TECHNES Encyclopedia Database

Thus the series Living Camera (1960-62) was born, and featured as its pilot the film Primary (1960) which described, from the inside, with synchronous sound and a shoulder-held camera, the battle between two Democratic candidates, John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey, in the Wisconsin primaries. By showing backstage events, the films produced by Drew Associates created a between-the-lines critique of media practices. Their production context, that of public television networks subject to the “Fairness Doctrine,” stamped this movement with the greatest concern for moral integrity, one of the key goals of cinéma vérité. Out of this there arose a specific approach defined principally by the filmmakers’ non-intervention in the event being filmed, which was chosen for its dramatic potential, and by “making sequences” with the goal of conveying the “feeling of being there.”^[4]

The theorization of direct cinema as a new artistic and social practice developed in large part under the auspices of UNESCO. At the time, it seemed that the new lightweight and synchronous sound shooting technologies opened up possibilities for democratizing film production for minority groups or in “poor” or non-existent national cinemas. These developments affected not only documentary cinema but also fiction cinema and non-commercial uses of film (uses by turn educational, political and social).

Since the 1960s, film production with lightweight equipment (its practices and the discourses associated with it) has been the foundation of the so-called “new cinemas” or “third cinemas” tied to quests for political liberation around the world. Alongside these abundant aesthetic traditions, which have given considerable new life to film form, whether in fiction, documentary or animation, there have grown up sustainable practices in communication, institutional and non-institutional education, political activism, social intervention, etc. which are also tied to the use of lightweight equipment.