Photo: Jeff Kreines
In my recent Filmmaker conversation with Julia Loktev about the making of her monumental documentary, My Undesirable Friends, I cited the work of the late documentary filmmaker Joel DeMott, because I believe there is a straight line between DeMott’s approach in the late 1970s to shooting vérité documentary using shoulder-mounted 16mm cameras and Loktev’s latter-day methods using iPhones.
DeMott, who died in June, has been eulogized in obits in Documentary and The New York Times, so no need to recap her venturesome life and career here. Instead, my way of paying homage to the contributions of DeMott and her partner in filmmaking and life, Jeff Kreines, is to reproduce, below, a 1983 interview I conducted with the two of them—along with a brief introduction I wrote—that appeared in my In Focus column in the March 1983 issue of The Independent, published by the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers in New York.
This interview was translated into Spanish in 1988 as part of a book of my writings on filmmaking and technology, jointly published by Fundación del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano and Departamento de Cine, Universidad de los Andes, Mérida, Venezuela. I’d like to think this gave DeMott’s ideas about the intimacy of vérité a little push into the wider world outside America. Even today this interview rings as true as it did over four decades ago—whether in 2025 you’re intrepid enough to shoot 16mm or simply pick up an iPhone.
As published in “The Independent,” March 1983:
Cinema vérité. Direct cinema. Non-fiction film. Film critics supplied colorful catchphrases for the radically fresh forms of documentary filmmaking that broke out as the Sixties ushered in quiet, lightweight 16mm cameras and ¼” tape recorders with shoulder straps. With us still are the names that marked that era: Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker, Robert Drew, Albert and David Maysles, Fred Wiseman, et al.
But the Sixties have passed, the Seventies come and gone. In the meantime, film schools have launched waves of independent documentary makers schooled in vérité history. Compact cameras and recorders have become the rule rather than the exception, and high costs have forced even feature film producers into economical, low-light shooting styles. In an era when vérité techniques are to be found on prime-time network news magazines and personality parades, earnest practitioners and thinkers of vérité tend to get overlooked in the shuffle.
Two challenging filmmakers who are actively defining vérité in the present tense are Joel DeMott and Jeff Kreines of Montgomery, Alabama. Their last feature, Demon Lover Diary (1980), a strange-but-true personal account of the collapse of a low-budget horror flick and its almost murderous aftermath, won the 1980 Los Angeles Film Critics’ Award for best independent feature. But the work that is destined to establish their credentials as among the finest of the current-generation documentary producers is the still-unreleased black sheep of the PBS “Middletown” series, Seventeen.
Seventeen, shot in the space of a year, is an intimate visit in the lives of some of the teenagers doing time in one of the least prestigious high schools in the Muncie, Indiana, public school system. DeMott and Kreines, later joined by production/editing assistant Peter Esmonde, lived in Muncie from spring of 1980 through that of 1982 and shared in the teenagers’ world of unbelievably ineffectual teachers; shifting, sometimes interracial romances; and free-floating, working-class Angst.
What sets this two-hour vérité piece apart from others is the degree to which original technique and concept contribute to its eloquence and power. Since joining forces at MIT in the early Seventies, DeMott and Kreines have cut their creative teeth on nine films of their own, several of them feature-length, and have achieved a singularly personal method of shooting documentary film. Each filmmaker sports a customized rig featuring a non-reflex CP-16 fitted with a luminous Leica viewfinder and a pocket-sized, reel-to-reel Nagra SN (1/8″ at 3¾ ips) mounted on the side. Each wields a hand-held cardioid microphone tethered to the recorder by an arm’s-length cable. And for each, a 10mm lens is the sole optic.
The choice of lens is significant. From the early days of wet-plate photography onward, the desire to reproduce natural perspective in the viewing of a print has led to the convention of designating as “normal” a focal length equal to the diagonal of the format. In still photography, this leads to “normal” horizontal angles-of-view of 45° to 60°, depending on the shape of the format.
