A HISTORY OF AMERICAN NEW WAVE CINEMA

Direct Cinema

The Nagra III portable tape recorder

Coinciding with the emergence of the French New Wave, British Free Cinema and a new generation of independent filmmakers working outside Hollywood in New York, Direct Cinema was part of a wider revolution that transformed filmmaking at the end of the 1950s and beginning of the 1960s. Developing almost simultaneously in Canada and the United States, and closely related to the cinéma vérité movement in France, it rejected many of the established conventions of documentary filmmaking in favour of a more immediate approach in which filmmakers attempted to record events as they actually happened. Professional lighting, formal interviews and authoritative voice-over commentary were largely abandoned. Instead, filmmakers used newly developed lightweight cameras and portable synchronous sound equipment to follow their subjects into streets, homes, workplaces, political campaigns and eventually rock concerts, hospitals and institutions. “My goal was to capture life in the raw,” Robert Drew later explained. “My idea was to have one or two people, unobtrusive, capturing the moment.”

The ambition sounds straightforward, but at the time it represented a fundamental change in documentary practice. Instead of explaining reality to an audience after the event, Direct Cinema attempted to place the audience inside the event while it was still unfolding. Its filmmakers wanted viewers to experience uncertainty, spontaneity and discovery for themselves. Their work belonged to the same cultural moment that was beginning to shake apart the conventions of fiction filmmaking. Across Europe and America, directors were taking cameras out of studios, questioning established forms and searching for a cinema closer to contemporary experience. Direct Cinema formed an important part of that transformation and would eventually exert a profound influence upon the American New Wave.

The revolution was partly technological. Until the 1950s, making a documentary with synchronised sound could be a cumbersome operation involving heavy cameras, tripods, large crews, substantial lighting and sound equipment that severely restricted the filmmaker's ability to respond spontaneously to events. Location sound presented particular problems. Documentary filmmakers could shoot silent footage relatively freely, but dialogue generally required equipment that made unobtrusive observation difficult. Sound was therefore often recorded separately, reconstructed afterwards or replaced altogether by narration. The result could be informative and sometimes artistically impressive, but there was usually an obvious distance between the event and the film recording it.

A new generation of filmmakers wanted to close that distance. Smaller 16mm cameras had already made handheld shooting increasingly practical, while developments in magnetic tape recording and synchronisation eventually made it possible for a small crew to record picture and sound simultaneously while moving alongside its subjects. The arrival of equipment such as the Nagra III portable tape recorder around the beginning of the 1960s was particularly important. Suddenly a filmmaker no longer necessarily needed to arrive with what amounted to a miniature film studio. A cameraman and sound recordist could enter an actual situation and move with it.

Technology alone, however, does not explain Direct Cinema. Lightweight cameras existed before the movement emerged. What changed was the filmmakers' idea of what those cameras might be used for. Throughout the post-war period there had been a growing desire for greater realism in cinema. Italian Neorealism had taken fiction filmmaking onto the streets, using real locations and sometimes non-professional performers to depict lives largely ignored by commercial cinema. In Britain, the filmmakers associated with Free Cinema were turning their cameras towards working-class communities and everyday experience. In France, Jean Rouch was experimenting with ethnographic filmmaking and developing ideas that would contribute to cinéma vérité. Meanwhile, the photographers of magazines such as Life demonstrated how photojournalism could create powerful narratives from unstaged reality. Direct Cinema emerged from this combination of technological possibility and a wider dissatisfaction with the artificiality of established forms.

Canada and the Beginnings of Direct Cinema

Les Raquetteurs [The Snowshoers, 1958]

Some of the earliest breakthroughs occurred not in the United States but in Canada, particularly among French-speaking filmmakers working at the National Film Board of Canada. During the late 1950s, Quebec was approaching the enormous social transformation that became known as the Quiet Revolution. Traditional rural communities were changing rapidly, French Canadian nationalism was growing, and a younger generation of intellectuals and artists wanted to record Quebec life from inside the culture rather than through the conventions of official filmmaking.

