Nicholas Eason - Final Project

Verité Form

Documentary Films of the nineteen seventies illustrate a greater change in the filmmaking that was occuring at the time. Most of the American Hollywood films of previous decades created an outlandish sense of glamour and excitement that allowed their viewers to escape the real world. Films like The Wizard of Oz and Cassablanca show glamourous characters that don't have any basis in reality and probably could never exist in the real world.
The Vietnam War brought on social changes that spilled over into cinema. The Films focus on the acts of individuals and the effects that they had for themselves. Films like Straw Dogs and The Texas Chainsaw Masacre portray these effects when people are placed into situations that they cannot control and called to act. In the real world, the persistant threat of being drafted into a war that was unpopular and perceived to be unjust forced people to act to avoid this threat to their livelyhood.
This change spilled over into documentary film through a modification of the concept of Direct Cinema called cinema-verité. Like direct cinema before it, this technique calls for the filmmaker as it is instead of determining what their work will say ahead of time. Beyond direct cinema, verite calls for the filmmaker to be a part of the world and make the film an authentic ducument of it. This recognizes the fact that it is impossible for the filmmaker to be completly invisible. It instead allows filmmaking to be a process of discovery and allows both the audience and the filmmaker to gain a new perspective which they must come to on their own, instead of being fed a perspective by a “voice of god” narrarator or other so-called “fly on the wall” techniques.
Peter Whitehead, an early pioneer of this technique had his personal epiphany while filming The International Poetry Incarnation in 1965. He described this chaotic countercultural event as causing him to "abandon any pretensions I had as a cameraman about the objectivity of film." He went on and continued his method further making Charlie is My Darling (1966), a film about The Rolling Stones in which he revealed the softer off-stage side of the rockers personalities, and Tonite Lets All Make Love in London (1967), A film in which Whitehead tried to integrate with special effects the experience of a Pink Floyd show.
For this projcet, I wanted to use illustrate this technique and create a series of images where I observe myself by forcing myself to see my surroundings as they are, rather than passivly going through my daily motions without thinking. I've tried to use these images to face my reality; I don't live in a fantasy world or in a perfect seaside vista. I live in a 100 year old rented house with two other students, and it's rather messy. The placement and angles of the camera are also important in the concept I've tried to capture. I've tried to create an effect similer to the camera placement in the newsroom scenes form All the Presidents Men, in which there is a definate feeling that the space itself is observing and experiencing the characters as much as they are experiencing it.
Bibliography

Cook, David. Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam. First. C. Schrbner, 2000.

Miller, Henry. "PETER WHITEHEAD: A cinema-verite misfit from the Sixties British underground.
Film Comment July 2006: 46-51.