EN
Direct cinema is the most famous current of American documentary cinema. It spans the tempestuous period of the 60ties and coincides with rapid development of an American avant-garde. At beginning direct cinema itself was regarded as a form of avant-garde. One of its films, Primary, received a prestigious Independent Film Award, granted by legendary “Film Culture”, a magazine dedicated to promote avant-garde cinema in America. Yet only a few years later direct cinema disappears from all avant-garde agendas. Also contemporary historians of avant-garde don’t mention it. Therefore the question must be asked, whether the primary categorization was right or wrong, whether direct cinema films contain features which may enable one to include them to an American avant-garde of the Sixties. Most prominent of these features are: open structure, improvisation, shooting on location, extreme subjectivity, freedom of the camera, political involvement, reflexivity, progressivism, display of film fabric (“structural cinema”). Direct cinema meets these conditions only to a very limi-ted degree.