The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris)

In 1988, Errol Morris' The Thin Blue Line received limited theatrical distribution before its video release and PBS telecast, which made the film slightly more accessible. Yet, arguably no American film of that year was as significant in blurring the boundaries between what's real and reel, and in demonstrating the impact a "small" documentary could have.

Offering a variation on the Hollywood "wrong man" plot, one of Hitchcock's prevalent paradigms, the docu centers on Randall Dale Adams, convicted to death for a crime he didn't commit. Morris became obsessed with Adams while researching another movie about a psychiatrist nicknamed Dr. Death, a popular expert witness at capital trials. Listening to Adams' plea of innocence, Morris decided to narrow his focus and make a crusading film aiming to reopen the case.

A drifter from Ohio, Adams was imprisoned for the murder of policeman Robert Wood in 1976. Adams was riding with David Harris on the day of the murder. When Morris interviewed Harris, then on death row awaiting execution for another murder, his comments suggested that he framed Adams to save his life, and that the authorities were reluctant to reexamine the case because they didn't want to be embarrassed as incompetent or corrupt. Some local lawyers believed police and prosecutors wanted to wrap up the case quickly to preserve Dallas County's conviction rate, then the highest in the state.

Among the records given to Morris by the Dallas District Attorney was evidence that the prosecution bent the guarantees of fair trial in efforts to obtain conviction. The prosecution and police were so anxious to charge Adams that they concealed critical testimony. Morris believed that a conspiracy existed between those agencies.

Adams' lawyer went back to court, and a Texas judge upheld a lower court's recommendation to set aside the conviction. The judge claimed the state was guilty of suppressing evidence favorable to the accused, deceiving the court and knowingly using perjured testimony.

The case was reopened due to Morris' exposure of misconduct. The crucial element--and the doc's climax--was Harris' confession on record, claiming he framed Adams because former assistant DA Doug Mulder promised him a deal if he talked. Mulder denied the charge, though pending felony counts against Harris were suspiciously dropped. Adams was released after years in jail for a crime he didn't commit. At one point, only three days from being executed, Adams was saved by the US Supreme Court due to a legal technicality.

Morris broke many rules in his landmark docu, which makes no attempt at "fairness," emphatically taking the position that Adams is innocent. Disregarding detachment, Morris became an impassioned advocate for Adams. Moreover, he mixed and matched interviews with surviving participants with recreations, by professional actors, of the events.

The Thin Blue Line created furor when it failed to be nominated for the Best Documentary Oscar, arguably because of its staged sequences. "Purists" charged Morris with violating the form's sanctity by augmenting reality with theatrical devices, and by presenting a stylized, almost surreal version of the legal process.

The Thin Blue Line is both a riveting criminal investigation and an intriguing meditation on the fine line between truth and fiction; in fact, the film reinvents the story while revisiting it. Morris' feature is a work of pulp fiction, a noir expos filled with stylized images and presumably minor details that nonetheless increasingly assume greater importance. Morris explores the darker side of American justice, immoral motivations, withheld data, interpretations of "facts" and the inevitably murky and Rashomon-like nature of "truth." To his credit, he doesn't claim to fully understand Adams, and each sequence raises more questions than he could possibly answer.

by Emanuel Levy

Cronicas De Un Verano (Jean Rouch)

Not much has been written about ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch's documentary The Human Pyramid(1960) in comparison to the interest aroused by Chronique D'Un Été (Chronicle of a Summer, 1961), the product of his collaboration with sociologist Edgar Morin. While most of his earlier documentaries were filmed in Africa,Chronicle of a Summer is set in Paris in the aftermath of the Algerian war and just before the explosion of social riots that came to dominate that decade. Chronicle of a Summer does not follow an established structure but is driven in an unpredictable manner by its characters and their reactions to the camera. It is arguably Rouch's best-known work, and has been widely discussed in the context of documentary filmmaking for its innovative cinematic techniques, its choice of scenario (the rough, urban streets of Paris during a significant historical moment) and for being the first film to define itself using the term cinéma-vérité.

Rouch' s documentaries are often inspired by a specific context that he wishes to capture; while in Chronicle of a Summer this is Parisian society in the aftermath of the Algerian war, in The Human Pyramid it is the issue of racism seen through the eyes of young black and white students attending a Lycée on the Ivory coast. The Human Pyramid, while possessing some of the same characteristics of Chronicle of a Summer, has a more poetic almost dreamlike atmosphere; it is also much more raw and less structured, especially considering most of it was left in the hands of the kids. For these reasons, The Human Pyramid is simultaneously more and less complicated than its successor. It is simpler because its themes are only moderately connected to society at large, as the world of these teenagers is somewhat separate to socio-historical reality, and more complex because this 'unreality' encompasses multiple layers of meaning. The Human Pyramid recalls some of Rouch's other documentaries made in West Africa, such as Les Maîtres Fous (1955) or Les Homes Qui Font La Pluie (1951), in which the element of the magical and the ritual plays a significant role. At the same time, it departs from his earlier work, and its results undoubtedly influence the approach taken by him and Morin in filming Chronicle of a Summer.

By the time of Chronicle, Rouch is more familiar with the impact of the camera on the milieu, and, rather than simply filming a designated ritual or event, is often responsible for provoking the action: “Rouch, the observer of rituals, crossed the line to become a creator of rituals in his own right”. (1) Some of the characteristics thatChronicle and Human Pyramid have in common are: Rouch exposing himself personally on camera; setting out the parameters of the 'experiment' within the first scenes; incorporating the screening of the film to the actors in the final cut; and including the 'before' and 'after' of the story. All these elements, nevertheless, are handled very differently in the two films, and Morin's influence is also to be taken into account. While Rouch's work is permeated by what Jean-André Fieschi calls “slippages of fiction”, The Human Pyramid is by far his more fantastic project. There is a sense of freshness in the film, due to the fact that it is open for anything to happen, and it is this freedom and flexibility that gives it its richness. While in Chronicle of a Summer Rouch and Morin are constantly present guiding the events, in his previous film, “once the project started, the director simply filmed it.” (2)

Rouch's work, and Chronicle of a Summer in particular, occupies an important position in debates about the nature of documentary and the relationship between camera and object. His cinema explored possibilities that had not yet been considered, and presented a very different response to the newly introduced technological advancements in comparison to his contemporaries.

