The King of cinema-verite: an interview with Allan King

TAKE ONE, March-May, 2003 by Tammy Stone

"There are few Canadian filmmakers whose impact has been central to the medium, but Allan King is unquestionably one of them. His contribution to the documentary form, most notably that strand known as cinema-verite, is second to none. Warrendale (1967) and A Married Couple (1969) are two of 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 I began to think about making documentaries. We were always looking for more flexibility in shooting news footage. In television, there was a need for immediate news and there was a need for a camera that could shoot sound and picture at the same time. A company called Cinevoice brought out a 16-mm camera that recorded optical sound, and then it added a 100-foot magazine. Soon there were people shooting with that equipment. The sound was poor, but I think that was the first impulse for verite.

I wouldn't call what Jean Rouch was doing (in France and Africa] cinema-verite any more than I would call my first film, Skid Row, cinema-verite because the sound wasn't in sync. There was no verite until we had sync sound. What Terence Macartney-Filgate (in the NFB/CBC series Candid Eye, 1958-61] was doing was not cinema-verite. He would get sync sound in some situations, like in his film Blood and Fire, but that film was loaded with narrative. However, I think extreme distaste for narration is silly. If it's saying something sensible and not telling you how to think, it can be very helpful, very useful and very interesting.

There has been a lot of comparison between cinema-verite and the rash of so-called reality television today.

Oh, you mean where they take the camera off the tripod and shake it? Verite came about swiftly as the demands of television-which provided the market-could mobilize the different equipment and sound gear to serve its needs. At the time of Flaherty, there wasn't much of a demand, at least in the theatres. There was a particular audience for non-fiction films and there were newsreels, but it just wasn't a big market. When the demand came with television, when people wanted everything more immediately, filmmakers were able to record actuality, or reality, as it occurred, spontaneously. They started chopping off the top of the camera and adding a Mitchell magazine that could run 400-foot rolls on a light body, even 1,200-foot rolls. At the same time, the Nagra tape recorder was developed, which was initially operated with an external battery. Then it developed into a self-powered, battery-driven machine. All this came along because there was demand to catch conversation as it happened, without rehearsal. So it wa s the technology that made cinema-verite possible. This only comes about because somebody wants to do something and thinks very hard, "It would be better to have a wheel than a square," and so on. This is how things develop.