cinéma vérité

From about 1958, cameras light enough to carry and sound that could run in sync with them let a crew work without a script, a studio, or enough people in the room to be noticed. Edgar Morin coined the name for what that made possible around Chronicle of a Summer in 1961, cinéma vérité, camera-truth, and the film argues with its own method inside itself: Rouch and Morin ask factory workers and shopgirls about their lives, then screen the footage back to the same people to ask whether the camera had caught anything true. The Americans who picked up the same equipment mostly dropped that argument and just left the camera running. Salesman stays in the room for a full Bible pitch, four door-to-door salesmen working small-town America with nobody narrating who is about to lose the sale. Titicut Follies turns the same method on the state prison for the criminally insane at Bridgewater, guards and psychiatrists and patients with nobody there to tell you who is right. Grey Gardens sits with a mother and daughter long enough in their collapsing East Hampton mansion that they stop performing for the crew and start addressing it directly. 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.