Michel Brault became one of the most important innovators of the new handheld style. Instead of standing at a distance and photographing events through long lenses, Brault wanted to enter crowds and move amongst the people he was filming, often using a wide-angle lens that placed the viewer physically close to the action. Working with Gilles Groulx, he made Les Raquetteurs (The Snowshoers, 1958), a short documentary about a snowshoeing convention in rural Quebec. On the surface it was an unremarkable subject, but the manner in which it was filmed was strikingly new. The camera moved among the participants, observing conversations, celebrations, and behaviour rather than organising the material around formal commentary. Groulx followed it with Golden Gloves (1961), about young boxers in Montreal. Other filmmakers at the NFB, including Pierre Perrault, developed related approaches.

These Canadian experiments were significant because they established one of the fundamental principles of Direct Cinema: the filmmaker should be physically present within the world being recorded. The camera was no longer an immobile observer looking at reality from outside. It could move through reality.

Similar ideas were taking shape independently in the United States, where a former fighter pilot and Life magazine journalist named Robert Drew was attempting to solve much the same problem.

Robert Drew and Drew Associates

Drew had become fascinated by the difference between still photojournalism and television documentary. Working at Life, he saw how a great photographic essay could tell a story through a sequence of images without constantly explaining their meaning. Television documentaries, by contrast, often seemed static and over-produced. A correspondent or narrator told the audience what had happened while pictures illustrated the commentary. Interviews were conducted after events had taken place. Reality was organised and explained rather than experienced.

Drew wondered whether it might be possible to apply the principles of photojournalism to moving pictures. Instead of making documentaries about events, why not film the events themselves while they were happening? He imagined a kind of non-fiction drama in which the characters were real people, and neither filmmakers nor audiences knew what was going to happen next. The crucial thing was to reduce the machinery of filmmaking until the crew could enter an event without dominating it.

Richard Leacock

One of the filmmakers who convinced Drew that this might be possible was Richard Leacock. Born in London and brought up partly in the Canary Islands, Leacock had been experimenting with documentary filmmaking since childhood and later worked as a cameraman on Robert Flaherty's Louisiana Story (1948). Drew was particularly impressed by Leacock's Toby and the Tall Corn (1954), about a travelling tent theatre in the American Midwest. Watching it, Drew felt that he was not being told about the company but was actually there with it. He contacted Leacock and proposed that they work together.

Around them gathered a remarkable group of young filmmakers and technicians. D. A. Pennebaker combined filmmaking ability with a fascination for the engineering problems involved in portable cinema. Albert Maysles, soon joined professionally by his brother David, brought an instinctive ability to observe people at close quarters. Canadian filmmaker Terence Macartney-Filgate also became part of the group. Together they formed Drew Associates and began developing both the equipment and the filmmaking techniques necessary to turn Drew's idea into practice.

Time-Life recognised the possibilities of the experiment and provided substantial financial support. Cameras were adapted to be carried on the shoulder and operated without tripods, while sound equipment was developed to remain synchronised with the camera without physically tethering the cameraman and sound recordist together. These may seem like straightforward improvements from a modern perspective, but their effect was liberating. Two people could now follow a subject through a doorway, into a car, along a street or through a crowd while continuing to record usable synchronised sound.

The breakthrough came in 1960.

Primary

Drew Associates travelled to Wisconsin to follow the Democratic presidential primary contest between Senators John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey. The resulting Primary became the film that established Direct Cinema in the United States.

Robert Drew records Senator Hubert Humphrey during the making of Primary [1960]

Political documentaries were hardly new, but Primary looked and felt unlike conventional political reporting. Drew and his team did not arrange formal interviews with Kennedy and Humphrey and ask them to explain their campaigns. They followed them. The camera travelled through crowded halls, entered hotel rooms, moved among supporters, and accompanied the candidates as they shook hands, gave speeches, and waited for results. Kennedy could be seen from behind as he pushed through an excited crowd, the handheld camera following him as though the viewer were another member of his entourage. Humphrey appeared campaigning tirelessly in smaller towns, trying to overcome Kennedy's growing celebrity and financial advantage.