Simultaneously a liberation and a fulfilment, it (photography) has freed western painting, once and for all, from its obsession with realism. (3)

Bazin, himself, has shown in his own work how such a 'liberation' can be simultaneously satisfying and unfulfilling, as it introduces a whole new set of questions far more complicated than the ones that it answers. In the same way, the technological innovations available to documentary filmmakers during the late '50s and early '60s created more issues than they resolved. Up until then documentary crews had to use the same cumbersome equipment used in fiction film, with obvious limitations to their recording of events, and forcing them to turn to the practice of reconstruction. Once sound and camera equipment became portable and silent, issues concerning the impact of the filmmaker on the object and its ethical implications had to be conceived of, and addressed, in a different manner.

The issue of the camera's relation to reality, which permeates the fiction film, is addressed directly by the documentary filmmaker, who has always aspired toward capturing the sight and sound of life in an unobtrusive and impartial manner. The ambivalent nature of the medium, which excludes the human element as an intermediary but nevertheless implies a subjective viewpoint, gives rise to issues concerning the camera's legitimacy to record the 'obscene' object of reality. Questions about what degrees of faithfulness to the truth establish a film as a documentary, and whether such faithfulness is even possible, have accompanied the history of documentary filmmaking since its origin.

In the meantime, partly due to the technological advancements, documentary underwent a revival, and experimentations with the new technology abounded. The answer of 'direct cinema', which included Richard Leacock, Donn A. Pennebaker and the Maysles brothers as its representatives, was a purist approach in which the impact of the observer on the observed had to be kept to a minimum. Interviews, voice-over commentary and any other forms of interaction with the subject matter were considered to contaminate the result of the observation. Others like, Pierre Perrault, used the new equipment to draw meaning from the seemingly insignificant and the quotidian, attempting to find greater meaning in and unity to the whole by observing and bringing together the small elements of everyday life.

Chronicle of a Summer was one of the first films to make use of the innovative equipment, which Rouch himself had helped to develop. The film's object, nonetheless, was precisely the contamination so painstakingly avoided by exponents of 'direct cinema': in the film, Rouch and Morin begin by investigating the nature of happiness by questioning passer-byes in the streets of Paris, but as the film progresses, the investigation becomes a pretext in order to access people's most innermost thoughts about life and their relationship with others. In this film, Rouch is considered to be responsible for introducing the term cinema vérité, as homage to Dziga Vertov's 'kino-pravda', referring to his and Morin's desire to create a reality between documentary and fiction through the camera's co-existing attributes of objectivity and subjectivity. Subsequently the term has been adopted to describe projects that differ greatly from Rouch and Morin's, one of the reasons for this divergence lies in the ambiguity of the word 'truth', and its complex relation to the filmic image.

What Rouch wishes to recuperate from Vertov is not the notion of the cinema-eye, radically different from the human eye, but rather the possibility of a marriage, a synthesis, between the human eye and the cinema eye – a fusion whose result will be a greater humanity and a greater objectivity at the same time. (4)In essence, the concept's intention is to unite the main characteristics of the camera and the human eye, objectivity and subjectivity respectively, and to find a new meaning in their relation. Rouch on the one hand grasps the enormous shift in perception caused by the introduction of the photographic image, and on the other, due to his scientific background, comprehends the impact of the observer on his subject matter. In fact, Rouch believes that, considering that the presence of the observer cannot be ignored, it should be taken into consideration so as not to invalidate the results of the observation. His first experiences with the camera come directly from this approach.The presence of the camera is a kind of passport that opens all doors and makes every kind of scandal possible. The camera deforms, but not from the moment that it becomes an accomplice. At that point it has the possibility of doing something I couldn't do if the camera wasn't there: it becomes a kind of psychoanalytic stimulant, which lets people do things they wouldn't otherwise do. (5)Since the action is partly motivated by the presence of the camera, concealing the camera would be an act of deception, which would be detrimental to an accurate experimentation. Rouch on the contrary accentuates this aspect and brings it to its extremes. He notices that the presence of the camera stimulates people's expression rather than inhibiting it, and that it can provoke strong reactions with the pretext of fictional circumstances, due to the fact that the subject feels less defensive. These feelings are not 'true' in a traditional way, but come into existence in the reality produced by the camera. The use of a poem entitled 'The Human Pyramid' recited by the young protagonists/students during one of their classes, as the title for the documentary, reflects the director's approach to cinema and life in general:I look at the human sciences as poetic sciences in which there is no objectivity, and I see film as not being objective, and cinema verite as a cinema of lies that depends on the art of telling yourself lies. If you're a good storyteller then the lie is more true than reality, and if you're a bad one, the truth is worse than a half lie. (6)It is this tension between Rouch the poet and Rouch the scientist that constitutes the uniqueness of his films, and that sees his influence far exceeding his original field of ethnographic film. Rouch recognizes that the facts are always disturbed by the person who asks the question, and through his acknowledgement of the subjectivity brought in by the observer, he can infuse the rationality that otherwise prevails in any kind of experiment with poetic and aesthetic qualities. Rouch nonetheless, faithful to his area of interest as an anthropologist, always maintains a scientific approach to the 'lies' that he fabricates. If the principles upon which he bases his observations break the traditional subject/object relationship, his methodology is reflective of his education: he begins his projects by creating the conditions of the experiment, expressing its purpose, and subsequently commenting on the proceedings. There is, therefore, a sharp contrast between his 'poetic' principles and his rigorous methods, a contrast that produces unusual and ambiguous results. If “anthropology must destroy what it investigates”, (7) Rouch is not interested in human nature as a lifeless object in front of the lenses, but wants to capture it as it breaths, moves, and evolves; the camera then becomes indispensable in recording life in its duration.

