Camera eye: Peter Wintonick's Cinema verite: defining the moment

TAKE ONE, Dec-Feb, 1999 by Maurie Alioff

Between the extremes of those who would prefer dental surgery to sitting through a documentary and the unquestioning champions of the form, are the ambivalent majority. Viewers know that docs can give them revealing, enlightening and thrilling film moments. But they've also suffered through films that exude a creepy aura of self-righteous, didactic, even authoritarian attitudes.

In Canada, where the documentary was once the only filmmaking game in town, old--guard media types persist in sanctifying it as the sole honest and virtuous genre, the antidote to Hollywood's pretty poisons. An old joke goes: "What's the difference between Canada and Russia?" The answer: "Canada still has communists," might imply that we tolerate culture commissars who come on as if they have a natural--born right to dictate public taste. The producers of CBC-TV's The National are not documentary filmmakers. Yet their recent insistence that program presenters use the lame PC term "fisher," which is hated by both actual female fishermen and other CBC staffers, typifies the heavy hand still lingering in Canadian "reality" mediamaking. The proletariat and the downtrodden are the salt of the earth, as long as they behave the way they're supposed to. NFB founder John Grierson was a brilliant documentarian with an empathy for the working class, but it's unlikely that his image of them included revellers at a Korn concert. "Working class" in Grierson's iconography, meant hapless victims or noble labourers, their muscles glistening as photogenically as the subjects of Leni Riefenstahl's Naziprop and Calvin Klein ads.

Far removed from this mindset is one of this country's top documentary filmmakers, Montreal's Peter Wintonick. While committed to socially conscious projects, the co-director of Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media approaches moviemaking with a freewheeling, doctrinaire-free attitude. Wintonick is an irreverent, playful guy, whose burly frame and curly hair evoke thoughts of Irish poets and Falstaffian romps. A nonstop punster with a self-deprecating sense of humour, he tags his political stance as "Groucho Marxist."

In Cinema Verite: Defining the Moment, Wintonick's new feature-length picture about what is probably the most vital and influential of doc genres, he slyly alludes to the kind of numbing films uninitiated viewers think of when they hear the "d" word. One of Cinema Verite's running gags involves an ancient NFB instructional short in which a pair of sombre twits explain how to climb a ladder with such pedantry, they could be demonstrating the correct way to handle plutonium. "The Extension Ladder," an unwittingly surreal parody of old-time reality filmmaking, gets fingered by Wintonick's voiceover as the kind of stuff that "gave documentaries a bad name."

It was about 40 years ago that the international filmmaking movement known as cinema verite in France (a.k.a. free cinema in England, direct cinema in the United States and candid eye in this country) broke away from the kind of documentaries that treat viewers like dim schnooks. A collaboration between the NFB's English and French programs (Adam Symansky and Eric Michel producing), Wintonick's Cinema Verite is the first movie to offer an in-depth look at the genre's origins and trace its continuing impact. Shot on digital video with a small handicam for waggish inserts of Wintonick and his tiny crew (cinematographer Francis Miquet, writer/researcher Kirwan Kox) at work, Cinema Verite plays vivaciously and is information packed. It continually finds smart ways to highlight its inventory of great verite scenes and goes tete-a-tete with its moviemaking subjects in several different countries. And the movie's data includes what you need to know about technical innovations like French cineaste Jean-Pierre Beauviala's crystal-synch system, which freed cameras from tape recorders.

During the week of the film's October debut at three film festivals, Wintonick told me that he believes verite is a crucial "defining moment" of movie history on a par with the invention of the medium and the year when films began to speak. This revolution synthesized a vision of reality without the proscenium arch. It was a technological break, born of the desire of artists to be mobile." The story of the moviemakers who first breathed life into verite is one of the best known in cinema history. Legends like England's Karel Reisz and Lindsay Anderson, Americans Richard Leacock and D.A. Pennebaker, France's Jean Rouch, and Canadians Wolf Koenig, Roman Kroitor and Michel Brault, wanted to capture the quivering intensity of real life without manipulating it or telling viewers what to think about the images they were seeing. Inspired by 1920s Russian avant-gardist Dziga Vertov's kino pravda (cinema truth), and still photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson (who hunted big game before he decided to track human beings), they shot fast and loose with excitingly new, lightweight cameras and portable sound equipment. Their improvisations were all about "wanting what you got, rather than going out to get what you want," says Reisz in Cinema Verite. The early films "had no arguments, no polemic, no conclusions. They were asking the audience to identify with the detail."