Martin Scorsese stirred up controversy in 2019 by calling Marvel films “theme parks.” He argued that big franchise movies, with the main purpose of entertainment, were different from true cinema, an art form that, at its best, challenges audiences with complex characters and storylines. Scorsese is the latest in a long history of filmmakers and critics to invoke the notion of “true cinema.” But beyond its critical or artistic merit, how veracious can a film be? To date, two of the most significant theories have been cinema verite and the ecstatic truth.

Although it is difficult to nail down a precise date, the tradition of cinema verite, meaning “truthful cinema” in French, likely began in 1923 with legendary and foundational director Dziga Vertov’s series of visual newsreels of Soviet history, called the Kino-Pravda project. In the following decades, cinema verite developed into a well-respected film tradition noted for its austere, stripped-down documentary-like style. It seeks to approach the ultimate cinematic verity by bringing the medium as close as possible to daily life. Instead of leaning into the multitudes of stylistic possibilities movies uniquely afford — involving editing, effects or even the complicated construction of a narrative — cinema verite aspires to objectivity at the cost of the near elimination of the filmmaker. 

Of course, the director maintains some control behind the camera, but compared to other film paradigms, especially auteur theory, which asserts the director as the foremost artistic personality behind a film and thus encourages innovation in the art form, it is extremely journalistic and straitlaced. Its strictest adherents argue that the cinematic medium yields even greater objective capabilities than the written word. Thus, in its purest conception, cinema verite portrays non-fiction material as accurately and faithfully to real-life subjects as possible. While the term is often misapplied to any comparatively unvarnished film, and the style is rarely used, cinema verite is often esteemed as the “most real” cinema and stands about as far as possible from Marvel theme parks.

Not everyone holds cinema verite to be the truest style the medium has to offer, most notably director and documentarian Werner Herzog. While portraying plenty of fictional subjects as well as acting and writing operas and books, Herzog is perhaps most famous for his relationship with the documentary format, one which has garnered him much criticism over his five decades of work. He takes a very different approach to cinema verite, sometimes selectively staging or writing scenes and using fake quotes or false descriptions in his documentaries. These practices are in service of what he calls the “ecstatic truth,” which transcends the factual nature of the story. To Herzog, portraying reality is not as simple as stripping cinema down to its bare bones and least invasive depictive powers. He likens the verite style to a cinematic telephone book presenting merely a banal truth, one utterly preoccupied with facts. Instead, Herzog seeks to depict the reality underneath, the abstracted sublime that art — albeit with considerable effort and craft and only with audience participation — can sometimes access. So even in his documentaries, he is not concerned with rigid accuracy but manipulates the story when necessary in order to furnish the real subjects with an extra dimension of cosmic significance. In other words, the path to the truth behind the story does not necessarily stem from bare factual portrayal. 

This theory also stands in opposition to Marvel theme parks, as the emotional resonance a film achieves with the ecstatic rejects the MCU model of quick gratification. Whether or not Scorcese would support Herzog’s rare but significant manipulations in his documentaries, this ambiguous ultimate sublime that cinema can achieve seems to match what the legendary director sees as true cinema. As mid-budget cinema disappears and the moviemaking industry rapidly changes, an effort to generate the ecstatic must be maintained no matter how one goes about depicting it.