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...the most important documentaries ever made and are acknowledged as such by critics and experts around the world." Piers Handling, Director, Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), from the preface to Allan King: Filmmaker, edited by Seth Feldman.
Cinema-verite was a term coined by French film historian Georges Sadoul in reference to Jean Rouch's and Edgar Morin's 1961 feature--length documentary Chronique d'un ete, which comprised a series of street interviews with the people of Paris about their various states of mind edited together into a series of long, uninterrupted takes. This technique was made possible by the introduction of lightweight, compact 16-mm cameras with provisions made for direct recording of synchronized sound. Its roots can be traced back to the American director Robert Flaherty with his famous documentary on Inuit life, Nanook of the North (1922), through Italian neo-realism (Roberto Rosellini's Open City, 1945) and the French new wave. But more importantly, it was the introduction of television in the late 1940s with its need for immediate coverage of the news and the demand for content that spurred the movement in the 1950s and early 1960s. The movement, known as cinema-verite in France and Canada and direct cinema in America, grew spontaneously, with an emphasis on the "filmmaker" over the director and glorified the function of the cameraman as an immediate link between the camera and the subject. One of its most famous Canadian advocates is Vancouver-born Allan King, who was honoured at the 2002 Toronto International Film Festival with a comprehensive retrospective and mimeograph, Allan King: Filmmaker, published by TIFF in conjunction with Indiana University Press.
Would you please talk about the emergence of cinema-verite in Canada and how you became involved?
The whole process emerged out of expectations, not one event. For some people, it happened because those types of films were all you could make during the 1950s and 1960s. That was the case with me. Also I didn't have the sense that I could write fiction. Other than drama for television, documentary filmmaking was all that was feasible in Canada in those days. I had a chance to see Robert Flaherty's films [Nanook of the North, Moana]. Then I managed to get a job at the first CBC station in Vancouver and...
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