Concurring with this suggestion, Michael Renov characterizes the seventies as the beginning of the "post-verite" period.
2 Rather than taking documentary film's turning away from cinema verite as signaling a retreat to blander and more traditional forms, however, Renov sees it as liberating. He praises a number of works of the seventies, which broke with the strict cinema verite discipline, for anticipating the profusion of films of the eighties and nineties that affirm their subjects' subjectivity, and especially the diaries, journals, and autobiographies that affirm the filmmaker's own subjectivity.
3 In asserting that the seventies marked the beginning of the "post-verite" age, Renov consigns cinema verite to the past. He assumes that cinema verite was not flexible or resourceful enough to accommodate the affirmations of subjectivity that began to emerge in the seventies. He assumes that such films were repudiating cinema verite, although it is more fruitful as well as more accurate to view them as extending cinema verite, as, indeed, transforming it from within. Although Renov understands cinema verite (as exemplified by the Drew Associates productions and the early films of Leacock, Pennebaker, and the Maysles) to be fundamentally opposed to subjectivity, in fact, those films affirmed subjectivity no less than the films he champions.
This is a free page. This page contains 177 words. This
article contains 18,577 words (approx. 62 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Article with our Looking Back and Turning Inward: American Documentary Films of the Seventies Access Pass.