With motion pictures, the story was different. Early cameras were noisy contraptions without much mobility. Greater working distances were required to free up space for the action. And in projection, the screen was so distant that perspective exaggeration often accompanied the cinematography of lenses in the 45° to 60° range. In consequence, “normal” focal lengths in motion picture photography became twice those of still, with a narrower horizontal angle-of-view of 20° to 30°. For example, the “normal” focal length in 16mm is 25mm, with a horizontal angle-of-view of 23°, even though the diagonal of the 16mm frame is 12.7mm.
The 10mm lens of DeMott and Kreines, with its 55° angle-of-view, restores to the screen a camera-to-subject distance that matches the interpersonal distance necessary to achieve a similar field-of-view in real life. Intimacy is created, since in order to obtain a medium shot, the filmmaker must move within what anthropologists who study territoriality call “personal distance.” We, the audience, quickly accommodate to any perspective distortion and proceed to experience a naturalistic sense of proximity to those filmed. The result is vérité without voyeurism.
David Leitner: You shoot with one lens primarily, and it reproduces for the audience your visual interaction with subject.
Joel DeMott: That way you’re not constricted, as with the close-up of a zoom lens. Nobody really ever sees a person in that kind of bizarre close-up that everyone is so fond of. You also feel it’s not a zoom; it’s not this mechanical thing bringing that person onto the screen. You feel that someone is shoved up against them, or standing back. You really do feel where the presence of the filmmaker and your response coincide—which is kind of neat, because there are some points where standing back a little conveys something, and there are other points where you’re shoving yourself up, saying, “Huh! I’m right in there, I’m right close, I’m right on top of this!”
Jeff Kreines: David Ehrenstein, a perceptive critic in LA who writes for the Herald Examiner, had a good line about Demon Lover Diary: “The camera doesn’t stoop to the cheap shot of zooming in for so-called ‘significant moments’.”
DL: Your style of shooting very close to your subjects and following them without feeling the need for detail shots and such—does that change your attitude towards the process of editing?
JD: There’s no more 1950s film grammar. The film says: “This is about people, it’s not about exteriors.”
DL: But it’s more than just a process of stringing it together on your part.
JK: Right, You cut yourself off from certain editing techniques that would be used to condense a scene. You don’t find yourself taking parts of sentences and using a cutaway to join them and make them seem continuous. You essentially go for hunks, but that doesn’t make editing any easier.
DL: How do you concentrate on taking sound and shooting film at the same time?
JD: Absolutely instinctive. You get to the point where it’s not a big deal to be mic’ing one person and filming someone else.
JK: It’s like rubbing your stomach and patting your head. You’re going back and forth in different directions with your different sides.
DL: Do you monitor the sound as you’re taking it?
JK: It’s delayed monitoring, so it’s not that useful.
JD: If you’ve been working that long, you know how you should be modulating it. You know the relationship between the distance between the mic and the person’s mouth, how loud they’re talking and what kind of sound you’re going to get. What’s important is that when you turn on the camera, the sound goes on at the same time.
JK: They’re controlled by the same switch. We never run wild sound.
JD: So when you’re ready to shoot, your camera’s perfectly responsive. You’re not sitting around there, signaling to a sound guy and waiting for him to start up five seconds later.
DL: How do you sync up?
JD: It’s really a gem to sync. There’s four to five frames’ difference between the sound and the picture. No slates, nothing like that.
JK: They both hit speed at almost the same time. Occasionally, I tap a mic; Joel never does.
JD: It’s rude!
JK: Actually, historically, the biggest technical advance that helped us was the Nagra SN. [Note: President Kennedy had originally commissioned Nagra to make the miniature SN for the Secret Service.] Some of my early films were shot one-person with a Nagra 4.2 around my waist, which is hard. I was stronger then, I think.
DL: Is there a problem of running out of tape?
JK: No, because you use SN tape [30-minute reel] that can cover three [400′ film] magazine rolls.
DL: You make it much easier than most on your subjects by not bringing a lot of lighting.
JD: There’s no lighting. That’s why we use [Eastman Ektachrome Video News Film] 7250 [EI 800 when pushed one stop]. That’s why, when no one else would push [Ektachrome reversal] 7242 [EI 125] three stops, we pushed ’42 three stops, and got really pretty stuff. Stopping to put up a light is ludicrous; people go many different places. Most people either have families or deal with families, and with kids running around, we’re talking disaster—a health hazard.
