I Know We Are In Trouble – Cinema Verite

Excerpt from Dont Look Back on YouTube

The following is a college paper for UC Berkeley Film Studies course: Documentary Film

Originally submitted on Feb 25, 2004

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I Know We Are In Trouble

The title of Dont Look Back, D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 documentary of Bob Dylan’s 1965 London tour, is purposely spelled without an apostrophe because Pennebaker felt the grammatical error reflected Dylan’s nonconformity (Couchman, 94).  Omitting the apostrophe calls immediate attention to the construction of the title and reveals the error in the sentence.  This attention to construction, however, is exactly what cinema verite or direct cinema filmmakers wanted audiences to ignore. Brian Winston’s 1978 article Documentary: I Think We Are in Trouble proposes that the problem with documentaries is that viewers do not recognize the films as “constructed artifacts” (33).  Documentary films will be more truthful than fiction when the filmmaker presents to the viewer his intentions, processes of recording, and examines the film’s effects on both subject and viewer.  The fact that the verite style does not hide the artifice of the cinema is not enough to suggest that a film is constructed.  What is important is that no matter how truthful a documentary is: it is still a film, an interpretation.

Expressionism and Realism in Sunrise – A Song Of Two Humans

Sunrise on YouTube (part 2) sequence described in essay begins at 00:03

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Expressionism and Realism in Sunrise – A Song Of Two Humans

The films of F.W. Murnau defy hasty theoretical classification because they are constructed from a mixture of expressionistic and realistic aesthetics.  In Sunrise – A Song Of Two Humans (1927) Murnau’s seamless blend of expressionism and realism creates a picture that is able to transcend the screen and affect its audience.  Murnau employs this aesthetic mixture within the mise-en-scene, the en-framed images, and the montage of Sunrise.  This allows an audience access to the subjective experiences of the characters while preserving the reality of the film.  One sequence in particular typifies this use of the expressive and real.  “The marsh sequence,” as I will term it, at the film’s start is when the Man (George O’Brien) leaves the Wife (Janet Gaynor) to have an affair with the Woman from the city (Margaret Livingston).  In this moment, Murnau uses the cinema to project the film’s meaning and conviction to an audience.  Joining expressionism and realism was familiar ground for Murnau by the time Sunrise was produced.