Verité comes back around

The observational documentary tradition — verité, direct cinema, the fly-on-the-wall style associated with Frederick Wiseman, the Maysles brothers, and D.A. Pennebaker — has quietly become the dominant serious documentary form again after a decade in which essayistic and hybrid forms received most of the critical attention. The return is worth noticing, because it suggests something about what audiences want from documentary in an era of ambient information saturation.

The essayistic documentary — the director speaking directly to camera or in voiceover, the subject treated as an occasion for the director's argument — was the dominant serious form for most of the last decade, and it produced some of the best documentaries of the period. Kirsten Johnson's Cameraperson, RaMell Ross's Hale County This Morning This Evening, Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir. Those films are legitimately great, and the essayistic tradition remains a live artistic option.

But verité has been quietly returning. Frederick Wiseman is now ninety-five and still working, and his most recent films are among the most-discussed documentaries of their release years. Younger directors are working in the mode more consistently than they were a decade ago, and the industry press has begun to notice. The reason is not that essayistic documentary has failed. It is that verité offers something the essayistic form does not: the specific pleasure of watching real people do real things without the mediation of a directorial voice.

That pleasure is scarce in the current media environment. Most of the audio-visual content the audience is exposed to — social media, streaming drama, algorithmic short-form — is mediated, edited for reaction, and structured around explicit narrative. Verité offers, unusually, a form that respects the audience's ability to draw its own conclusions from unmediated observation. That respect is not fashionable currently, and part of why verité is returning is that its unfashionability is itself the point.

The critique of verité is the same one it has always faced — that the appearance of unmediated observation is itself a construction, and that the director's editorial voice is present in the framing, the editing, and the selection of what to shoot. All of that is true. Verité is not innocent of authorship. But the tradition's specific formal discipline — the willingness to sit with the observation and not to intervene — produces a documentary form that respects the subject in ways the essayistic form does not always match. The return is welcome.