Confronted with the knowledge that the production of an image implies the death of the event that it represents, Rouch has no choice but to maintain the signified and the signifier intertwined, creating as a result what Mick Eaton calls “a new cinematic reality”. If, according to Barthes, the photographic image produces death while trying to preserve life, a possible approach to the matter is to render the object and its representation as closely related as possible, generating a dimension that is halfway between the two. This approach, which Rouch explores in all of his documentaries, is obviously riddled with contradiction and ambivalence, and is attributable to his double role as anthropologist and filmmaker. Traditionally, the ethnographic film is considered to be the polar opposite of 'art cinema', and while it would be unproblematic to say that Rouch's work simply compresses the two categories, ethnographic film and art cinema, his work presents so many layers of meaning so intimately entwined that such simplifications are impossible.

In Chronicle of a Summer, his attempts to blur the boundaries between subject and object, and to recognize the unique dimension created by cinema, are represented by his and Morin's efforts “to create reality starting from fiction”.

Jean Rouch

For Rouch and Morin the only possible vérité was one which included the filmmaker – as if it were the case that the only subject for documentary film was the making of documentary film. (8)

It is necessary for Rouch and Morin to be present in the film and to explain the conditions of the project for their experiment to be valid. In the first scenes, the two are in front of the camera, explaining to Marceline, whom they have chosen to conduct the interviews, her role in the development of the film, and how they will go about the project. Both Rouch and Morin are present throughout the film, even though not always in front of the camera, asking questions and instigating reactions. Before the final scene, the film is screened to its actors/participants and receives mixed reactions. Subsequently Rouch and Morin discuss the results of the experiment in private. The outcome seems to have been unexpected, and they walk off full of unanswered questions. Rouch and Morin constantly provoke their impersonators, even quite crudely, as when Rouch asks a North African immigrant (who also appeared in The Human Pyramid) to explain the numbers tattooed on Marceline's arm, aware that the young man does not have knowledge of the events of the Second World War. Nevertheless they are exposing themselves too and putting themselves at the same level of the people they film. After that incident, Rouch said that he was ashamed of the cruel smile that he had on the screen while asking about Marceline's tattoo, but even that simple smile is important in creating perspective for what we are watching, and in acknowledging the conditions under which it was created.

Well, the only objective document is the film, which is, however, a fiction film, acted by people playing plausible roles. Why? Because they show what an investigation would never show, that is, the context: how it happened, where it happened, the relationships between people, their gestures, their behaviour, their speech, etc. (9)It is clear how the presence of this 'context' creates a very complex cinematic reality that does not proceed in a linear manner, which in turn arouses feelings of unease in the viewer. In “Cinema Vérité or Fantastic Realism”, Fereydoun Hoveyda describes the film's inclusion of the context as that of a novel incorporating its notebook. The two cannot be viewed as separate entities, but are inextricably linked and designed to enhance each other's meaning. The essential point is that the limitations between the subject and the object are blurred and a new space is created from the encounter between the camera and the external world, in which traditional binary opposites such as fictional/documentary, performance/private life, are imploded. This is the result of a self-conscious effort that recognizes that film, while representing reality, constitutes a reality of its own. The fictional element becomes a starting point in order to create reality, allowing the elements of truth to shine through the 'lies'.

In Chronicle of a Summer, Rouch and Morin enter people's lives quite intimately, with extreme close-ups and personal questions, as in the case of the interview with Mary-Lou. She has been told to improvise, but becomes very emotional while expressing her feelings. At the same time, Marceline, who has made a seemingly heartfelt confession about her past in a concentration camp while wandering around Les Halles, claims that she was only “play-acting”. Could it be true that “fiction is the only way that we can truly face ourselves”? (10)

The Human Pyramid

In The Human Pyramid, Rouch's approach to the actors, who are adolescents, is very different. He does not probe into their lives with such insistence, but allows them to create their own illusory world as they go along. In this case, the aim is to show friendship between European and black students in a Lycée on the Ivory coast, and the pretext for the narrative is the arrival of a new French girl in class, Nadine, who is interested in interacting with the Africans. This simple pretext creates a number of situations and meetings between the two groups in which the protagonists improvise their lines as they go along, while sharing each other's culture and point of view. The credits of the film roll only at Nadine's arrival in the classroom. Two scenes precede this. In the first one Nadine and Denise are walking in the streets of present day Paris, obviously after the events have happened. In the following scene, filmed before the beginning of the experiment, Rouch himself is talking to the students of the Lycée about their involvement. These first two scenes belong to the 'notebook' of the documentary, which is also profoundly imbedded in the construction of the film itself. There is never a moment in which fiction can be separated from reality, and the dynamics of the relationship between the two is a constant source of meaning. As a consequence, the concepts of time and space, and the function of the characters and their impersonators, become non-linear and multi-layered, the results of which can be noted during the screening of Chronicle of a Summer to its participants, towards the end of the film, in which the audience had extremely diverging opinions about what was 'real' and what was not. The screening in The Human Pyramid is quite different and occurs a bit earlier in the film. We can't hear the remarks of the students, but they don't seem to be adverse to the way in which they are portrayed (or portray themselves). This is also due to the fact that the pretext of the narrative allows them great liberties in playing their roles, and disconnects them more from reality. The freedom that these characters were given has unleashed a response that is not constructed or strained, making them unaware of the results. During the screening they are able to acknowledge their cinematic persona, thus incorporating it into their 'real' persona: “each discovered his or her unknown image, thus fiction became a reality.” (11)

Through the screening, Rouch consolidates the reality that he has created between fiction and documentary, but he is also ready to recognize its fragility and limitations, and to destroy it. He does so by inserting into the narrative, just after the screening, the death of one of the main characters (and not a real-life person) in the film under mysterious circumstances. With Alain's death, once again, Rouch explores the differences between the roles each of us play in different situations, and the reactions that they provoke. Alain dies, disappearing in the waves, during a picnic on a sanded ship. It was his favourite place, as he had confessed to Nadine earlier in the film during an excursion. He said that it was where he felt most comfortable with himself, where he did not feel the pressure of playing a certain role. It is difficult to grasp the meaning of Alain's death, as it is abrupt, unexpected and disorienting. It suddenly breaks an intricate illusion, creates discomfort, and forces the audience into re-evaluating what has happened until then.