What made the film remarkable was not simply its access but the sense that events were taking place in the present tense. The outcome of the primary was unknown when the material was filmed. Kennedy and Humphrey were not remembering what had happened for the benefit of a documentary made afterwards; they were living through it. Small gestures and apparently incidental moments became revealing because the filmmakers stayed close enough to capture them.

Kennedy was an ideal subject for the new technique. Young, charismatic and unusually comfortable around cameras, he appeared to belong to the emerging television age in a way many older politicians did not. Primary consequently became not only an important documentary but an inadvertent record of the changing nature of American politics. Television was beginning to alter the relationship between politicians and voters, placing increasing importance on image, personality and physical presence. Direct Cinema was perfectly equipped to observe that transformation.

Drew Associates made other films for Time-Life during this period, including Yanqui, No! and Eddie (On the Pole), but Primary was the decisive work. It demonstrated that an unscripted documentary could possess the dramatic tension of fiction simply by following real people through an uncertain situation. Drew sometimes described what he was seeking as a form of theatre without actors. In Primary, he had found it.

Crisis

Three years later, Drew returned to Kennedy, by then President of the United States, for an even more remarkable film. Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment (1963) followed the confrontation surrounding the attempted integration of the University of Alabama. Governor George Wallace, who had built his political reputation upon resistance to integration, announced that he would personally prevent two African American students, Vivian Malone and James Hood, from entering the university. The Kennedy administration was determined that the federal court order permitting their admission would be enforced.

Robert F. Kennedy on the phone during the University of Alabama integration crisis in Crisis [1963]

Drew's filmmakers were given extraordinary access to the unfolding crisis. Cameras followed events in Alabama while another member of the team was permitted inside the Kennedy White House. The documentary moves between the different participants as the confrontation develops, observing Attorney General Robert Kennedy and administration officials considering how to respond while Wallace prepares his symbolic stand in the schoolhouse door.

Again, nobody involved knew exactly what would happen. That uncertainty gives Crisis an extraordinary tension. Rather than historians subsequently explaining how a major event in the Civil Rights struggle unfolded, the viewer watches decisions being made while their consequences remain unknown. Eventually Wallace stepped aside after the federalisation of the Alabama National Guard, and Malone and Hood entered the university.

The implications of the film extended beyond documentary technique. Direct Cinema had demonstrated that it could enter the centres of American political power and reveal processes normally hidden behind official statements and press conferences. But such access was unlikely to remain uncomplicated. Politicians quickly became more conscious of what an observational camera might reveal, and the extraordinary intimacy achieved by Drew during the Kennedy years would become increasingly difficult to reproduce.

The assassination of Kennedy in November 1963 also gave films such as Primary and Crisis an unintended historical importance. The camera had preserved not the public monument Kennedy would become but the living politician: moving through crowds, talking to advisers, waiting, listening and making decisions. Direct Cinema had become an instrument of historical memory almost by accident.

Direct Cinema and Cinéma Vérité

The American movement developed alongside cinéma vérité in France, and the two terms are still frequently used interchangeably. They shared the same technological revolution and the same dissatisfaction with traditional documentary, but there were important differences in approach.

Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin's Chronicle of a Summer (1961), one of the defining works of cinéma vérité, made no attempt to pretend that the filmmaker was invisible. Rouch and Morin questioned people directly about their lives and happiness, encouraged discussions and finally showed participants parts of the resulting film so that their responses could themselves become part of the documentary. The presence of the filmmakers helped create the reality being recorded.

Drew and Leacock generally preferred the opposite approach. They wanted their subjects to become sufficiently accustomed to the filmmakers that the camera could observe events without directing them. Drew later recalled his surprise on encountering the French approach, which seemed to him far more interventionist. His own ambition remained much simpler: one or two filmmakers, as unobtrusive as possible, waiting for something to happen.

Where cinéma vérité might use the camera to provoke a revelation, American Direct Cinema ideally waited for the revelation to happen.

David Holzman's Diary [1967]

The distinction was never absolute. No camera is genuinely invisible, and the Direct Cinema filmmakers themselves differed in their methods. Nevertheless, the difference is useful. Cinéma vérité frequently acknowledged the encounter between filmmaker and subject; Direct Cinema usually tried to minimise it.

