Cinéma Vérité, French term, meaning literally “cinema truth”, first used by the sociologist Edgar Morin in the title of an article about the films of Jean Rouch. The title, “Pour un Nouveau Cinéma-Vérité” (“For a New Cinema Truth”, France Observateur No. 506, January 14, 1960), was reiterated in the subtitle “Une Expérience de Cinéma Vérité”, regarding a film that Morin and Rouch shot later that year: Chronique d’un Été (1961; Chronicle of a Summer). The term was quickly adopted by French film-makers to describe the nature of their practice as it developed in the early 1960s, when new lightweight equipment for filming and recording synchronous (sync.) sound on location opened up new possibilities for documentary production. Material could be filmed, sounds and speech recorded as they happened, without the need for events to be staged or restaged for the camera, and film-makers could change position while still filming, to focus attention on what they deemed was of most interest.

Previously, documentaries had rarely made use of sync. sound footage shot on location. In the United States, for example, the monthly current affairs magazine, March of Time, which continued production until 1951, regularly employed actors to re-enact key events for its reports. These scenes were then mixed with real-life, unstaged footage, and the authority of the voice-over commentary was relied upon to convince viewers of the authenticity and meaning of the visual material used.

Rouch’s conception of cinéma vérité was consistently interventionist rather than purely observational. He believed that the camera should act as a catalyst, bringing out hidden emotions, pushing people to a kind of confession. Thus his approach contrasted radically with that of the parallel movement in the United States, Direct Cinema, where film-makers such as Richard Leacock, Donn Pennebaker, and Albert and David Maysles were simultaneously using new equipment (some of it specially adapted by Leacock) for filming and recording sync. sound on location in real-life situations, in order to develop a new kind of television reportage. For their “fly-on-the-wall” documentaries they entered situations where there was the chance of a story developing, aiming to be in the right place at the right time to record as unobtrusively as possible.

Films such as Primary (1960, about the crucial Wisconsin primary between Hubert Humphrey and John F. Kennedy) and The Chair (1963, about the struggle to obtain a reprieve for a black man sentenced to the electric chair) are clearly the ancestors of modern television documentaries, though these typically make frequent use of commentary, something the purist practitioners of Direct Cinema strove to avoid.

For Chronique d’un Été, Rouch brought Michel Brault over from Canada as he was comfortable moving around with a hand-held camera. A crucial scene with Marceline Loridan made use of the most up-to-date equipment: a Nagra tape-recorder in her handbag, she walked through the market of Les Halles, talking about her wartime experience of deportation (an improvised monologue, the subject of which was suggested by Rouch). She was filmed using the prototype of a new, lightweight, 16-mm sync. sound camera, the design of which André Coutant was still working on for the Éclair company.

Coutant ultimately developed his prototype into the Éclair NPR. This was used for the first time on a major film to shoot Chris Marker’s Le Joli Mai (1963), which has the imprint of the director’s characteristically personal irony. The new camera was, compared to the background noise in most locations, effectively noiseless, light enough for hand-held filming, particularly as the bulk of the weight rested on the cameraman’s shoulder, and had a reflex view-finder, to ensure accurate framing. It was normally used with a 12-mm to 120-mm Angenieux zoom lens, which allowed movement closer to or further from the action without the cameraman having to shift position physically. Sound was normally recorded on quarter-inch tape on the equally portable Nagra tape recorder. Their running speeds could be synchronized by using a cable linking the camera and Nagra, or a pair of quartz crystal oscillators.

The new possibilities for documentary were quickly exploited all over the world: by Brault in Quebec; by Frederick Wiseman in the United States; by Louis Malle in India; and in Mao‘s China, by the great veteran of earlier documentary, Joris Ivens, in collaboration with Marceline Loridan, who had become his wife.