Direct Cinema: Observational Documentary and the Politics of the Sixties

Dave Saunders

June, 2007
Paper, 224 pages, 20 black and white
ISBN: 978-1-905674-15-2
Wallflower Press
$26.00

Cloth, 224 pages, 20 black and white
ISBN: 978-1-905674-16-9
$80.00

Direct Cinema is the first comprehensive study of the "direct cinema" movement of 1960s America. Through the inquisitiveness of filmmakers such as Robert Drew, D.A. Pennebaker, and Frederick Wiseman—and predicated on innovations such as portable cameras and synchronized sound—direct cinema intimately documented presidential campaigns through the revelers of Woodstock and the dispossessed subjects of Wiseman's "reality fictions". This volume recovers these vastly influential yet politically underappreciated films, suggesting they represented a resurgence of America's home-grown philosophical tradition inextricably bound up in the artistic and political impulses of the 1960s.

Related Subjects

• Film

Series

• Nonfictions (Wallflower Press)

About the Author

Dave Saunders is a visiting tutor at the Department of Media Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London.

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