Film Forum

Talking heads, pushy interviewers, voice-of-God narration – fed up with conventional documentaries, Time-Life editor/correspondent Robert Drew looked for another way. In the late 1950s, he and like-minded filmmaker Richard Leacock, together with a team, developed lightweight 16mm synchronous sound cameras.

Joined by D.A. Pennebaker, Albert and David Maysles, Bill Jersey, and many others, they chronicled events as they happened, capturing the decade in a way impossible before: JFK, the Civil Rights Movement, the war in Vietnam, drug culture, drag culture, the rock and folk scenes, hippie counterculture, as well as the seemingly mundane.

“60s Verité” features more than 50 modern classics which not only changed the recording of social history, but revolutionized filmmaking itself. From the observational cinema of Drew Associates to the collaborative work of Pierre Perrault and Jean Rouch; from Lionel Rogosin’s Apartheid South Africa docufiction, to Jim McBride’s confessional-skewering mockumentary; from William Greaves’ avant-garde Symbiopsychotaxiplasm to Agnes Varda’s verité-infused Cléo from 5 to 7, and everywhere in between.

The festival includes a sidebar festival spotlighting nine films by Jean Rouch, one of the inventors of cinéma vérité: The Mad Masters, Mammy Water, Moi, Un Noir, Chronicle of a Summer, The Lion Hunters, Jaguar, Little by Little, The Human Pyramid, and Punishment. 

Programmed by Elspeth Carroll.

The following films are presented with support from the George Fasel Memorial Fund for Classic French Cinema
Cléo from 5 to 7, Le Joli Mai, The Mad Masters (and Mammy Water), Moi, Un Noir, Chronicle of a Summer, The Lion Hunters, Jaguar, Little by Little, The Human Pyramid, and Punishment

The following films are presented with support from the R.G. Rifkind Foundation Endowment for Queer Cinema
Portrait of Jason, and The Queen

The following films are presented with support from the Richard Brick, Geri Ashur, and Sara Bershtel Fund for Social Justice Documentaries
The Bus (plus Integration Report I), A Time For Burning, Winter Soldier, Take This Hammer and Baldwin’s N*****, The Chair (plus Chiefs), Law And Order, Black Natchez and I Am Somebody, Come Back, Africa, Titicut Follies, and Crisis: Behind A Presidential Commitment

Reviews

“Cinéma-vérité is a cinema not of mere observation but of immersive engagement. It fuses investigation with self-revelation, presence with performance—and, above all, it turns its participants into self-aware performers, both behind and in front of the camera. The Film Forum series displays the first wave of cinéma-vérité in its vast variety.” 
– Richard Brody, The New Yorker

“Film Forum’s expansive offerings reveal how often the notions of ‘truth’ and ‘objective reality’ were upended during a tumultuous decade.”
– Melissa Anderson, 4Columns 

“Taken together, [these films] shed some much-needed light on the often understated influence of this non-fiction style on the fiction films that followed them. The series includes a handful of narrative efforts that clearly convey that influence (like Faces and Cleo from 5 to 7), but said influence goes beyond copping the handheld, run-and-gun aesthetic. These films explored a naturalism in staging (and often even with traditional editing) that would, at long last, match the naturalism in acting that was practiced by Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, Warren Beatty, and other students of Method acting, yet was often stifled by the stiffness of the studio style.”
– Jason Bailey, Flavorpill

Films in this Series