Primary [The Richard Leacock Version]. 1960. USA. Directed by Robert Drew and Associates. 16mm. 30 min.
De Grands évènements et des gens ordinaires (Of Great Events and Ordinary People). 1979. France. Directed by Raúl Ruiz. DCP courtesy INA. In French; English subtitles. 60 min.
Robert Drew and his legendary band of associates—Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker, and Albert Maysles—ushered in the era of Direct Cinema with their indelible record of the 1960 Wisconsin primary. The production’s unheard-of around-the-clock access to Hubert Humphrey and the young John F. Kennedy brought the inner workings of each campaign to life with unprecedented immediacy. Primary lives up to its reputation as a milestone of documentary filmmaking through its regular presence in the Flaherty’s screening history. The original hourlong film was spurned by the major networks; Leacock edited Primary down to 30 minutes overnight, but this shorter version never made it to the air.
Primary screens alongside a lesser-known entry in electoral cinema: a rarely screened television documentary Raúl Ruiz was commissioned to make during the 1978 French legislative elections from his viewpoint as a Chilean exile, which was featured in programmer D. Marie Grieco’s 1984 seminar. Of Great Events opens with Ruiz dutifully interviewing friends and neighbors in Paris’s 11th arrondissement, but the film quickly cannibalizes the tropes of television reportage, morphing into a self-referential (and frequently comical) study of artifice. Upsetting polls and Ruiz’s producers’ expectations, the left-wing parties were handed a narrow defeat, but from this anticlimax Ruiz crafts a memorable account of his own outsider position, full of dislocations and digressions. The film has multiple narrators: among them, a fellow Chilean exile who sight-translates Ruiz’s Spanish commentary into French, and another who is said to be the voice of an uncredited Jean Baudrillard.