In the early 1960s, a group of young American film-makers, led by Robert Drew, who has died aged 90, began making a series of documentaries that were dubbed "direct cinema". In an interview at the time, Drew attempted to define the aims of his kind of cinema: "It would be a theatre without actors. It would be plays without playwrights; it would be reporting without summary and opinion; it would be the ability to look in on people's lives at crucial times from which you could deduce certain things and see a kind of truth that can only be gotten by personal experience."
The ambition of film-makers to record "the truth" without interpretive editing or narration goes back to cinema's very beginnings, with the work of the Lumière brothers, and continues through Dziga Vertov's Kino-Pravda (Cinema Truth) to the cinéma vérité movement in France, espoused by Jean Rouch. However, what enabled Drew to realise his observational method was the perfecting of a lightweight, handheld 16mm camera, synched to a quiet recorder, which allowed the film-maker to intrude as little as possible into the lives of those being filmed.
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