Portability - Text 3
These few technical considerations – to which we must add the appreciable advances in the sensitivity of film stock – demonstrate the extent to which it is necessary to connect the birth of this “direct cinema” with innovations intended for radio (the Nagra tape recorder) and television (the live broadcast and reportage model). Although a few filmmakers, at the end of the Second World War, began to go outside the studio to confront the reality of the world (with Italian neo-realism as emblematic movement), post-synchronization remained the rule because of the technical constraints imposed by sound recording. And yet thanks to portable sound recorders the possibility of recording speech on site in the early 1960s gave rise to new experiments outside traditional production and distribution circuits. Every attempt which could be described as direct cinema was tied to a desire to record all of the sound and the images with the goal either of documenting important events in our collective lives or of giving voice to those who are denied it, at a time when documentaries privileged voice-over commentary.
Portable equipment brought about new relations with filmed speech, which is essential to understanding the context in which direct cinema made its mark. These new relations were based on two determining factors; the first concerns the relation between the device and the body of the operator, and the second the relation between the operator and the person being filmed. In Méthode 1, a veritable manifesto of direct cinema made in 1962, Mario Ruspoli introduced his “lightweight synchronous cinema group,” claiming that the shoulder-held camera was like an extension of the camera operator’s sight, while the hand-held microphone of the Nagra, worn over the shoulder, became an extension of the sound recordist’s hearing.
This hitherto unseen complementary connection between person and machine can be viewed as a major new form of the connection, in cinema, between technique, which according to Tim Ingold “places the subject at the heart of the production activity,” and technology, which “holds that production is independent of human subjectivity.”[3] Here the reality is less binary: with portable equipment, technology makes possible the expression of a new subjectivity, that of the equipment operators, based on technical mastery and the emergence of equally new relations with the persons being filmed. The nature of their exchanges is transformed by the proximity and reactions of the technical crew, thereby constructing an investigatory cinema close to the “sociology of the present” later theorized by Edgar Morin. Direct cinema, an improbable encounter between technical innovations connected to radio and television and the ethnographic and sociological ambitions of a few filmmakers working in a do it yourself mode, signalled the birth of hitherto unseen encounters between documentary and fiction. These experiments, coming out of unexplored relations between humans and machines, are not unrelated to the profusion of forms accompanying the advent of digital culture today, thereby demonstrating the legacy, despite this being contested, of “direct cinema.”
