its formal style and methodology. The elusive recipe of reality captured The awareness of cinema's potential to lie would result in filmmakers' trying precise ways of shooting. For Michel Brault of the National Film Board of Canada, who pioneered modern hand-held camera work, it meant the ability to go amidst the people with a wide angle. Other filmmakers would develop different methods. Some insisted that their subject needed to get used to them before they started any real shooting, so it would seem the camera was being ignored Still another group of direct cinema filmmakers would claim that the most honest technique was for a filmmaker to accept the camera as a catalyst and acknowledge that it provoked reactions. This allowed filmmakers to feel free to ask their film subject to do something they would like to document. The desire to capture reality led to some questioning the ability of filmmakers to properly film someone whom they could not fully understand. As an example, Jean Rouch went so far as to hand the camera to the "subject" (and co-author) of Moi, un Noir. Regardless of these practices, one thing is certain: direct cinema had more to do with the ethical considerations in documentary film making than with the technology. This could explain why the movement began in two North American societies that were in social and ideological mutation, French Canada (Quebec) and the United States, before spreading to South America and France. Regional variants Quebec Direct cinema began in 1958 at the National Film Board of Canada in Quebec, at the dawning of the Quiet Revolution, a period of intense social and political change. At that time, a university education was a rare thing for a Québécois. The people of Quebec were seen by its young emerging intelligentsia as alienated and abused. This period of complex cultural and economical change for French-speaking Quebecers can be summarized by the convergence of three phenomena: The advent of a welfare state in Quebec accompanying its institutional Anglicization. A nationalist and social movement fighting ethnic discrimination against Canadians of French origins. The important industrialization and socio-economic change brought both by the baby boom and by the extraordinary post-war wealth (1945–1975) in Quebec (and Canada) meant the end of a more traditional rural life. The consequences of these three movements deeply modified Quebec society and resulted in a myriad of perspectives by intellectuals and artists