This raised a question that would increasingly trouble the movement: could the presence of a camera ever really have no effect upon what happened in front of it?

By the middle of the 1960s, younger American filmmakers were already beginning to play with that contradiction. It would become particularly important to the emerging American New Wave, whose filmmakers were absorbing lessons from documentary, European art cinema, underground film and television simultaneously. Jim McBride's David Holzman's Diary (1967), a fictional film made in the style of cinéma vérité, turned the pursuit of documentary truth into its central joke. Its protagonist decides to film his life in the hope that the camera will help him understand it, only to discover that filming reality inevitably changes it. The movie belonged to the same restless New York independent culture from which filmmakers such as Brian De Palma and Martin Scorsese were emerging. It demonstrated how quickly the ideas behind Direct Cinema were passing into fiction filmmaking.

The Maysles Brothers and Salesman

The breakup of the original Drew Associates group did not bring Direct Cinema to an end. Instead, its members pursued increasingly individual careers. Albert and David Maysles developed an especially distinctive form of observational filmmaking. Albert generally operated the camera while David recorded sound, and together they cultivated an unusual intimacy with their subjects. They were less interested than Drew in major political events and increasingly fascinated by character: the revealing gestures, conversations and moments through which people unconsciously disclosed themselves.

David and Albert Maysles film Paul Brennan as he attempts to sell a Bible in Salesman [1969]

Albert Maysles contrasted this approach with conventional commercial cinema in particularly forceful terms: “The Hollywood film is an escape of one sort or another. But our films make it damn near impossible to escape. We’re interested in what you can’t escape from and presenting it.”

That difference is central to understanding the Maysles' work. Their films were not constructed around heroes, villains or conventional dramatic resolutions. They remained with people even when nothing spectacular was occurring and trusted that character would emerge from accumulation.

Their masterpiece Salesman (1969), made with Charlotte Zwerin, followed four travelling salesmen attempting to sell expensive Bibles door-to-door. Its central figure, Paul Brennan, known as "The Badger," is a weary Irish-American salesman whose ability to close a sale seems to be deserting him. The filmmakers follow Brennan and his colleagues through anonymous motel rooms, sales meetings, car journeys and uncomfortable visits to potential customers.

Nothing conventionally dramatic happens, yet the cumulative effect is powerful. The salesmen have been taught a language of optimism and self-belief, but under it lies the constant possibility of failure. Their livelihoods depend upon persuading often cash-strapped families to buy lavish Bibles they can barely afford. Brennan becomes increasingly despondent as one unsuccessful call follows another.

Without narration or explicit argument, Salesman becomes a portrait of a particular America: competitive, commercial, optimistic in its rhetoric and frequently unforgiving in practice. But the Maysles do not ridicule their subjects or turn them into symbols. Brennan remains first and foremost a man, tired and increasingly conscious that the qualities that once enabled him to make a living may no longer be enough.

The film demonstrated how far Direct Cinema had travelled since Primary. The drama no longer required presidential candidates or historic confrontations. An ordinary working life could provide enough.

Frederick Wiseman and the American Institution

Titicut Follies [1967]

At much the same time, Frederick Wiseman was taking observational documentary in another direction. Wiseman was not a member of Drew Associates and developed his own highly distinctive filmmaking method, but his work became inseparable from the history of Direct Cinema. Where the Maysles concentrated upon individuals, Wiseman increasingly examined institutions and the systems of authority operating within them.

His first film, Titicut Follies (1967), was shot inside Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane in Massachusetts. What Wiseman and cameraman John Marshall recorded was disturbing: inmates stripped naked, mocked, force-fed and subjected to conditions that appeared degrading and dehumanising. There was no narrator to condemn what was happening and no series of experts explaining the institution. Wiseman simply assembled scenes that allowed its routines and relationships to reveal themselves.