Now that everything is possible, why not go all the way with the experiment, take it to the limits? Why not test their friendship with a tragedy; a fiction that once filmed becomes reality, freeing those who believe too much in their roles. (12)This is exactly the desired effect, to shake us out of our assumptions and demand a revised opinion. It is also about exploring the boundaries between documentary and fiction, life and performance, the viewer and the screen. Rouch, as Eaton points out, is also interested in making films for himself and his cast. The death of Alain occurs in order for him and them to realize the limitations of their own experiment, of their own creations. It shows the contradictory nature of the reality that has been created. It is so powerful as to have an actual impact on the lives of the participants, yet so fragile and ephemeral that it can be wiped out like a sand painting. Additionally, it represents a way for Rouch to detach himself from the cast and from the project, and to emerge once again as “the shaman, the master of ceremonies at a cinematic ritual, stimulating and entering the trance with his camera as the magician's instrument...” (13), ready to perform once again by creating another 'filmic truth'.

Within these multiple reflections of reality, Rouch is both master and actor, and shares with the protagonists a profound experience, because, besides orchestrating it, he participates in the illusion and is invested with its energy. As Deleuze notes in Cinema 2, in order to tell these people's stories he must 'become' them. Perrault commented that “Rouch's characters are prone to introspection rather than action, they are reflections of themselves” (14). The characters don't undergo growth or evolution in any traditional manner. Their journey does not conclude at the end of the film, as Denis says in a voice over in the last scene, “The film ends here but the story isn't over…it's so much simpler and more complicated but it's up to all of us to write it”. So he must feel their emotions in order to illustrate them, as their performances are uncontrollable, inundated with spontaneity and improvisation. In a similar way, the actors themselves must become Rouch: this film is not the product of a singular perspective that constructs the events in its own particular way; Rouch steps down from his position as director and allows it to be taken over, injecting the film with multiple points of view and dimensions, only to then step back and point it in a new direction, as with Alain's death.

Similarly, there is no clear conception of time and duration. There is no beginning or ending, or, depending on the perspective, there are many beginnings and endings, as is demonstrated by the two scenes prior to the credits, and the death of Alain. Even in these instances, each segment can't be analysed singularly as it would loose its significance. As Hoveyda puts it, “one discovers other films in it […] hidden under the first one”. (15) Here he is referring to Chronicle of a Summer, but I believe his remarks are even more relevant to The Human Pyramid. This non-linear conception of time is further complicated by the use of the soundtrack. It is a combination of Rouch's commentary, the synchronous dialogue and sounds, and the comments made by the main characters, Denise and Nadine, that have been recorded after the film has been edited. They have improvised their speeches after watching the scenes, adding the perspective of their current position to their feelings at the time. Moreover, the synch dialogue and the commentary are continually interwoven and blended with the images. The viewer often forgets which one is being transmitted, the two time frames consistently merging.

Because the death of a character is most likely to represent the end of a movie, Alain's death also constitutes a form of closure before the film ends. The characters created by the young students, which have subsequently become a part of them, can now live eternally, frozen by death, in the fantastic realm of the filmic image. Their world is, in a way, left intact, as immediately after the (fictional) tragedy, the audience is taken to a completely different level. This is because, in spite of the above-mentioned power of the 'cinematic reality', death remains the 'un-representable'. Death constitutes the line that separates (or unites) facts from fiction, performance from life. Even though, via the pretext of fictional circumstances, the students in The Human Pyramid have felt and acknowledged the emotions that the presence of the camera has aroused in them, they cannot experience death without it actually occurring. After Alain's death, the spell is broken and the viewer is not in a position to surrender his trust to them anymore. The truth behind the “cinema of lies” has been pushed to its limits and has, literally, died. If earlier we did not know where the performance commenced and real life ended, now everything seems fictional, yet, as it has lost ambiguity, plain.

In this respect, Rouch's exploration of the limitations of cinema in dealing with the subject of death comes from the opposite direction of Nicholas Ray's performance in Lightning Over Water (Wim Wenders and Nicholas Ray, 1980). Both deaths occur near the end of the movie and mark a dramatic turn in the atmosphere and events of the film. In The Human Pyramid, after Alain's death everything becomes – or reveals itself to be – mannered and unreliable, while in Lightning Over Water Ray's actual death represents the ultimate moment of truth. There is a loss of ambiguity in this case too, but only to reveal the blue skies under which the crew of the film is sailing, before scattering his ashes into the sea. The crew itself is finally seen by the audience directly and not through self-conscious reflections in mirrors, as during the previous scenes. Simply, in the moment of revelation constituted by death, one film has become fiction, and the other has become reality. In Lightning Over Water, Nicholas Ray and his death are the raison d'être of the film, the focal element that generates the action, and it was truth that became fictionalised from the beginning of the movie until Ray's death took place. On the other hand, Rouch's The Human Pyramid revolves around the presence of the camera, and aims to create reality using fiction as its starting point: “The camera will not be an obstacle to their expression, but the indispensable witness that will motivate it”. (16)

One of the last scenes in The Human Pyramid is an aerial view of a boat and the ocean, as in Lightning Over Water, but this time it is the sanded ship where Alain lost his life. The sight seems to suddenly materialize all the questions and ambiguities raised throughout the film. The distance from the object and the fluidity of the shot puts the viewer in a different position from the earlier footage, and the object itself is simple yet permeated with meaning. It is a material object (it is not a set), but what has occurred on its premises was a fictional event, the death of a character (not of its impersonator). To what extent were the events surrounding the death fictional, is uncertain. The ship, in view of the emotions that it has witnessed, takes on an almost lifelike presence, a presence from which the viewers are demanding answers. And in these words, which accompany the scene, Jean Rouch expresses the position that he wishes to occupy within the film, and the aim of his work:

…No matter whether the story is plausible, no matter the camera or the mike, or the director, or whether a film was born or not, more important is what happened around the camera…” (17)The protagonist of a short story by Jorge Luis Borges who is incarcerated and awaiting execution, reflects that “reality does not usually coincide with our anticipation of it”, (18) and proceeds to imagine different versions of his own death in great detail in order to eliminate them from the realm of the possible. In a similar way, Jean Rouch seems to think that cinema's claim to the real automatically excludes the essence of it, and therefore represents it in his texts, particularly in The Human Pyramid, with such complex and numerous layers that the final product is somehow able to allude to the reality that has remained outside the representation by limiting its possibilities. This explains the impression experienced during the viewing of both The Human Pyramid andChronicle of a Summer, that what is played out in front of us, what we are entranced by, is the absence of an object rather than the object itself.

