Technique of Film Editing, Reissue of 2nd Edition, 2nd Edition

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Cin é ma-V é rit é

In the cinema at present the camera has become a sort of god. You have a camera fi xed on its tripod or crane, which

is just like a heathen altar; about it are the high priests — the director, cameraman, assistants — who bring victims before

the camera, like burnt offerings, and cast them into the fl ames. And the camera is there, immobile — or almost so — and

when it does move it follows patterns ordained by the high priests, not by the victims.

Now I am trying to extend my old ideas, and to establish that the camera fi nally only has one right — that of recording

what happens. That’s all. I don’t want the movements of the actors to be determined by the camera, but the move-

ments of the camera to be determined by the actor. . . . It is the cameraman’s duty to make it possible for us to see a

spectacle, rather than the duty of the spectacle to take place for the benefi t of the camera.

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The taste which widescreen had fostered among fi lm-makers — and presumably the public too — for allowing

the action to develop as naturally and spontaneously as possible, with little interference, was well served by the

widescreen processes. But the taste found more advanced expression in a different sort of cinema at the other

end of the scale; a cinema whose style came soon to be known as cin é ma-v é rit é , or spontaneous cinema, or

direct cinema. The words describe a method of shooting and presenting material so as to preserve primarily the

spontaneity and fl avour of the real event. The editor in this situation is therefore under some constraint to pre-

serve the unbroken fl ow of actuality. At fi rst sight, then, it would seem that his role would be reduced to that

of a mere scene-joiner’s. But that this is not so, as some of the more successful cin é ma-v é rit é fi lms conclusively

demonstrate.

There are many good reasons for the development of cin é ma-v é rit é . One of the best is stated by Jean Renoir

in the quotation above. The clumsiness and clutter with which the traditional cinema had surrounded itself —

a huge camera, tracking rails, dollies, blimps, tripods, cranes — was intimidating and inhibiting, especially

to non-professionals. Richard Leacock, a key fi gure in the development of cin é ma-v é rit é , was involved in

Flaherty’s Louisiana Story , and he has noted that wherever synchronous dialogue was needed, the paraphernalia

of equipment that was necessary quite changed the nature of the event they were recording. It was from those

professionals interested in preserving accurately the raw event — sociologists, ethnographers — that a great part

Chapter 17

Cin é ma-V é rit é and the Documentary Film of Ideas

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Jean Renoir interviewed by Andr é Bazin in France Observateur . Translated in Sight and Sound , Winter 1958 – 59.