material rather seeing it as a statement from the filmmaker.” The metaphor is a “driving line” that is restricting the audience’s ability to explore and draw its own conclusions. Blue summarizes: “The problem is that we grow up in a society where we think the only possible stance is polemic, that having an opinion means presenting a case. I think that there are alternatives to that. One can make an analysis of a situation as a scientist might, say what he or she thinks is relevant to that situation and leave it up to the audience to make some judgements about it. And that is, in fact, Ricky Leacock’s viewpoint.”

Blue says that Leacock and others in the Robert Drew orbit grew disaffected with the pressures from Time/Life to focus on celebrities and find melodramas. Other filmmakers came along who were inspired by the early verité works, but “set out to do work with more of an observational, scientific approach.” They felt that “to find out something about life, we should really get down to ordinary situations.” John Marshall was one of these filmmakers, and he has influenced some of the younger observational filmmakers who went through the ethnographic film program in UCLA, like David Hancock and David MacDougall.

Screens: Three Domestics (John Marshall, 1969)

This film follows police on three domestic calls, presenting some of the essential elements of those concrete situations,  so that the audience (law students, police cadets, or general viewers), can learn and make judgements from it.

How does a filmmaker shoot the scene that gives the audience the greatest amount of information? “The idea is to get a position which will give you the maximum access to the scene without having to move around” or to cut. Blue draws for the class the “isosceles triangle” method that allows the filmmaker, at one axis, to pivot, pan and occasionally zoom to cover a scene.

Emergence of Reflexive and Participatory Cinema (1;12:41 – 1:45:07)

When the scene is condensed, the audience should be aware that something is left out.  “What we see through the history of the Direct Cinema movement is a growing concern for the audience to be aware of the codes that are being used, the communication process that’s going on,” not concealing the codes as Wiseman does. An area of concern is: “What is the effect that the camera’s having on the event itself? And if you pretend that the camera is having no effect, or don’t show that effect, aren’t you hiding part of the evidence?”

Screens: Lonely Boy (Roman Kroiter and Wolf Koenig, 1962)

Blue highlights a particular scene in this National Film Board of Canada production in which the director asks Paul Anka to retake a scene we have just witnessed, surprising both the singer and the viewer.

The French had no problems along this line because “the way that they had conceived cinema verité from the outset, in Jean Rouch’s Chronicle of a Summer (which we unfortunately couldn’t get for this class), the film constantly revealed its own methods.” This is how participatory film began to evolve, out of recognition that the filmmaker’s presence had to be acknowledged and “the subject should be a part of the creation of the film.” This issue goes back to Flaherty and Nanook’s role in inventing the scenes that Flaherty filmed. “Particularly with anthropological films, if you went out and made a picture without the tribe having anything to say about what went on, then it could be argued that was a form of colonialism translated into an aesthetic.”

Screens: Pour la Suite du Monde (Pierre Perrault and Michel Brault, 1963)

Pierre Perrault and Michel Brault’s film is about a Quebecois island village’s effort to revive a practice of whale-hunting that had been dormant for 50 years. The film does not hide the traditional community’s modernity and romanticize the traditional practices, as some early exploration documentaries had done. The revival of the traditional practice is something the community wants, and the filmmakers are helping them record. This is an early participatory film.

Pierre Perrault was a poet who had also worked in radio, recording the speech of French Canadian communities. Supported by the Quebec government, he was striving to revive and restore pride in French Canadian culture. His work, and Pour la Suite, is balanced between art and science, “trying to find something out and also to make some kind of poetic statement.”  This is where all documentarists reside, Blue believes, sometimes emphasizing the artistic and other times the scientific side of the spectrum.

Pour la Suite du Monde’s search for the white whale is consciously undertaken by the villagers “as a means of organizing awareness of the worth of their own traditions and culture and also a way of putting on film, for practically the first time, the sound of the French-Canadian language and its utterances.” Blue says this use of film to heighten awareness of a people’s self-worth, with their participation, is a recent development in documentary, further explored by the Challenge for Change program in Canada, which used the portable video as a tool for community access. (One of its leaders, George Stoney, will attend the final lecture). The filmmakers tried not to make their film “quaint and folkloric,” and occasionally failed. Pierre Perrault is not happy with some of the pastoral scenes and “cute flute-like melodies” sprinkled in, and especially with the English narration track the National Film Board added.

So Perrault and Brault’s participatory ethic, and that of others who have followed, “is a different relationship with subjects than when filmmakers parachute into the village, knock off a few great shots of the natives, and get out. That’s way National Geographic does things.” The camera does not stand back, but “acts as an ordinary person would who was involved with the group.”

The next step in verité documentary reflexivity involved perfecting ways of “giving the audience the measure of just how much interference the camera was imposing or what the relationship of that camera was to the scene. As in a scientific problem, you would indicate how much the apparatus disturbs the circuit and results” of the investigation. Thinking along those lines led to the notion of including the crew in the picture and developing the relationship between the subject and the crew “so that the work would emerge, not out of an exploitative situation, but out of a collaborative situation, embodying the inside elements that grow out of and are felt by that culture.”  Next week, “I will elaborate further as we move into more reflexive forms and into some examples of attempts to destroy the illusion totally as a means of putting the audience on guard.”

CONTINUE TO LECTURE SEVEN: Direct Cinema (Continued)