In the revised and expanded version of his invaluable history of nonfiction film, Richard Barsam sees the sixties as a high-water mark for the American documentary cinema. It was a decade in which the politically committed social documentary flourished even as a new and experimental form of documentary, cinema verite or direct cinema, emerged. Barsam sums up the seventies, by contrast, as a decade in which few filmmakers were interested "either in the identification of social abuses or in the cinematic experimentation that, a decade earlier, had created direct cinema. Thus, much of their output, mired in tradition, seemed bland."1
In the seventies, filmmakers like Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker, Albeit and David Maysles, and Frederick Wiseman adhered to the strict cinema verite discipline they had mastered in the sixties, which calls upon filmmakers to wait silently for their human subjects to reveal themselves and to edit out signs of people's self-consciousness in the presence of the camera. A number of younger filmmakers, such as Alan and Susan Raymond, came to master that discipline, too. Nonetheless, Barsam is correct in suggesting that there was a general tendency in the seventies for documentary filmmakers to turn away from cinema verite as the "old masters" had practiced it (and continued to practice it).
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