The reaction demonstrated the political power of observational filmmaking. Massachusetts attempted to prevent the film from being shown, ostensibly to protect the privacy of inmates, and Titicut Follies became subject to lengthy legal restrictions. The controversy inevitably raised ethical questions of its own—notably about whether severely vulnerable people were capable of giving meaningful consent to being filmed—but it also demonstrated Direct Cinema's ability to expose worlds that institutions preferred to keep hidden.

Wiseman went on to make a remarkable series of documentaries examining American institutional life, including High School (1968), Law and Order (1969), Hospital (1970) and Welfare (1975). Collectively they offered a different kind of social history, built not around famous personalities or great events but around the everyday operation of authority.

This was particularly significant in the atmosphere of late-1960s America. Suspicion of institutions was growing as the Vietnam War escalated, the Civil Rights struggle exposed deep racial inequalities and younger Americans increasingly challenged the authority of government, universities, police and other established bodies. The same anti-authoritarian mood was beginning to transform American fiction filmmaking. Direct Cinema and the American New Wave were not the same movement, but they belonged to the same historical moment and shared an instinctive distrust of official versions of reality.

D. A. Pennebaker and Don't Look Back

Dont Look Back [1967] – D.A. Pennebaker films Bob Dylan

Direct Cinema also found an ideal subject in the new youth culture, particularly rock and popular music. D. A. Pennebaker's Don't Look Back, filmed during Bob Dylan's 1965 tour of Britain and released in 1967, effectively established the modern rock documentary.

Pennebaker understood that the most interesting material was not necessarily the concert performance itself. He followed Dylan into hotel rooms, cars, dressing rooms and press conferences, observing the strange new machinery of modern celebrity forming around him. Dylan could be charming and funny, but also evasive, cruel and deliberately provocative. Journalists attempted to define him; admirers treated him as the spokesman for a generation; Dylan himself continually resisted the identities other people tried to impose upon him.

The result was very different from the carefully controlled star portraits that entertainment industries generally produced. Dylan was not explained. He was observed. His contradictions remained intact.

Two years later Pennebaker filmed the Monterey International Pop Festival, held in California in June 1967. Monterey Pop (1968) captured performances by a remarkable collection of musicians including Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Otis Redding and The Who, but once again its historical value came from more than the music. Pennebaker recorded the performers and audience before the festival had grown into a legend. Hendrix setting fire to his guitar and Joplin astonishing spectators appear not as retrospective milestones of rock history but as events happening for the first time.

Direct Cinema was ideally suited to the counterculture because it shared something of its distrust of established forms. Like the New Hollywood filmmakers beginning to emerge at the same time, documentarians abandoned the controlled studio for the street, the concert hall, the political demonstration and the open road. The distinction between documentary and fiction became increasingly porous. Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider (1969), Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool (1969) and John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy (1969) were fictional films, but their location photography, handheld camerawork and interest in contemporary American life belonged to a cinematic culture transformed by documentary realism.

Wexler made the connection explicit. An acclaimed cinematographer who had also worked in documentary, he described his ambition for Medium Cool as finding a marriage between fiction and cinéma vérité. The film follows a television news cameraman whose detachment from the events he records gradually becomes impossible to sustain. Wexler took his actors and crew into the actual demonstrations surrounding the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and incorporated the resulting footage into his fictional story. At one point, as police and protesters clash and tear gas is fired, a crew member can be heard warning: “Look out Haskell, it's real!” Few moments more effectively capture the collapsing boundaries between fiction, documentary and lived American history at the end of the decade.

Gimme Shelter

Gimme Shelter [1970] – Albert and David Maysles film Mick Jagger

The darker side of the counterculture emerged with extraordinary force in Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin's Gimme Shelter (1970). The filmmakers followed the Rolling Stones on their 1969 American tour, culminating in the disastrous free concert held at Altamont Speedway in northern California.

Only four months earlier, Woodstock had appeared to vindicate the counterculture's belief in peace, music and spontaneous community. Altamont offered a very different image. Poor organisation and the decision to use members of the Hells Angels as security contributed to an increasingly threatening atmosphere. Fights broke out in front of the stage, performers were attacked and, during the Rolling Stones' set, eighteen-year-old Meredith Hunter was stabbed to death by Hells Angel Alan Passaro.