 Barbara Bruni, March 2002

Entrevista Raymond Depardon

RAYMOND DEPARDON TALKS LIKE HE PHOTOGRAPHS, like he films, like he writes: profusely. And the torrent of words is intensified by the singular sound of his voice, always slightly hoarse, out of breath, and devoid of Parisian preciosity. Difficult to translate into print much less into English (imagine a French version of Peter Falk), but eminently worth signaling by way of introduction. The title of Depardon's current photo and film retrospective at the Maison Europeenne de la Photographie in Paris felicitously captures the pattern of his speech no less than the meandering of his career: "Detours."

Photo reporter at the age of eighteen for a leading French news agency, cofounder of the pathbreaking Gamma photo agency in 1967, member of the venerable Magnum agency since 1979, the precocious foreign correspondent and sometime paparazzo turned photographer-filmmaker now has to his credit some twenty-five books (photos and texts) and thirty-five films (long and short, documentary and fiction), not to mention commercials and public service ads. An "incredible itinerary," as he says, for someone who was born on a farm in

Villefranche-sur-Saon north of Lyons, in 1942, completed his formal schooling at fourteen, and studied photography by correspondence before "going up" to Paris in 1958 to work as a photographer's assistant.

Indeed, Depardon's work, like his manner of speaking, is always remarkably simple in its form--frontal, symmetrical photos, films composed of long, fixed-camera sequence shots, and first-person commentaries that, like the uncropped photos and the unedited sequence shots, seem totally spontaneous. But it is precisely the incessant detours from one subject, one medium, one register to another that transform the individual elements into a complex but coherent body of work.

A small book called Notes (1979) is often signaled as Depardon's first "break" with conventional photojournalism because of the disarmingly personal, diary-like texts accompanying images of a two-month trek from one war (in Lebanon) to another (in Afghanistan). But this first-person approach had already made its way into his early films, beginning with Tchad 1: L'embuscade (Chad 1: The ambush, 1970), an extraordinary twelve-minute account of an attack on Chadian rebels not only filmed but experienced from within (cf. Depardon's voice-over: "Watch carefully--this is where the ambush is going to start").

In the intervening thirty years, the films, the books, and the voyages have all gotten longer, while the lines between fact and fiction, history and memory, fixed and moving images have been progressively blurred, ignored, defied. War reporter Depardon's trips to Saigon metamorphosed into the fantasies of seduction recounting his first fiction film, Empty Quarter: Une femme en Afrique (1984-85), and the book that followed, Les fiancees de Saigon (1986), just as his film interviews with Francoise Claustre, the French ethnologist held hostage by the Chadian revolutionary movement in the mid-'70s (in Tchad 2 and 3, 1975-76), resurfaced in fictional form with La captive du desert(Captive of the desert, 1989), starring Sandrine Bonnaire. Counterpointing the deserts, the journeys, and the fantasies, he has constituted a sober catalogue of films (and, occasionally, photo-essays) on urban institutions--the political campaign (50,81%, 1974; Vues: Une campagne pour l'election presidentielle en France, 1988), the press (Numeros zero [Trial runs], 1977; Reporters, 1980), the mental asylum (San Clemente, 1980), the police (Faits divers [News items], 1983), the psychiatric emergency room (Urgences [Emergencies], 1987), and the court system (Delits flagrants [Caught in the act], 1994). And in recent years, the omnipresent man with a camera has returned to his rural origins as well, with a family album-cum-autobiography (La ferme du Garet [The farm at Le Garet], 1995) and a film in progress on French farmers today.

The most extroverted of introverts, the most nomadic of stay-athomes, the most cosmopolitan of provincials, Depardon has made his "detours" not only a way of life but an art. The remarks that follow, extracted from what was essentially a one-question, ninety-minute interview that took place in a Paris cafe in late October, are, on reflection, a perfect "image" of the man and his work.

MIRIAM ROSEN: You've often insisted that you don't make "photographer's films" and that the two practices, film and photography, are separate. Do you still think so?

RAYMOND DEPARDON: With experience, I can see that they're even more different. Maybe in the beginning, I went from photography to film without really thinking about it, and with lots of false problems, like how to do a tracking shot. Today I can see that it's not just a question of technique--the frame, the way you film. It's true that sometimes I feel a Little frustrated aesthetically in film. At first, I was doing direct cinema. The American filmmakers played an important role for me because when I was working for the Dalmas news agency [1960-62], my editor, Claude Otzenberger, made me read Richard Leacock's interviews and go and see the films of D.A. Pennebaker and others who were trying to extend journalism into cinema.

For a long time, my experience in film was like that, an extension of my journalistic photography, which I've abandoned little by little, even if I'm still at Magnum. Journalism as a lifetime profession is something I don't think I'm capable of, and I even ask myself if I was cut out for it. I was curious about photography, I was curious about traveling, but I don't think I was made to be a press photographer. It's my family, I read the newspapers, I feel certain things, but to say, for example, that I want to go to the Occupied Territories right now, no. I'd like to go, but with something to create, not something to endure.

MR: But that's photojournalism, war reporting even. You're still doing other kinds of photography.

RD: I have the impression that I'm a survivor of something. My past plays a large role in what I'm doing today--I'm very anchored in the real, in the fact of never constructing something false, or if I construct it, if I intervene, of leaving things in a natural state. I'm coming from journalism, but at the same time I'm tempted by poetry, politics, and maybe the idea of being a witness, a belief that you can still change things with the image. Sincerely, deep down inside, I believe it.

