On Verite

Linda Williams, in her article on contemporary documentaries, devotes attention to distinguishing films like Errol Morris' The Thin Blue Line from earlier documentary forms.  Specifically, she seems to have identified what she call "cinema verite" as the primary documentary aesthetic against which Morris is rebelling, an argument that I find problematic.

Williams liberally throws around the terms "cinema verite" and "verite" without ever defining what she means, committing what Fischer would call the fallacy of ambiguity.  Admittedly, the term comes with a certain amount of built-in ambiguity, as it has been used historically to refer to two radically different filmmaking styles.  First coined by French sociologist Edgar Morin to refer to his work with filmmaker Jean Rouch, the name was taken from Dziga Vertov's term kinopravda and was meant to refer to the use of cinema, particularly new mobile camera and sync sound equipment, to reveal truths about society.  Confusion arose when filmmakers like Robert Drew, Ricky Leacock and the Maysles brothers, who had previously used terms like direct cinema to refer to their films, began describing their work as cinema verite, despite the fact that its observational non-interventionist aesthetic bore little relationship to the French films.  (Or course, things became even more confusing when some French filmmakers began calling their work "direct cinema.")

However, Williams seems to be referring to neither of these, but rather to "the verite sense of capturing events as they happen" – a vague non-definition which allows her to label the Rodney King video and the Zapruder film as "verite." (12)  In doing so, she has set up cinema verite as a straw man ("verite's discredited [discredited how? by whom? –JV] claim to capturing events while they happen") against which she can position The Thin Blue Line and other recent documentaries.  (14)  Did some direct cinema/cinema verite practitioners make claims that their films represented an objective reality?  Certainly, but Williams presents no such evidence, even arguing the opposite: that "even in its heyday no one ever fully believed in an absolute truth of cinema verite."  (14)  Ultimately, it seems that she is only interested in discussing cinema verite as an abstract concept which she can freely define and discuss without resorting to any kind of concrete examples or evidence.

As an unrelated note, the appearances by David Irving and Robert Jan van Pelt in Mr. Death reminded me of the fascinating Lipstadt-Irving libel case, which both were involved with - Irving as plaintiff, van Pelt as expert witness.  I won't go into the details here; I'll just say that most court cases don't involve the creation of hundreds of pages of historical scholarship on the Holocaust or end with the judge declaring that someone (Irving, in this case) is not an "objective, fair-minded historian."  Read more at Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_v_Penguin_Books_and_Lipstadt) or in one of the many books published about the case – I'd particularly recommend Richard Evans'.

Jonah Volk