The incident was captured on film.

The importance of Gimme Shelter lies partly in the way it incorporates the subsequent examination of that footage. Mick Jagger and the filmmakers watch the material on an editing machine, replaying the killing and attempting to understand what happened. Direct Cinema, which had begun with the ambition of recording events as they unfolded, had arrived at a strange point of self-reflection: the camera had witnessed something that the people physically present had not properly seen, and the recorded image now became evidence through which reality could be reconstructed.

Gimme Shelter has frequently been described as the film that recorded the death of the 1960s dream. The claim is too neat—history rarely obliges such convenient symbolism—but the film undeniably belongs to the darker atmosphere that descended over America at the end of the decade. The optimism associated with the Summer of Love had been followed by the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, riots, escalating opposition to the Vietnam War, the violence surrounding the Democratic Convention, the Manson murders and now Altamont. Direct Cinema had recorded the decade almost from Kennedy's optimistic presidential campaign to its disillusioned conclusion.

There was also something particularly revealing about Albert Maysles' insistence that his films dealt with what audiences could not escape. Gimme Shelter takes that principle to its most disturbing conclusion. The filmmakers cannot impose a satisfying explanation upon Altamont because none exists. Instead they remain with the confusion, the images and the terrible fact of what happened.

The Problem of Truth

Grey Gardens [1975]

By this point the assumptions behind Direct Cinema were themselves being questioned. Its practitioners had sometimes spoken as though removing narration, interviews and overt direction allowed reality to reveal itself. But filmmakers could never be completely absent from their films. Someone chose where the camera pointed. Someone decided when filming began and ended. Most importantly, someone took dozens or hundreds of hours of footage and edited it into a coherent film.

Editing inevitably created meaning.

The criticism did not invalidate Direct Cinema so much as expose the complexity of its original ambition. A documentary could reduce interference without eliminating interpretation. Wiseman's films, for example, contain no explanatory narration, yet their editing is extraordinarily purposeful. Salesman may appear simply to follow Paul Brennan, but its cumulative portrait of failure is created through the Maysles and Zwerin's selection and arrangement of material.

There was also the question of the camera itself. However unobtrusive filmmakers attempted to become, people knew they were being filmed. Bob Dylan certainly knew it. So did the Beales in the Maysles' later Grey Gardens (1975), whose extraordinary performances before the camera would make the distinction between observation and participation almost meaningless.

The young independent filmmaker Jim McBride had already recognised the contradiction in David Holzman's Diary. The more its fictional protagonist tries to use the camera to discover truth, the more his filming destroys the reality he wants to understand. The film's joke was also a serious criticism of the documentary revolution: the moment a filmmaker records reality, it becomes cinema.

Yet that tension was ultimately part of Direct Cinema's achievement rather than evidence of its failure. The movement forced filmmakers and audiences to think more carefully about what documentary truth actually meant. It may not have captured reality in some pure, uncontaminated state, but it brought cinema much closer to the unpredictable textures of lived experience.

Legacy

By the 1970s Direct Cinema was no longer a small movement. Its methods had become part of the basic vocabulary of filmmaking. Portable equipment, handheld camerawork, synchronous location sound and small crews were increasingly normal. Observational documentaries no longer seemed revolutionary because Direct Cinema had won the argument.

Its influence upon American cinema extended far beyond documentary. The filmmakers of the American New Wave were coming of age in a world in which the camera had escaped from the studio. They were accustomed to European New Wave films, television news, underground cinema and documentaries that showed contemporary American life with a directness Hollywood rarely attempted. When Martin Scorsese filmed the streets and bars of Little Italy, when Dennis Hopper took his actors across the American landscape for Easy Rider, when Haskell Wexler mixed actors with real demonstrators in Medium Cool, or when Francis Ford Coppola set off across America with a small mobile crew to make The Rain People, they were participating in a broader transformation of filmmaking of which Direct Cinema was an essential part.

