"Direct Cinema-as A Filming Method"

As an important film genre, the "Direct Cinema" of America in the 30s and 40s has almost renovated the aesthetics of the world documentary film.Featured with the so-called "flying on the wall" filming method that is shooting non-interfered and uncontrolled, the direct cinema has become a powerful working method that has produced great impact to the word documentary film history and its influence has reached as far as today's china. At present, almost all the best documentaries in china have been made with the adoption of the" direct cinema" method.Through the interview of a great number of documentary film-makers in America and China, this study will exam the direct cinema in the context of the history of the world documentary and explores the relationship between the American culture and philosophy and the direct cinema. The studying of the aesthetics of the direct cinema will mainly focused on its advantage in capturing the reality and study the unpredictable feature brought by the "non-interfering" and uncontrolled shooting. In addition, metaphor as a very important rhetoric in the direct cinema will be pointed out.By studying the works of the most important American direct cinema filmmakers, the paper made an analysis of the narration art of the direct cinema. For me, the core of the narration in the "direct cinema" is to capture the immediate reality and show the process, which is realized by the non-interfering and uncontrolled shooting. The intellectual position is highlighted in the study of ethics of direct cinema and "the middle stage" action theory by Joshua Meyrowitz will be first time introduced in the study of the question of privacy and ethical bottom-line.In addition, the papers will exam the embarrassing situation of the direct cinema facing today. Confronting with the post-modernism, the direct cinema finds itself tightly encircled by the commercial and political trap. Should we give it up or insist? Or make some improvement? Chinese question is the ending of this paper. A couple of years ago, some predecessors of the "direct cinema " brought the new idea to China and help the Chinese contemporary documentary to free from the obsolete "image and commentary" mode , which began to let people speak. Around the nature of documentary film, this paper manages to analysis the inspiration that the American direct cinema has brought to Chinese documentary: as a "modest observer", "direct cinema" filmmaker should give up the control in some extent and shows respect to the subject. From this point of view, the author thinks what we should treasure of the direct cinema is a kind of honest, modest and persistent independent documentation spirit.