JK: Also, there’s the psychological effect lights have when you turn them off.
JD: Yes! Everybody is depressed. They feel very up when your light is bright.
JK: A lot of people who use lights don’t consider a minor but important thing [when] filming people who don’t have a lot money: running the lights in their house runs up their electricity bill quite a bit. You get into a weird financial relationship if you offer to pay it. It’s strange.
JD: It makes you look like a charity.
JK: Or like they’re a charity case. So there are socioeconomic reasons not to use lights as well as political-aesthetic.
DL: You did employ one interesting lighting technique, though.
JK: The flashlight. That got invented the night of the kegger [beer party], because I thought things were happening outside, and I had a flashlight in the car. All it is, is a 6-volt flashlight, the type with a handle, with pieces of typing paper over the lens. Gaffer-taped to the handle of the camera. It’s so dim that it doesn’t blind people,
JD: What it does is provide a little light for flesh tones.
JK: Just a little, less than a foot-candle. You’re still getting a very underexposed original.
DL: Your viewfinders are unique.
JD: They’re funky.
JK: Leica makes finders that fit in the accessory shoe of a Leica for different-focal-length lenses. They’re very bright. They’re little bitty things physically, but the image is huge.
JD: Bigger than what you get on most 16mm cameras.
JK: Any 16mm camera. They really fill your eye up, which is important. You’re not peering down a tunnel.
DL: So you shoot non-reflex?
JD: Yeah, but if you say that, it sounds bad. You do about 25 tests, and you know what your usual shooting distance is: anywhere from 1½ to 6 feet. If you align the viewfinder properly, you will get the exact equivalent of what you will get in your frame from that distance.
JK: We’ve tried to make the equipment so simple that it’s really, truly demystified. Our cameras are almost like snapshot cameras. So you’re not there reacting as a technician, but as a human being.
DL: Can they see the expression on your face behind that viewfinder?
JD: Your whole face is visible, not like an ordinary [16mm] camera with half your face blocked.
DL: You don’t go out of your way to respond when someone turns to you and says something?
JD: The old Cinema Vérité approach was that when someone turned to you, you didn’t respond at all, because any response constituted some influence on the action. But the fact is, if you don’t respond when someone turns to you, then you’re saying: “I’m not a human being.” A human being responds.
DL: So they can’t pretend they aren’t being filmed.
JD: In most documentary films, you are asking people to act, even if you’re asking them to act as they do in regular life. And often, without it being spoken, the people in the film feel that they are not pleasing the people who are making the film. Whereas if you film the other way, shooting with a 10mm lens and with a mic a foot from their mouth, you are saying people are not supposed to pretend that you’re not there.
DL: Do you spend a great deal of time getting to know the people first?
JD: No, no, no!
JK: We’re always there with the camera.
JD: The minute you say there’s a separation between personal response and camera response, you’re in shit. And the minute you set up a situation where sometimes you film and sometimes you don’t, you’re in bad shape. People have to accept the idea that if they want to see you, they are probably going to be filmed. Otherwise, people say, “Oh God! Now we’re being filmed.” Then they feel relieved if you don’t show up with a camera. If they don’t accept that you’re always there with the camera—they have that right—then you don’t film them.
DL: Who, precisely, has influenced you, and how have you gone further with their concepts?
JD: Ricky Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker, and Ed Pincus. Those are our sole teachers, although John Marshall, who we met only once, did have a rubbing effect on us.
JK: Also Robert Frank. And Pennebaker, unlike anybody else, shows you can be playful in making a film.
JD: Yeah. Penny does not have any rules. Whatever you feel like doing with your camera is perfectly all right, and what makes it all right is the fact that if you feel that way, it’s very expressive.
DL: At minimum, there need only be one of you there shooting?
JD: Lots of scenes in the film were shot with only one of us there. Well over three-quarters
DL: An adjective that comes to mind when I’m watching your film is purist. I noticed there aren’t any dissolves, nor fades until the last shot. Nor do we, I believe, ever hear your voice.
JD: Sure you do! Real important. A real conscious effort was made to keep it in. It establishes that, not only are you there, but you are…
JK: …a participant observer. It’s part of not pretending you’re not there.
