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...