Verite style

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... 

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... 

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. 

Again, this is just an illustration. Take the time to look at successful documentaries and identify the sequences within them. Watch a range of films and film styles, from historical films (such as Middle-march s Benjamin Franklin) to social issue films (compare the use of sequences in Taxi to the Dark Side and The War Tapes, for example) to traditional verite. Sequences, also known as chapters, are structural devices that enhance, rather than limit, presentation. 

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