Cinéma Vérité and Direct Cinema - Text 5
For Jean Rouch, these new relations shaped the cinematic logic to the ethical question:
In this way we passed, without changing speed, without an intermediary (like the direct contact of the gearbox of an automobile), to a notion more ethical than aesthetic or mechanical, to the problem of the direct relationship with the people filmed or, at a later date, the viewers.[6]
The expression “cinéma direct” gradually began to take the place of “cinéma vérité” around 1965, except for the followers of the movement in the United States (Drew Associates), who continued to use the latter term. In their films, the connection to reality was established without visible interference in the shooting stage, but the revelation of truth they claimed required deferred mediation in the form of the film’s later editing. In 1964, in a lecture to television professionals entitled “Thèmes de réflexion sur le ‘cinéma-vérité’” (5 June 1964), Edgar Morin sought to decompartmentalize the expression “cinéma vérité.” By historicizing its emergence as “a moment when cinema was invested by speech,” he sought to reconcile two often opposed positions (intervention and withdrawal) under a third term, a “communication cinema.” Morin saw the term “truth” (vérité) as an epistemological problem which social psychology made it possible to illuminate. “Cinéma vérité” as a “research tool” and “means of communication,” based on an inevitable dialectic, joins two fundamental attitudes for Morin, “fraternization” and “distanciation.”[7]
