Revolution! Paris! The 1960s! Repulsed by bourgeois propaganda, documentary filmmakers decided that truth was a matter of technique. Studio production values were out, guerilla film making in. A director's greatest ambition? To become that "fly on the wall": an objective observer minimally influencing his surroundings.
Pretty soon you couldn't tell a true story without shaky hand-helds, queasy, monotonous close-ups, imperceptible zooms, and enough seemingly irrelevant footage to assure the audience that nothing had been staged. Directors carefully avoided broadcasting a message or orchestrating an atmosphere of poetic ambiguity. This technique worked for a lot of concert films, most memorably in D.A. Pennebaker's iconic portrayal of Bob Dylan in "Don't Look Back," filmed in 1965. The name of this style: Cinéma Vérite!
Being a good college kid, I consulted the experts. To what extent does truthfulness rely on stage settings? If the Orient issued a misprint, spelling its name "The Oreint," would you believe a word it said? Or how about "The Orien" or "The Orion"? Where would you draw the line? Then you must ask yourself the consecutive question—to what extent does the veracity of a publication depend on proper spelling? I mulled things over with Professor Dallas Denery (PhD.), resident medievalist and historian of truth who is currently writing a book about lies.
"That's just silly," he said with a dismissive wave, "It's called Cinéma Vérite, not Cinéma Falsite!" Case closed.
May this background help to illustrate my glee when I stood to applaud Neil Blomkamp's "District 9." Sure, the film is mildly redolent of the Halo commercials, what with the director's scanty filmography. Sure, like in "Blood Diamond," the cause of oppressed Africans wasn't enough and the director had to emboss the plot with corny romantic intrigue. But a political statement is filtered through Cinéma Vérite's "truth machine" and embellished with aliens scores for self-indulgent fiction against ideological truth-hounds. By no means the first to utilize Vérite effects in a fantastic sci-fi adventure, director Blomkamp outdoes the rest, redeeming the style by parodying the genre.
If you've seen "District 9" and enjoyed it for the same reasons I have, the film to see is Peter Watkins' Punishment Park (1971). As the war escalated in Vietnam, a British director decided to go to America and watch it blow up. The film is a Vérite pseudo-documentary in which political prisoners are detained in the deserts of California. A citizen's tribunal informs them that if they reach an American flag poled a few miles away, all charges will be dropped against them. The catch is that the National Guard and state SWAT teams use the park as a training ground for the surgical removal of hippies, anarchists, black panthers, periphery scum and those on government subsidies.
In a stroke of genius and English derring-do, Watson cast non-actors—including actual policemen, panthers, and grey flannel hawks—with political convictions that explode into real violence on screen. Exploitation film you say? Not at all: Watkins justifies his social commentary using the Vérite technique. As in "District 9," the visual economy of truth achieves highest merit in a perfidy of facts.