The influence continued into television journalism, political documentaries and the modern music film. It can also be found, in considerably altered form, in reality television, where cameras follow ordinary people through their lives and editors subsequently construct narratives from hundreds of hours of supposedly unscripted behaviour. Much reality television abandons Direct Cinema's principle of non-intervention altogether, but its basic promise to the audience—watch these people and see what happens—would have been impossible without the revolution of the early 1960s.

Later documentary filmmakers either extended or challenged the movement's principles. Frederick Wiseman continued his patient observation of institutions across a career lasting more than half a century. Barbara Kopple combined observational filmmaking with a more openly committed political perspective in Harlan County, USA (1976). Errol Morris moved in almost the opposite direction, embracing interviews, stylisation and reconstruction while rejecting the idea that simply watching people necessarily brought the filmmaker closer to truth. Michael Moore would place himself conspicuously at the centre of his documentaries. Each approach, however different, was responding to questions Direct Cinema had helped to establish.

The movement's greatest legacy may therefore be larger than any particular visual style. Robert Drew and his collaborators helped overturn the assumption that documentaries should primarily tell audiences what had happened. They demonstrated instead the extraordinary possibilities of being present while something happened.

From the Wisconsin primary and the Kennedy White House to anonymous motel rooms, mental hospitals, Dylan's hotel suite, Monterey and Altamont, Direct Cinema placed its camera inside contemporary American life at precisely the moment that life was undergoing enormous change. In doing so it provided not only some of the most important documentaries ever made but another of the foundations upon which the American New Wave would be built.

The new American cinema of the late 1960s did not emerge solely from Hollywood's collapse or from young directors discovering Godard and Truffaut. It also emerged from a decade in which American filmmakers had learned to look at their own country differently. Direct Cinema was fundamental to that change.

Key Works

Les Raquetteurs / The Snowshoers (Michel Brault and Gilles Groulx, 1958)
A short film about a Quebec snowshoeing convention that became one of the formative works of Canadian Direct Cinema. Its mobile camera moves amongst the participants rather than observing them from a safe distance.

Primary (Robert Drew, 1960)
The breakthrough American Direct Cinema film. Drew Associates follow John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey during the Wisconsin Democratic presidential primary, creating an unprecedented feeling of being inside a political campaign as it happens.

Chronicle of a Summer (Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin, 1961)
Strictly cinéma vérité rather than American Direct Cinema, but indispensable to understanding the differences between the two movements. Rouch and Morin actively engage their subjects rather than attempting to disappear behind the camera.

Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment (Robert Drew, 1963)
Drew's extraordinary account of the Kennedy administration's confrontation with Alabama Governor George Wallace over the integration of the University of Alabama. Direct Cinema enters the centre of political power.

Don't Look Back (D. A. Pennebaker, 1967)
Pennebaker follows Bob Dylan through his 1965 British tour. Less a conventional music documentary than an intimate, frequently uncomfortable study of celebrity, personality and performance.

Titicut Follies (Frederick Wiseman, 1967)
A disturbing observational portrait of Bridgewater State Hospital that demonstrated the ability of documentary filmmaking to expose the workings of closed institutions.

David Holzman's Diary (Jim McBride, 1967)
A fictional film posing as documentary and one of the cleverest early critiques of Direct Cinema's pursuit of objective truth. It also forms an important bridge between documentary experimentation and the emerging New York independent cinema.

Monterey Pop (D. A. Pennebaker, 1968)
The counterculture captured at the moment of its ascendancy. Pennebaker records Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Otis Redding and others at the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival.

Salesman (Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin, 1969)
One of the masterpieces of Direct Cinema. Four travelling Bible salesmen become the subjects of a compassionate but quietly devastating portrait of work, failure and the American promise of success.

Gimme Shelter (Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin, 1970)
The Rolling Stones' American tour culminates in the violence of Altamont. A disturbing counterpoint to Monterey Pop and one of the defining documentary records of the end of the 1960s.

Grey Gardens (Albert and David Maysles, Ellen Hovde, Muffie Meyer and Susan Froemke, 1975)
Direct Cinema enters the strange private world of Edith and Edie Beale. By allowing its subjects to perform openly for the filmmakers, the film also complicates the movement's original ideal of the invisible observer.

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