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In contrast to traditional documentary, cinema verite documentary
attempts to capture experience is an unobtrusive, unedited manner
as possible. These documentaries consist of long takes with little
editing or commentary. There are also far fewer interviews in favor
of having participations converse with each other. Events are portrayed
as they unfold, without having the presence of a camera influence
those events or any staging or playing for the camera to shape those
events. The less-obtrusive, light-weight 16-mm camera, zoom lens,
fast film stocks, and superior recording equipment in the 1960s
led to the rise of cinema verite documentary during that time (Giannetti,
2002).
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Cinema verite documentary reflects the ethnographic/anthropological
belief in the need to capture social and cultural practices as they
occur without imposing one’s own interpretive frame. The primary
assumption is that the filmmaker should simply portray events or
people as they behave in everyday contexts without attempting to
manipulate or impose their own perspectives onto such portrayals.
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The most famous and productive cinema verite documentary filmmaker
is Frederick Wiseman. Wiseman’s documentaries focus on peoples’
experiences in various institutions or sites — schools, hospitals,
towns, government /welfare agency sites, prisons, stores, parks,
etc. He shows long segments of people interacting with each other
or with the site with minimal editing and no interviews or voice-overs.
His films are often quite lengthy, in some cases, lasting four or
five hours.
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One of his recent films, aired on PBS, was Domestic
Violence, filmed in Tampa, Florida, which portrayed police
responses to domestic violence calls and attempts by the police
to mediate domestic disputes and violence towards women and children.
It also portrayed various activities in a shelter for women and
children in Tampa, that included interviews, counseling sessions,
anger management training, group therapy, and conversations between
and among clients and staff. The audience witnesses the women’s
and children’s fear of being abused, as well as attempt to cope
with their abuse in a protective site.
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In an interview with Nick Poppy (“Frederick
Wiseman”) in Salon (3/28/02) about Domestic Violence,
Wiseman notes that he filmed the documentary over 8 weeks and spent
a year editing it before it was shown on PBS. Wiseman noted that: |
The shooting was eight weeks, and in eight weeks I accumulated
about 110 hours. The movie took about a year to edit. And the second
one will also take about a year to edit. You make or break a movie
like this in the editing. You can have good material and screw it
up, and you can have mediocre material and improve it by the way
you put it together.
I have no idea what the themes or the point of view are going
to be until I get well into the editing. I don’t have
a story in mind in advance and I don’t set out in these
movies to prove a thesis. I discover what the themes are as
I put the film together, as I edit the sequences and study the
material.
I think I have an obligation, to the people who have consented
to be in the film, to make a film that is fair to their
experience. The editing of my films is a long and selective
process. I do feel that when I cut a sequence, I have an
obligation to the people who are in it, to cut it so that
it fairly represents what I felt was going on at the time,
in the original event. I don't try and cut it to meet the
standards of a producer or a network or a television show.
When I’m making a movie, I have no idea how to
think about an audience. I think the kinds of surveys
they do in Hollywood are basically high comedy. I hope
you don’t think that what I’m about to say
is arrogant. I have no idea how anybody else is going
to respond to the movie, what their experience or their
interests are, what books they’ve read or movies
they’ve seen, what their general interests are,
etc. So the only audience I have in mind when I make
the movie is myself. And I try to make it to my own
standards, and I hope that somebody else who sees it
will connect to it. The only things I know a little
bit about — and I don’t say I know a lot
about them either — are my own standards. |
Some other Wiseman documentaries include:
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Public Housing: portrays life in the Ida B.
Wells public housing development in Chicago, coping
with crime, drugs, family conflicts, pregnancy, and
government officials in a world of poverty.
Belfast, Maine: portrays life in a small coastal
town in terms of people’s daily work and dance, music,
and theater productions.
Zoo: portrays the world of maintaining and
caring for animals in the Miami, Florida Zoo.
High School II: portrays teachers and students
in an alternative Manhatten high school, Central Park
East Secondary School. It portrays various classroom
interactions and discussions of issues, faculty/student
council meetings, disciplinary problems, conflict resolution
by students, and other events in the high school.
The Store: portrays the operation of and customers
purchasing expensive goods in the main Neiman-Marcus
store and corporate headquarters in Dallas.
Central Park: portrays people’s uses of New
York’s Central Park as well as difficulties in maintaining
the park.
For information about all of Wiseman’s films,
go to Zipporah
Films, the distributor of his films.
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For further reading:
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Benson, T. W. & Anderson, C. (2002).
Reality fictions: The films of Frederick Wiseman.
Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University
Press.
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Benson, T. W., & Anderson, C.
(1991). Documentary dilemmas: Frederick Wiseman’s
Titicut Follies. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois
University Press.
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The Maysle Brothers.
Albert and David Maysle were also important figures
in the rise of cinema verite. Their 1969 documentary,
Salesman, considered seminal in the development
of cinema verite portrayed the experiences of four
door-to-door salesmen of expensive bibles in working
class neighborhoods. The film was a landmark in
that it captured the realities of frustrated workers
and of customers who could not afford to buy their
bibles.
