Back to Nature
By CHRISTOPHER BOOKER
I make no apology for exhuming the subject —for undoubtedly some of the ideas and inten- tions behind cinema-verite are from now on going to have an ever greater importance, both for the cinema and, despite the anguished cries of the purists, for television.
Cinema-verite, in some form or another, has been around just as long as there have been cameras manoeuvrable and flexible enough to take pictures of people going about their busi- ness or their pleasure, without all the parapher- nalia of arc-lamps, cables and other obtrusive impedimenta that inevitably impose an arti- ficiality on normal filming for cinema or tele- vision. The philosophy that must lie behind all cinema-verire is that it is an attempt to record thingS as they actually happen, as if one was there and the camera were not. And since even the smallest camera is obtrusive enough to dis- tract the attention of an otherwise idle subject (viz., the awful grimaces and contortions that make up most holiday home-movies), the more one's subject is preoccupied with his own ac- tivities, the greater the chance for naturalistic behaviour. Thus one of the finest exercises in cinema- verite that has yet been made is Point of Order —a ninety-seven-minute version of the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings edited down from CBS telerecordings, that should shortly be getting a showing over here. No one could say that the protagonists in that incredible drama were pre- occupied with anything other than the mounting tension of events in that stuffy, chaotic, over- crowded Senate Committee-room—certainly not with the television cameras that were so tucked away into the crowd that occasionally people Pass in front of them, pushing past. The result is something so exciting that no script-writer could possibly have done justice to it—and ob- viously has a 100 per cent accuracy of which any artist might be envious.
Now, accuracy is a quality which seems to be very much in demand in the cinema and tele- vision today. In a sense, it has always been a major ingredient in any artistic medium that seeks to set down the way people behave— novelists and playwrights have always been praised for their accurate observation of manners and dialogue. And yet how rare it is—when reality must first be strained through the writer's mind and memory and then artificially re- created—for the fragile plant not to wither into
easily acceptable formula and cliche. At least two films recently which were widely hailed for their accurate social realism—The Servant and Nothing But The Best—were absolutely riddled with the sort of solecisms and inaccuracies that, assuming a certain degree of accuracy even as a basis for satirical exaggeration was intended, at once took away half the point bf the exercise.
Equally, television, even at its best, has always been a highly artificial medium--how often, as the lights flood down on the subject's nerve- racked face, has even a second of everyday truth'emerged from that most artificial of con- frontations, the television interview? I shall always remember the day, when I worked on the magazine Private Eye, that a television com- pany wished to show how and in what sort of atmosphere the magazine was produced. Instead of just coming down to the office and discreetly shooting a few hundred feet of film while the thing was actually going on, they had to build a large and elaborate reconstruction of the office in their studios. The result was worse than a parody of the truth—with everyone far too much on their guard to appear natural.
But now, with the sixteen-pound camera in production and even the possibility of televising 8 mm. film looming in the not-so-distant future, a hitherto almost unattainable accuracy is coming within reach of boll) the cinema and televisioh. To what uses will it be put?
A good indication of one sort of answer to this question was given by Huw Wheldon in a superb give-away line during the course of his dreary Monitor. Commenting on some shots of American football, he observed that, of course, there's far more opportunity for cinema7verite in America—where life is so much more colour- ful than it is here. Apart from being a succinct summary of the entire Wheldon approach to modern culture—that the offbeat, the trivial, the gimmicky must always be preferred, in any field, to the Real Thing—this was unfortunately typical of the prevailing attitude to cinema-verite so far. Just as early films and early Cinerama were largely demonstrations of the gimmicky uses of the new toy, so most exercises in cinema- verite to date have been not so much attempts to capture the reality of everyday life, as a pur- suit of the offbeat, the colourful, the 'Believe it or not.'
It was a just coincidence that, immediately after watching the Wheldon programme, I heard de- scribed what would seem to be an ideal example of the sort of subject to which only cinema- verite could do full justice. It was the annual luncheon of a well-known avant-garde theatre in West London. Throughout the heavy spread, in the River-Room of the Savoy, a series of speeches were made—firstly by the rich backers of the theatre, gloomily recounting what a bad year the theatre had had financially; then by some of the successful playwrights whom the theatre had helped to make famous, recounting how they in turn had had good or bad years— not in artistic terms, but in the sense that they had grossed more or less than the year before. Finally Mr. Wheldon himself got up to say how pleasant it was to welcome in the New Year on such a splendid day—with a nice glass of Chablis, a good trout and a gathering of good old friends. What a film that lunch would have made. No commentary would have been neces- sary—for the epitaph on the spirit and en-
thusiasm that once made this theatre's name would have spoken for itself, through the burps, the brandy-sloshing and the general air of Rotary philistinism run riot.
This is just one of the fields in which cinema- \redid opens up whole new vistas for film- making—in ironically pointed essays, such as the Maysles' film on the working life of cinemoguL Joe Levine, in "adding a wealth of immediacy to fiction features, in just showing 'what it was like to be alive, there and at that time.' What nonsense it is to suggest, as did Mary Crozier in the Guardian, that the use of these new tech- niques is a negation of• all the discipline and selectivity that make up art. Of course, editing and selection, even the addition of commentary, are of supreme importance in shaping the final product to achieve its full and desired effect--so long as they remain true to the spirit of the facts. But what is already there, in the raw material, are two of the qualities which most artists sweat blood to get hold of—accuracy and atmosphere.
As for subjects--the world is waiting. Wherever the camera can slip behind the public mask, to show the private face. Imagine, as one wild instance, the worth we would put on just ten minutes of film sitting in on a Kennedy or Eisenhower Cabinet meeting—more than on 10,000 miles of them on public show, smiling to the crowd. To the imaginative film-maker the possibilities are endless; and the ramifications of this fact, for cinema, for television and for 'artistic truth,' are as yet beyond conception.
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