Right now I'm in a period of stocktaking. You could say that my films are ahead of my photography because I've already positioned myself as a filmmaker for a long time: I have a point of view, I make films that are more personal. I'm someone who's always looking around for something, and I don't want to shut myself up in documentary film, so I look to fiction, or in between fiction and documentary.

In photography I haven't positioned myself as well. I've always had this complex of being an ex-reporter-photographer, of being a photographer who was more of a witness than a creator. It's stupid, but it's like that. So now I want to make up for lost time and go for the things that seem essential to me, questions I haven't really raised in my photography because I've raised them in cinema. I've always had a slightly strange attitude in relation to photography, which was to wait for a commission or, as a journalist, to follow the news.

MR: What kinds of questions?

RD: There are recurrent themes in my work that I haven't really gone into deeply enough--mineral spaces, like the desert, a certain French rural life, a French quintessence, a relationship between pain and photography, politics. What I'm interested in today is really constructing, because that's a luxury. I see the photographers at Magnum: They're all reacting, they're doing commissions.

I think that we photographers are behind in relation to other forms of expression. We're still questioning ourselves, wondering, "Are we useful, or are we a little frivolous?" But these drawbacks are also advantages: Obviously, we're not very serious, we're not very important, but that's the strength of the photo, precisely that it's ephemeral. It's somehow both ephemeral and superimportant. It can go back and forth, like a conveyor belt, I'd say, between the two things. Whether you're a filmmaker or a photographer, you always have that guilty feeling--"Maybe I wasn't in the right place."

I think we have to move toward something that's more distanced in relation to the event. When you look at the press, French or American, you see that it's still extremely explicit. And as far as film goes, I want to do something different now.

MR: Which means?

RD: That today we've caught up with what's happening in the big cities. We film everything, we know about everything--the police, the psychiatric emergency units, all the public institutions, we've filmed them all. There are still one or two that I hope to get authorizations to film one day, because I know there are a few hideaways like that, where they don't want any movie cameras. I'll do them, but I don't want to do too many. I respect filmmakers like Frederick Wiseman who've zeroed in on these things again and again, but after the police or the court system, I don't want to make another film like that.

Relative to the Anglo-Saxons, I'm more impressionistic. "So French," as someone told me one day when I was showing them photos from Notes. And it's true. Other filmmakers, if they'd treated the same subjects, would have zoomed in to the bitter end, done one big "close-up," as they say in American journalism. "I'd have gone with the policemen to their homes," people said to me. "Why didn't you go?" But I'm more impressionistic. Is it the fact that I used to be a photographer? Maybe that's where the photographer turns up again, in a much more subtle way--not in the frame, not in the way of filming, but in the way of being attuned to the minute, to the fraction of a second that's not the same as any other. Which inevitably means that it's subjective.

MR: Maybe that's where we find Raymond Depardon.

RD: Absolutely. Because I'm coming from journalism, unlike Chris Marker or Jean Rouch, who are ethno or very political filmmakers. I'm closer to the Americans. But since I'm French, I'm more political, and maybe more of a loner. It's like Errance [Wandering, 2000; Depardon's latest photo-essay], where I went off, just like that, wherever chance happened to take me. I have a few 35 mm films like that, where I didn't have a subject, the same way I've tried to kill the subject in photography. For my short film New York, N.Y. [1986], for example, I shot at the same time every day. The subject isn't always a help to the photographer, it's like handcuffs. And I think that with the cinema as well, we have to take back our freedom, set out to make images, to construct images.

I don't have a press card any more, but deep down inside, I'm still a journalist. If we picked up a newspaper here, this morning, I could find a few stories to cover, but I feel like I should do things that are more advanced.

MR: More advanced?

RD: We have the right to claim the status of authors. I don't think that the big photo-essays we knew in the '50s and '60s, even just after the war, are completely dead. We have to keep on doing this kind of thing. Continue to be free, to lay claim to a purely photographic form of expression. It's paradoxical for me to say this, because I often use interviews, words, speech, but I see that as a photographic or filmic form of expression.

MR: You speak of being a loner and being able to take certain liberties now that you're recognized, but I notice that with that recognition, the list of credits at the end of your films gets longer and longer.

RD: The maximum in my experience was La captive du desert--ten people. And it's true that I'm not interested in that kind of production, but I'm glad to have done it. Having your own chair with your name written on the back and talking with the star--it was kind of romantic, like Cecil B. DeMille with his megaphone. So it's something I wanted to do, and I don't regret it, but I think it's one of my worst films.

You're always under pressure to have more money and more people working with you. I've worked on commercials where there were fifty people, but that didn't interest me because I was too much of a loner and I was terrified of working with people. I was really unhappy the first time I worked with even a few other people, for Empty Quarter: Une femme en Afrique. There were just the three of us-me, Francoise Prenant [who played the title, and only, role] and Jacques Kebadian [a filmmaker, who later coedited the film with Prenant]-and they kept asking me, "Raymond, what are we going to do tomorrow?" And I'd say, "Oh, I don't know!" And I made all sorts of mistakes because I had to come up with explanations to make them happy. That was the worst.

My dream is to go roaming around with a movie camera, to let myself be carried away by the images, to stay curious, free myself from the TV news, go and see what's happening in other places, and be alone. And to come up with a film, to do the sound myself, like I did with the first ones.

MR: Do you have anything in the works?

RD: I have an advance from the Centre National du Cinema for a film that I'm supposed to shoot in the desert, and I really want to do it completely differently, to go back to my own way of filming, with a handheld camera. What I want is a form, a substance, something that holds up, and at the same time, a kind of urgency. I think there'll be four Westerners. But first, to spot locations, I'm going alone, totally alone. No sound engineer, no nothing. Maybe I'll take an old man as a guide, and somebody young to make the tea, because I'm used to it. But you have to stay free, in film and photography alike.

MR: Are there any other projects?

