COPS and the lying nasty tradition of vérité

All stopped cars have crack in them. Sorry, it's the objective truth

Submitted by mike, 10/05/09 1:23 PM

COPS has always been my favourite TV show, a thing I don’t bother mentioning to most movie/documentary people I meet. It’s (probably) fairly dismissed as reality-TV dreck, but I in addition to enjoying seeing people get tazed, think it’s a pretty neat artistic artifact and case-study.

As filmmaking equipment got cheaper and more importantly lighter and more portable in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, different dudes and dudettes in America, Quebec and France all kind of semi-colluded to invent a “new” form of documentary filmmaking, called variously “cinema vérité” and “direct cinema” (they’re not quite the same but the differences are small). They and others felt, these folks like DA Pennebaker and the Maysles Bros and Michel Brault, that they could by being on-location, shooting in available light, being unobtrusive etc. capture the “objective truth” of moment of reality. They eschewed narration, titles, scripts: they just went and shot footage (in many cases hundreds of hours’ worth) and then built the film in post.

This is hard to do. One of the only remaining examples of true vérité style documentary filmmaking is COPS, in part because following cops on the beat is probably the surest bet that you (without interference or provocation) might end up shooting something interesting enough to put on TV. It’s also a complete and earnest discreditation of the idea that vérité filmmaking is any more objective or truthful than any other kind of filmmaking: COPS is as close to being bald-faced fascist state propaganda as you can get on TV (and I say that as, again, a real fan).

As much as the filmmakers try to refrain from interfering in the “moment”, they are interfering in it by shooting it. And not in some abstruse Heisenburgian way with the particles and the etc. but on a basic level: would the cop or the crook do the same thing had there not been a camera there? (The answer is always no, by the way). Furthermore, what is actually being shot and showed to us is an even more explicit message directly from the mind of the filmmaker. Why do we never see cops accuse innocent people, who then make the cops look foolish? Why do we never see the cops behave unprofessionally? Why do we never see them lose a foot chase or car chase or any of the other you know actual things that happen, all the time? Because we are not being shown the truth, we are being told a story, a subjective, untruthful, manipulated story, as we are when we watch any type of documentary or fiction film or TV show. It’s a neat style, but just as false as anything Michael Moore can cook up.

That said, here is a naked guy on angel dust punching a hole in a fence.

Obviously, just because it's no more truthful than anything else doesn't discredit the vérité style, which I love. If you want to see more, zip.ca has got two classics: Pennebaker's Don't Look Back and the Maysles' Grey Gardens. You'll have to look farther abroad (but it is worth it I promise), but it's also worth finding a copy of Alan King's Warrendale and Brault and Groulx's Les Racquetteurs.

You can also watch COPS on Saturdays or on DVD (my favourite is "Ho! Ho! Ho!, the Christmas/prostitute episode).