in the perspective of the popular evolution of ideas about reality and the media. Sound before the 1960s Before the use of pilottone (invented in 1954) and the 1961 Nagra III, sound recording machinery was either extremely heavy or unreliable. Many attempts were made to solve this problem during the 1950s and 1960s. At the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), for example, a system called "Sprocketape" was designed, but was not implemented. In the best case scenario, documentary sound was recorded before, in interviews, or much later on location, with a portable studio located in a sound-proofed truck. The sounds that were captured were later synched (synchronized) in sound editing, thus providing the film with sound. In other cases, the soundtrack was recorded, as in fiction films: with layers of ambient sound, archival sound effects, foley, and post-synced voices. In other cases the documentary subject was brought into a studio. Sound taken directly from the studio made the documentary nature of the recording arguable. For example, a production might reconstruct a stable in the studio, with a sound engineer close by in a soundproof booth. This mimics the production of some studio films and TV series, but often results in surreal situations, such as cows being in a studio for a documentary on farming, rather than in their natural habitat. Synchronized sound was used by French filmmaker Jean Rouch in 1960 when he shot Chronicle of a Summer, a landmark film in direct cinema history, in style of cinéma-vérité, using a 16 mm camera connected through pilottone with a prototype of Nagra III, a transistorized tape recorder with electronic speed control, developed by Stefan Kudelski. Ideological and social aspects With improved sound, lighting and camera equipment available, the technical conditions necessary for the advent of direct cinema were present. The social and ideological conditions that led to direct cinema also appeared. Direct cinema seemed to reflect this new attitude. It emerged from a desire to compare common opinion with reality. It attempted to show how things really are, outside the studio, far from the editorial control of the establishment—be it governmental or big press. What was noteworthy was that the desire to test common opinion and show reality was constantly kept in check with an acute awareness that it is easy to lie with sound and image. This tension was at the center of direct cinema and resulted in