Cinema verite

Style became more pronounced in the 50s with "direct cinema," in the documentaries of Lindsay Anderson (Everyday Except Christmas) and Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson (Momma Don t Allow). This was even more the case in the "cinema verite" explosion in the documentary filmmakers of the 60s (Leacock, Pennebaker, the Maysles brothers). But no examples of the style sacrificed those original intentions—actuality, education, political goals. Also, the style crossed over into the feature film— Haskell Wexler s Medium Cool and Michael Ritchie s The Candidate. In the... 

The battle is presented in a cinema verite style. Details of social, economic, and military organization and weaponry are combined with journalistic interviews with the combatants. The presentation is extremely realistic. The narrator, the writer-director Watkins, has clear sympathies for Scottish nationalism consequently, he editorializes about the English leadership and forces in the harshest terms. It is his view that this last battle on English soil destroyed a culture, the remnants of which were dispersed to the far comers of the Empire as a result. The tone of the narration is one of... 

The film uses a blue filter to present an attitude about Brighton Beach. The cinema verite footage of the deli, the restaurant, the street, and the subway station, as well as the beach, echo a community in a deep malaise. The emigres are not home in their new home. But they recreate the sounds and smells and sights that remind them of home—Moscow, Mother Russia. The film has a powerful sense of place and of nostalgia for that other home, far away. 

Don t be confused by the fact that festivals and film schools commonly use the term narrative to describe only works of dramatic fiction. Most documentaries are also narrative, which simply means that they tell stories (whether or not those stories are also narrated is an entirely different issue). How they tell those stories, and which stories they tell, are part of what separates the films into subcategories of genre or style, from cinema verite to film noir. 

Some editors work from a written outline of scenes and sequences, especially if the film consists primarily of live action, such as cinema verite. If there is a significant amount of interview material, whether or not there is to be narration, the producer may also take transcripts of the interviews and cut and paste selected bites into a "paper edit." If the project was shot to a script or a script-in-progress, that working script will be adjusted to reflect the actual material on hand. In either case, rough narration can be written to seam together disparate elements, make a transition clear, or hold a place for a sequence that s still to be shot. In many editing rooms, "scratch" narration is recorded and cut in against the picture, to better evaluate its effectiveness. 

Armed with that, you can do interviews you know how to craft questions. And you can always go out and shoot live cinematography, whether it s cinema verite shooting or live shooting of landscapes. The ideal thing is to do at least some of the production, in addition to interviews, while you re doing the script, because you re going to find that there s material you didn t expect. 

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