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In the previous year, 1968, they made an up-beat
rock documentary, Monterey Pop. This contrasted
with their 1970 rock documentary, Gimme Shelter,
about a 1969 Rolling Stones concert tour, including
a concert in Altamont, California, in which members
of the Hells Angels contracted as security guards
murder an audience member. They also made a number
of films about the artist, Chisto, who constructed
monumental works of environmental art. David Maysle
died of a stroke in 1987. Albert then made one of
the key sports documentaries, When We Were Kings
(1996) about the Ali–Foreman fight in Africa.
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Barbara Koppel. Another
important documentary filmmaker to arise in the
1970s was Barbara Koppel, whose 1973 documentary,
Harlan County, U.S.A. (released on video
in 1976) portrayed a bitter coal-miners strike against
an intransigent mining company in a small West Virginia
community. This film, which won an Academy Award,
portrays the poverty of the workers and their lack
of power relative to the powerful mining company.
She then made another film, American Dream,
about a strike at the Hormel meat packing plant
in Austin, Minnesota. The film portrays the workers’
attempt to strike for higher wages after their wages
and benefits were cut despite the fact that the
company was profitable. It shows how the strike
created conflicts between friends and family members
in the town of Austin. It also captures the rise
of a new negative attitude towards unions that began
during the Reagan administration.
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Her 2000 film Woodstock portrays the
attempt by the producer of the original 1969 Woodstock
concert to put on a repeat concert in 1999. The
film demonstrates the cultural shift from the late
60s to the late 90s towards a much more commercialized
music industry and American culture.
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An American Family.
Another ground-breaking cinema verite documentary
is the 12 hour PBS series, An American Family,
broadcast in 1973 made by Alan and Susan Raymond.
This documentary portrayed the daily lives of an
upper-middle-class California family with five children
as it coped with martial conflict — leading to divorce,
the oldest boy’s gay lifestyle, and attempts to
deal with shifting values toward the family that
challenged the idealized Father Knows Best drama
versions on prime-time television. Before beginning
the actual filming of the family, the Raymonds had
the cameras running without any film in them so
that the family would become accustomed to the presence
of the cameras to that point that they began to
ignore them, lessening the likelihood that the presence
of the cameras would alter their behavior. However,
the question remains as to whether the presence
of the camera had any influence on how the family
portrayed themselves, as well as whether it is possible
to capture the reality of everyday family life.
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The Raymonds made another follow-up documentary
about the Loud family, An American Family Revisited,
that was aired in 1983 on PBS. Then, in 2003, they
aired another documentary on PBS, Lance
Loud! A Death In An American Family, that
portrayed, at his request, the final months of Lance
Loud’s life, who died in 2001 at age 50 of Hepetitis
C and HIV infection.
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Because Lance was one of the first people to
have been shown on television as an openly gay person,
he became a celebrity figure and writer. However,
in the documentary, after years of coping with substance
abuse and dying of AIDs, he perceived his celebrity
status, the result of television exposure, as shallow.
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Another important documentary that dealt wit
the issue of gay rights is the 1984, The Times
of Harvey Milk, which portrays the political
experiences of Harvey Milk, a representative of
San Francisco’s gay community on the San Francisco
Board of Supervisors. In 1978, Milk and Mayor George
Moscone were both assassinated by another supervisor.
The film documents the ways in which Milk’s election
and death galvanized the gay community.
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All of this raises questions as to whether it
is ever possible to portray “reality” in an unmediated,
unfiltered manner, “as it really is” even through
cinema verite documentary. Frederick Wiseman describes
his films as “fictions,” noting that they are still
his interpretations of reality, as opposed to a
totally unmediated version of reality. This is most
evident in documentaries about the film medium itself.
The 1991 documentary, Hearts of Darkness: A
Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, about Francis
Ford Coppola’s making of the film, Apocalypse
Now, demonstrates how the attempt to recapture
the Vietnam War itself was a difficult, almost impossible
attempt to capture the cultural and psychological
realities of that war. And, the 2002 documentary,
The
Kid Stays In the Picture, portrays the
story of a Hollywood producer, Robert Evans, who
produced films such as The Godfather and
Chinatown, but then, in the 1980s, with
the decline of the studio, he experiences his own
loss of fame to become an obscure person.
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And, the documentary, Lost
in La Mancha, portrays the challenges of
director Terry Gilliam’s attempt to make a film
version of Don Quixote, that demonstrates the challenges
of attempting to portray past historical period.
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Studying documentaries therefore involves applying a rhetorical
analysis to examine the filmmaker’s intended message and stance
towards the subject. In some cases, a filmmaker adopt s a more neutral,
objective stance, but in most cases, documentary filmmakers have
a defined attitude towards their subject that they want to convey
to their audiences. Students may also study the filmmaker’s
attempts to gain their audience’s sympathy or identification
with their portrayal of a certain topic, issue, institution, person,
or group.
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To examine the question of whether a documentary simply captures
or actually shapes or constructs “reality,” you could
bring a camcorder into the classroom and begin filming the classroom
engaged in some activity. You could then ask students to discuss
whether the presence of the camera influenced their behavior in
any way. If it did, you could then discuss how they were influenced
and what assumptions they had about how they should behave in front
of a camera. This could also lead to discussions about a culture
mediated by media productions in which people acquire assumptions
about appropriate social practices “on camera.” For
example, professional athletes, when interviewed about post-game
reflections, typically talk and behave in a highly predictable manner,
practices shaped by the familiar television post-game interview
practice. All of this leads to the larger issue of whether documentaries
mirror or construct realities and for what purposes.
Documentary
Filmmakers
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