cinéma vérité

Four door-to-door salesmen work Bibles across small-town America in Salesman, and the camera stays in the room for the whole pitch. Titicut Follies films the wards of the state prison for the criminally insane at Bridgewater and does not narrate any of it. Grey Gardens visits a mother and daughter living with the cats in a collapsing East Hampton mansion. From about 1958 lighter cameras and sync sound made all of this possible, and Jean Rouch in France and the Americans then argued about whether the camera provokes what it films or disappears. Nobody explains anything to you. You get a room, a length of time, and whatever people do while it runs.

Distinguish from

Dogme 95 adopted cinéma vérité's techniques (handheld, available light, no score) as rules for fiction filmmaking. French New Wave was influenced by vérité's freedom but applied it to scripted, often playful narratives rather than documentary observation.

Films here also carry Class Warfare, Identity Crisis, Artistic Obsession, Loneliness & Isolation, Coming of Age.