The Origins of Direct Cinema: Cinema Vérité
The Origins of Direct Cinema: Cinema Vérité
Before submerging into the realm of Direct Cinema, it is essential to understand
where it is originated from. Although today the notions of Direct Cinema and Cinema
Vérité are often confused, overlapped and substituted with one another, they must be
differentiated on the basis of two main characteristics: the time period in which they came
about, and their specific approach concerning the radical change they intend to implement
The very first pioneer of the movement of “film truth” also known as Kinopravda
was Dziga Vertov, the man who was not reluctant to call every type of fictional movie
“mortally dangerous [and] contagious” (Michelson 7). He sought to find how the medium
of film can transgress the boundaries of conventional storytelling methods and convey a
completely new message, one that even goes beyond what cinematography was originally
used for by the inventor Lumière brothers: recording everyday scenes as they are. Vertov's
aim was to take this idea further, and to give the documentations an experimentative touch
thus calling into life a subjectified vision of the outside world, while discovering a hidden
truth through editing and montage techniques. His ideas were directly represented later on
in the Direct Cinema, the Free Cinema, and the Cinema Vérité movements.
Only in the 1960s Cinema Vérité began to unfold its anti-aesthetic views of
cinematography in a technically much more advanced environment where the art of
cinema was already defined by numerous film theoreticians setting a firm ground to what
is called conventional within the realms of the Seventh Art. These conventions were torn
down with the onset of the 1960s, when intellectuals and artists began to recover their
consciousness almost two decades after World War II. The Direct Cinema movement
picked out essential characteristics from the innovations of its predecessor for its very
Before submerging into the realm of Direct Cinema, it is essential to understand
where it is originated from. Although today the notions of Direct Cinema and Cinema
Vérité are often confused, overlapped and substituted with one another, they must be
differentiated on the basis of two main characteristics: the time period in which they came
about, and their specific approach concerning the radical change they intend to implement
The very first pioneer of the movement of “film truth” also known as Kinopravda
was Dziga Vertov, the man who was not reluctant to call every type of fictional movie
“mortally dangerous [and] contagious” (Michelson 7). He sought to find how the medium
of film can transgress the boundaries of conventional storytelling methods and convey a
completely new message, one that even goes beyond what cinematography was originally
used for by the inventor Lumière brothers: recording everyday scenes as they are. Vertov's
aim was to take this idea further, and to give the documentations an experimentative touch
thus calling into life a subjectified vision of the outside world, while discovering a hidden
truth through editing and montage techniques. His ideas were directly represented later on
in the Direct Cinema, the Free Cinema, and the Cinema Vérité movements.
Only in the 1960s Cinema Vérité began to unfold its anti-aesthetic views of
cinematography in a technically much more advanced environment where the art of
cinema was already defined by numerous film theoreticians setting a firm ground to what
is called conventional within the realms of the Seventh Art. These conventions were torn
down with the onset of the 1960s, when intellectuals and artists began to recover their
consciousness almost two decades after World War II. The Direct Cinema movement
picked out essential characteristics from the innovations of its predecessor for its very