Today marks the one billionth time the term "cinéma vérité" was applied incorrectly. This time it was in reference to a commercial for blue jeans or cell phones or something. I know what you're saying: "They're just words, man" or, "why do we have to categorize anything?"


My point is, what is most often referred to as cinéma vérité is not only philosophically diametrically opposed to actual cinéma vérité but (more damningly), it conflates irreconcilable understandings of the nature of reality, God, the universe and everything else!

Cinéma Direct -or- what pretty much everyone erroneously refers to as Cinéma Vérité

Cinéma Direct is documentary genre that began in Québec in 1958. The Quiet Revolution, a cultural assertion of the French-speaking majority under the rule of the Anglo-minority, encouraged the development of a distinct Québécois identity.


As part of this cultural expression, filmmakers sought to re-instill truthfulness in the documentary genre, which, by the 1950s was usually studio-based propaganda rife with dramatizations and mickey mousing. In 1922's Nanook of the North, for example, Nanook (actually an Inuit named Allakariallak living in Inukjuak, Quebec) was built an oversized igloo to share with his wife (who wasn't really his wife) to allow a camera crew and sufficient lighting inside. He was filmed hunting with a harpoon. In the scene, Allakariallak looks in the direction of the camera laughing and smiling memorably. He only knew how to hunt with guns. You can almost hear Robert Flaherty taking him aside and asking, "Could you act... you know... more Eskimo?"

When I was a young'un, my parents exposed me to many horrifying films which they correctly reckoned I wouldn't understand but wrongly assumed wouldn't scar me for most of my adult life. I was four or five when my father took my six-year-old sister and I to see Alien. When I saw it again about twenty years later I was surprised at how vivid my memories were, although I could now recognize that the decapitated Ash was an android, and not, as I had previously surmised, someone with milk in his veins.


Another movie that haunted me when I was young that I have spent many years wondering about. I saw it in the late 1978 wood-paneled RCA Selectavision VCR. I didn't have much to go on. I remembered a country house, black & white sequences, an old woman in a chair that gets spun around and, most importantly, a chauffeur with an awful and inappropriate smile that he flashes during a funeral. After that I used to smile creepily at my younger brother whilst my sister relied on draping her long hair over her face like a Yūrei.

  

Anyway, for years I have repeated those vague details to co-workers and horror aficionados, blogged about it and watched things like House of Seven Corpses to no avail.

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