RD: I'm in the process of making a long film that's going to take me about ten years. It's about rural France, the small farmers and problems of transmission to the next generation. It's an important subject for me because it's something quintessentially French. There's a word in Cevenol--that's a local dialect-roumiger, and it means to talk to yourself, to grumble. When I go to Magnum from time to time, I see the photographers with their heads drooping, anxious, and they make me laugh. I say to myself, "My God, that reminds me of the farmers," because they have this French quintessence, which is to grumble. It's kind of superstitious--you know, like the farmers--because if you talk about too much happiness, you're going to be disappointed. So I tell myself that, ultimately, my farmers in the countryside and the people in Paris have something in common--it's this attitude (laughs), which probably comes from our past, our history, our rural culture. So I'm making this film on the rural world.

Given that I'm fifty-eight now, let's say that I still have another period in my life, an important one, where I have to go slowly because I'm in a hurry, as Lenin would say (laughs). We're in a hurry because the light doesn't wait, things don't wait, and maybe we have to think about our failures. Photographers are often proud, and coming from a farmer's world, which is also very proud, I think I was saved, not by my will, not by my work, but by my pride (laughs). It's true that the passing of time plays a role, like when I see two films that were made practically at the same moment and had totally different careers. Reporters, for example, worked very well, it was even nominated for an Oscar, but it really shows its age now. And then I see San Clemente, a film that was made just like that, self-produced, which had a tiny release, and it's clear that this is an extraordinary film, because there was an incredible freedom. So today I tell myself, "Wait, let's go back to films like that, back to the essential. Be careful! Be careful about the fact that I'm recognized, be careful about pride, be careful about vanity. Let's go back to being a loner."

"Why do I need this help? You're ruining me!" So begins a dialogue between a bundle of nerves prisoner and a short, Germanic man, apparently of letters, who controls the prisoner's fate. Standing in the desolation of the institution's yard, the authority figure attempts to convince the prisoner that if he were "sent back to 
prison today, [he would] be back to Bridgeport today or tomorrow." As if to emphasize the point and to garnish it with an air of legitimacy, the authority figure, who would appear to be a psychiatrist, asserts, 

"If you don't believe me, you can spit in [my] face." Pressing the matter still further, the prisoner asks, "How do you know that I am a schizophrenic- paranoid?" to which the doctor retorts, "Because you had psychological testing."And so goes the absurdity captured in the theatrical revue of a mental institution called "Titicut Follies." Examining the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Bridgewater, an institution for the criminally insane, Frederick Wiseman chronicles the daily lives of the prisoners and staff in "cinema verite" style. Granted access to the institution for 29 days of filming, Wiseman captures images and interactions that are both macabre and revolting. Whether it be guards badgering a prisoner for voiding on the floor of his cell, a doctor telling a prisoner "to chew" his food as he is force fed through his nose with a tube, or an interaction between prisoner and doctor as described above, Titicut Follies is a powerful and disturbing examination of the world of a mental institution which, among other things, questions the traditional boundaries separating the deviant from the conformist.More subtly, Wiseman also makes problematic the common assumption that mental institutions are founded on a bedrock of rationality and order. Of course, the medical model adopted by these institutions in the twentieth century makes an explicit commitment to the[End page 2] logic of the scientific method-- the driving force of positivism --, yet Wiseman deftly and ironically presents the institution as a place of chaos and absurdity, despite the regimentation and extraordinary control that it exudes. Careful and clever editing results in the presentation of disembodied images, taken out of context, which make the functioning of the institution seem incomprehensible. The lack of order conveyed in the film and the inability to distinguish readily between the guards and the guarded leads one to question whether the institution has any greater purpose than the systematic degradation of human beings-- both prisoners and guards.Of course, painting the institution as a place mired in degradation and exploitation is ironic given Wiseman's own use of the prisoners and guards as his "subjects." In using these people as the vehicles for his polemical attack on mental institutions, Wiseman has been accused of doing to the prisoners what he condemns others for doing. In fact, it was this point which resulted in a series of court cases, dating from the 1967 release of the film, in which the Massachusetts Supreme Court declared the documentary obscene and exploitive, banning it from public viewing. Only after 24 years has this restriction been lifted, allowing the film to be aired on public television for the first time in early 1993. Nonetheless, while the legal entanglements have apparently dissipated, the moral quandary still remains, and it tugs hard at those who partake of this film. Named after the annual talent show held at Bridgeport in which both 

prisoners and staff participate, Titicut Follies is a highly charged polemic that, by necessity, moves its viewers both intellectually and emotionally. The documentary would be a useful addition to classes which deal with punishment, deviance, treatment, ethics, and possibly even research design because it raises basic questions concerning the identification and control of individuals deemed deviant by the larger society, or at least the criminal justice and mental health systems. In addition, it forces viewers, albeit not intentionally, to consider the moral and ethical boundaries which pertain to the observation and study of human beings.When does one cross the line from a reasoned and informative examination of the human condition to a systematic exploitation of individuals aimed at[End page 3] rattling one's own ideological saber? On what moral basis do we and should we determine who shall be the kept and who shall be the keeper? Are there readily identifiable characteristics which distinguish the two? These questions and more need to be explored, and this film provides a useful mechanism for making them more salient to undergraduates and professionals alike. Given its rich theoretical content and the power with which it speaks to the audience, this film is a fantastic pedagogical tool. Accordingly, it receives four gavels on the Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture's esteemed rating scale and comes highly recommended.

Gregory J. Howard 
State University of New York at Albany School of Criminal Justice

Direct Cinema

What Is Direct Cinema?
This is a style of film-making that is often confusing and difficult to define. While it has some similarities to Cinema Verité and Free Cinema, it is unique to North America. It is different from traditional documentaries for many different reason. Most noticeably the

"events seem recorded exactly as they happen without rehearsal and with minimal editing."

Unlike the traditional documentary's use of a voiceover and interviewer, in direct cinema

"people are allowed to speak without guidance or interruption, inadvertently revealing their own motives, attitudes and psychology."

How Did Direct Cinema Get Here?

