Cinéma vérité is a documentary style that uses lightweight equipment to capture unscripted reality with the camera as participant.
Cinéma vérité ('cinema of truth') emerged in France in 1960 with Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin's 'Chronique d'un été', a film that asked Parisians on the street whether they were happy and treated the camera as an active provocateur rather than a hidden observer. The technical breakthrough was the arrival of portable 16mm cameras and synchronised sound, which freed documentary filmmakers from the tripod and the studio. The American counterpart, called Direct Cinema and practised by D. A. Pennebaker, the Maysles brothers, and Frederick Wiseman, took the opposite philosophical stance: the camera should be a fly on the wall, not a participant. Both schools rejected the omniscient narration of earlier documentary in favour of letting subjects speak for themselves. The fingerprints of cinéma vérité are everywhere in modern film — in reality television, in mockumentaries, in the handheld realism of the Dardenne brothers and Andrea Arnold.