Cinéma Vérité and Direct Cinema - Text 2
In an article published in France-Observateur in January 1960 entitled “Pour un nouveau ‘cinéma-vérité,’” Edgar Morin borrowed from Dziga Vertov the term “cinéma vérité,” the translation of “kino pravda” proposed by Georges Sadoul. This programmatic text, written a few months before the making of Chronique d’un été, called for a lightweight cinema capable of entering the lives of our fellow men and women and tearing off their masks. He took as his model the work of Jean Rouch, a “filmmaker-deep-sea diver [who], equipped with a 16 mm camera and carrying his Nagra tape recorder over his shoulder, can now enter into a community as a friend and an individual.” In keeping with the ambitions of this manifesto, Chronique d’un été tried out new forms of staging speech in order to try to bring out the “psychoanalytic truth” of people who had agreed to share the shooting experience during moments of “shared meals.”[2]