Direct Cinema developed in the 1950s and 1960s in North America. It was the result of both sociological and practical changes to the world of film making. Equipment that was developed for television news documentary, such as better film stock that could be used in natural lighting, directional microphones, and a zoom lens, was used in order to

"get closer to a subject without interfering in the natural flow of speech or action."

The most obvious use of the Direct Cinema technique would be for documentaries, but they were also used in many fiction films. Films like A Married Couple took footage shot during the daily lives of people, and then edited it together to create a fictional piece. Thus, Direct Cinema is not pure documentary; due to the style of shooting and the use of "real" people and events it is not true fiction either. In many ways it mixes the two.

How Is Direct Cinema Different From Cinema Verité?

Often these two styles of film-making are confused. Many people think that they are the same style. The most obvious difference is that Direct Cinema insisted that the

"subjects (become) so involved with what they are doing that they forget the presence of the camera and the film-maker."

Whereas Cinema Verité felt that the camera made the subject

"aware of themselves by giving them a feeling of importance".

Elsewhere on the web, see Cinema Verite: Defining the Moment, from the National Film Board.

Critiques of Direct Cinema?

Perhaps the most obvious problem with Direct Cinema is that it often could "seem amateurish" and had a "home movie quality". However, this limitation also "adds to the authenticity" of the experience of watching a Direct Cinema film. One of the most difficult parts of watching a Direct Cinema film is to avoid judging it by the same standards and expectations with which one would judge a traditional documentary or dramatic film. Direct Cinema was trying to re-define what films were used for and how films would be seen.
What Happened to Direct Cinema?

Direct Cinema in a pure form didn't last very long. Some critics believed that Direct Cinema would replace both drama and traditional forms of documentary. Instead, parts of it were quickly adopted by the very styles of film making it was going to replace, and can be seen in films and television today.
© 1998 Hannah Rasmussen

Chantel Ackerman:Moving Through Time And Space

Recognized as one of the most important directors in film history, Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman presents her key films and major installations, spotlighting the crossover genres of film and visual art. The five projects of this touring exhibition, including a newly commissioned film, span more than two decades of Akerman’s career, opening a window on to the shifting frames between fact and fiction. Exploring the politics of territorial borders, recent histories of racism, and the poetics of personal journeys, Akerman’s films touch on ideas about image, gaze, space, performance, and narration.

Chantal Akerman: Moving Through Time and Space is a collaborative effort of four institutions: Blaffer Gallery, the Art Museum of the University of Houston; the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; Miami Art Museum (a MAC@MAM presentation); and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.

The exhibition and catalog have been generously supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO). Additional support for the catalog has been provided by the Barbara Lee Family Foundation Fund at the Boston Foundation.

General support for the Contemporary’s exhibitions program is generously provided by the Whitaker Foundation; The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; William E. Weiss Foundation; Nancy Reynolds and Dwyer Brown; Regional Arts Commission; Missouri Arts Council, a state agency; Arts and Education Council; and members of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.

Georges Franju Sangre De Las Bestias

Screening Georges Franju’s Blood of the Beasts in a class focusing on Marxist theory somewhat demands a Marxist reading of the film. But fairness will be attempted.

Blood of the Beasts is much less a vegetarian propaganda film and much more a look at an industry disconnected from the society which and into which it feeds. Franju’s dissonance between the rather happy, but nevertheless postwar, life of sub/urban Paris is signified through a change in the voice of narration (from female to male), an abrupt shift/absence of music, and a transition from long shots to medium shots. Then, of course, there is the change in content. Another thing Franju doesn’t seem to be saying is that the work done in slaughterhouses is necessarily wrong. On the contrary, the animals are killed with utmost efficiency and (apparently) painlessness. The worst any of them undergoes is briefly getting pushed around prior to decapitation (which, I hear, is a pain-free experience).

Granted, watching these things on film (even if it is black and white) feels traumatic to one who is not accustomed to such sights. But whether this was Franju’s intent, it certainly attests to the point that there is a real disjoint between daily life, with all of its burgers and steaks, and the place where animals begin the transition to becoming burgers and steaks. In an interview, Franju firsthand confirms what the style of his film already told us: he went to pains to ensure that the film was a work of art. This was his chief goal. He insists that we wasn’t particularly interested in the subject of slaughterhouses, but he was intrigued by the provocative presence of a moat separating the slaughterhouse from the rest of the city. When some said that color photography would have enhanced Blood of the Beasts‘ effect on viewers, Franju insisted that color would have removed the art from the film and reduced it to shock-value. And while shock-value wasn’t Franju’s intent, clearly he was attempting to evoke an often emotional response from the viewer both through content and style. He did not position his camera, say, behind the horse as it was being slaughtered (“shot” in the head), only to show us the animal dropping to the ground. Rather, the camera is right on front to show the entire picture.

The presence, in particular, of the former French boxing champion employed at the slaughterhouse seemed intentionally drawn out by Franju. To be sure, he wasn’t the only worker to be mentioned, but Franju must have know that his background would be more interesting than the rest and therefore made a point of it. Is it too simplistic to wonder if the boxer isn’t another means of disassociating the slaughterhouse from a “normal” Parisian life? Sure, lots of people love boxing. But not many people actually box. Franju could be noticing a connection between two professions: one that is paid to beat on humans, another to kill animals.

The nuns are more interesting and seem to serve the film’s purpose better. Mostly shot from behind, they are identified in terms of their spiritual calling rather than as individuals per se. The nuns cross the boundary of the moat separating the slaughterhouse much in the same way as they would cross the line into diseased territory to witness to the sick and poor. They visit the slaughterhouse in order to obtain fat, an undesirable part of the animals that would otherwise presumably be discarded. Nuns have seemingly always been those that society sends to places it would otherwise prefer not to visit. Their presence at the slaughterhouse hammers home the point that this is a place that is truly “other” from the world to which it belongs. The fracture between production and consumption is a Marxist lament, and one that isn’t without merit. In (Marxist) theory, knowledge at least and participation at best would positively affect the exchange value of such commodities as these. Knowing the interior of a slaughterhouse would certainly cause some to abstain from meat, and perhaps it would cause others to appreciate a little better the nature and history behind a good steak.