4 Documentary journeys (p.99)

Shoah, London

The influence of direct cinema has been widespread. The preceding chapter discussed the problems of this legacy with reference largely to popular film practice, whereas the new journey documentaries, to be examined here, signal the influence of direct cinema uponmore intellectual and relatively elitist documentary filmmaking. Shoah and London are illustrative of the growing tendency to offer a critique within the films themselves of the issues surrounding documentary representation, issues that direct cinema,with its unflinching faith in observation, naively took for granted. This reflexivity has further advanced the practice andtheory ofobservational documentary. Journeyfilms are structuredaroundencounters and meetings – often accidental or unplanned, they are about not necessarily knowingwhere they will end up. These characteristics recall direct cinema’s interest in the moment when people meet; they also very clearly recall direct cinema’s French counterpart, cinéma vérité, exemplified by Jean Rouch and EdgarMorin’sChronique d’un été (Chronicle of a Summer) which opens with the filmmakers (who, like several later observational filmmakers, trained as anthropologists) discussing embarking upon a film study of happiness, followed by two women collaborators going out onto the streets of Paris to collatematerial for the film, Nagra and microphone in hand.

The essential difference between this cinéma vérité approach and that of Robert Drew and his followers is the ostentatious forefronting of the filmmaking process; the crewofChronique d’unété do not hide behind the supposed transparencyof film, they do not remain anonymous auteurs. Many journey documentaries borrow from both observational traditions: the close attention to detail and personality of direct cinema and the focus upon the moment of encounter with the filmmaker of cinéma vérité. The presence of the author is a significant intervention in journey films such as Shoah and London: the visibly intrusive presence of Lanzmann in the former, and the invisible but equally clear imposition ofKeiller onto the latter.Although both films areconcernedwith the inherently unpredictable meeting or encounter, they are very obviously guided by the presence of their respective authors.

Direct cinema was founded upon an uncomfortable paradox, that whilst the films were putatively concerned with the unpredictable action not dictated by the filmmakers, they also desired and sought ways of imposing closure on their ostensibly undetermined action.