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ABSTRACT: Documentary filmmaker Robert Drew's rhetoric about his observational approach to filmmaking served a centrally important function: to sell his approach to networks and sponsors for funding and distribution. This rhetoric depended on the contexts in which Drew discussed his filmmaking approach, a context that included a television industry that was wary, if not hostile, to independent news producers; sponsors that were resistant to making significant financial investments in television journalism; and an observational style that was commercially unproven, expensive, and time-consuming. Drew's rhetoric also shifted over time as industry circumstances and opportunities changed.
KEYWORDS: documentary, direct cinema, Robert Drew, Drew Associates, cinema verité, archive
In a 1963 interview with Cahiers du Cinéma, documentary filmmakers Robert Drew and Richard Leacock discussed their approach to filmmaking, which was later dubbed direct cinema or cinema verité. When asked "Do you have the impression that you uncover the whole truth?" Drew responded: "I think that contemporary televised journalism tries to reveal a sort of intellectual truth, whereas we try to reveal a sort of emotional truth: what does life consist of for a given person in a given time. It is a new kind of truth."1 Drew not only relied on claims to truth in differentiating his filmmaking approach from the contemporary practices in television, but he also described his films as uncovering a previously inaccessible truth. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, film scholars and other filmmakers were increasingly critical of Drew's assertions about truth and reality. Detractors positioned this rhetoric as an expression of the naive belief that direct cinema films were objective, real, and true, and that this deception was at the core of Drew's approach and the resulting films. Film scholar Jeanne Hall summarized this critical response: "cinema verite was denounced as a transparent purveyor of ideology. Reflexive documentary filmmakers like Jean Rouch, Jean-Luc Godard, and Emile de Antonio became the darlings of contemporary documentary theory, and indeed, such filmmakers were among the harshest critics of American verite. . . . 'Cinema verite is first of all a lie and secondly a childish assumption about the nature of film,' de Antonio charged. 'Cinema verite is a joke. Only people without feelings or convictions could even think of making cinema verite.'"2
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