Méthode 1: The Utopia of Direct Filming - Text 3
For Mario Ruspoli, technology was the ally of the finest human ambitions and should, for a film crew, be “second nature.” Thus the film vaunts portability and underscores how the machine and the human body are complementary: the operator’s feet replace the tripod and the lightweight camera is a second head, creating a new form of receptiveness. The crew as a whole forms a body in osmosis, capable of “simultaneous collective thought,” and its members are connected to each other by the “synch wire” regulating the choreography of the ensemble and symbolizing their necessary mutual recognition. Virtuosity is required – rapidity, precision, selectivity – but technical aptitude should yield to an intuitive understanding of human behaviour. This configuration – lightweight, mobile, symbiotic – made possible the immersion and participation of the “Martians,” who stake their claim to being a part of the reality they are filming.
In the film, Mario Ruspoli emphasizes, like Louis Marcorelles, that direct cinema’s greatest innovation is to provide “total sound” and the “living voice.”[5] An illustration of this is Pierre Lhomme’s willingness to wear headphones to hear what the microphone was recording and to subordinate the images to the sound. This involves a profound transformation of know-how: the camera operator learns to listen, the sound recordist learns to watch and anticipate sound events and the crew’s movements. To master synchronous sound was thus also to master the bonds between crew members, via the synch wire, and between the crew and the world in which it was immersed. These new connections also transformed the work of editing, as the film took form out of its verbal content[6]. The work’s mutation was matched by that of the viewer, who had to re-learn how to watch and listen.
Méthode 1 was based on two sets of equipment. Its two film crews end up facing each other, and its editing took the form through feedback, by revisiting the filmmaking experience and placing the question of cinema’s political and epistemological potential at the heart of the film. It also revealed the kind of “dual role” inherent in the act of filming: Mario Ruspoli appears successively behind and in front of the camera, taking on at one and the same time the “we” of the film crew and the “I” of the film director. Here we see asserted a quality of presence in the world which, for Ruspoli, underlies the specificity of direct cinema: the filmmaker’s participation and engagement with society, and his or her personal involvement and responsibility.
