Crónica de un verano

"Chronicle of A Summer" invented the cinema verité movement, the idea being that by celebrating and revealing the artificial nature of the film-making process, the truth, or more accurately, some truths will emerge. The film is enveloped with a luminous and appealing humanism, and it is a very cool and cinematic portrait of Paris in the beat days. Remember that World War Two was only a decade or so before this and somehow the fog of that war hangs over the film, especially given the backstory of one of the participants, at least this is what I remember..As historic documents go, it is also amazingly compelling today. I find the film much more absorbing than "Salesman" or Drew Associates stuff. Drink espresso instead of a pint before the film, my friend and you'll be fine..

JB-81

PS If you want to watch paint dry, check out Melville- Although he's pretty great too..

Some really fascinating stuff pops up in here with pertinent questions that make you wonder how much was real vs performance. Overall a neat look at 1960 Paris that holds time capsule like qualities and the keys to shared traits cross generations.

This film, made in the summer of 1960 by the sociologist Edgar Morin and the ethnographer Jean Rouch, aimed to be as 'true as a documentary, but with the content of a fiction film.' Facilitated by improved technology (16mm film, sync sound, light hand held cameras) it pioneered a direct or live aesthetic dubbed 'cinema verite'. It was to film 'true life', but engage on a subjective level, getting people to talk about their experiences and ambitions, and most notably, whether or not they are happy. What emerges is an absolutely overwhelming cinematic experience, a film that is deeply affecting but also that makes you think. The film begins with a market researcher, Marceline, on the street, asking people whether or not they are happy. This sequence seems to me both to confirm the importance of human relationships and point up the dissatisfaction that living in a society about to tip into consumerism engenders. The film then moves to concentrate on a set of characters. Morin was criticised for his structural approach, typing his characters (i.e. a factory worker, a petit bourgeois, a student), but a real sense of the individuals involved shines through, notably in the sequences with Angelo and Landry chatting, and Marceline recounting her experience of deportation during the war. The most revolutionary part of this film is that the makers demonstrate the impossibility of documentary objectivity when they film themselves filming - they show how the truth of the film is constructed. Questions of authenticity abound. At the end of the film, they screen it to the characters involved. Even those filmed are unable to decide whether they were acting ('hamming for the camera') or being themselves. Morin and Rouch conclude they have failed in their aim to offer a slice of life, as the very act of filming something transforms it. Truth is elusive in the attempt to represent the everyday. This film is far from a failure however - watch it and be blown away.

Dugan McShain Anthropological Film Chronicle of a summer Chronique d'un été

Filmmaker Jean Rouch, in coordination with sociologist Edgar Morin, create a story out of seemingly random interviews and anecdotes. Together they create a piece that describes life in Paris circa 1961, they converse with their friends and associates about life, the current war in Algeria, and the mindset of the daily life of Parisians. Using the newly available 16mm camera they set out to do what no one had done before them: try and capture daily life and discuss it. They talk at length about politics, arguing on film, and discuss, both during the film and at the end when the filmmakers show their finished work to the participants and have them dissect it.

They give feedback, feelings and talk about the characters, describing what worked and didn't, what felt real and what seemed contrived. The people that they interview are across the board when looked at socioeconomically, intellectually, and racially, providing alternate views about the problems faced, the stories that they needed to tell to the camera and the trials that were associated with their lives.

I was, to say the least disappointed with the final product that was shown. As I was watching the film there came a scene where the two filmmakers are discussing their participation and the feat that they had just accomplished with the finished film ready to be shown. It was a very intimate scene where it seemed as if both of the filmmakers were unaware that they were being filmed and as such proceeded to expound on the principles, and the theory of making an anthropological film.

It was half way through this conversation that I realized that they staged this discussion not as a candid frank debate but as a 'realistic end cap' to put on their film to add flair and realism. What seemed at first as a novel approach to film-making came off more as a clever marketing ploy, using the audience as a sounding board, and bringing the audience closer to the subject matter of the film through the use of intimacy.

The filmmakers opted for participation in the film instead of the typical vein of anonymity. Reflexivity is a device that is used to vary the distance from a subject, giving the idea that the filmmakers, the product and everything that goes along with it a unity in the production. This style is self-serving in that the filmmakers could be seen prompting the subjects and providing a direct line of questions that they could use to form a solid piece. In the court of law this is called 'leading the witness' in order to get the desired answers that you seek, as opposed to the answers that come naturally from a subject matter that is brought up.

Rouch gives specific questions that lend themselves to specific answers. "I would argue that most anthropologists implicitly believe content should so dominate form in scientific writing that the form and style of an ethnography appears to "naturally" flow out from the content." - (Ruby, Studies in the anthropology of Visual Communication, Pg 106,Vol. 2, No. 2, Fall 1975). In providing specific questions, they do not let the life naturally 'flow' but instead impede it at their own will destroying the illusion that they have created. These filmmakers seem almost like they wish to participate in the very spectacle they wish to show, and cannot distance themselves from the subjects for fear of losing notoriety.

Morin and Rouch are extremely open to their subjects, providing valuable insight into their minds, as well as the minds of the people whom they are interviewing. This certainly provides for honesty in front of the camera creating a cushion of comfort for the subjects so that the camera does not seem to interfere as much a simply record. In certain scenes it seemed as if we were an observer regarding these people with a cold unfeeling eye. The argument in the hallway for example. This does not lend itself to a self-conscious conversation.

There are moments in the film that do seem very contrived however. There is a scene of a woman walking through the streets of Paris along with her walking we hear her telling the story of her father's internment and her own in a Nazi death camp. This is obviously a scripted scene. It lends itself to disbelief when we see that she is walking, lost in thought. The technique of us hearing those thoughts is vital to this disbelief.

The film-making was excellent at times, as I said, giving the sensation of an omniscient- floating eyeball, observing the people at their daily lives. This feeling is ruined however when we are privy to the Rouch's and Morin's conversation on what they feel the outcome of the film represents. It creates a feeling of false voyeurism then, incompatible with the sensitive proximity that we have just watched. The scene in the theater when he shows the characters dissecting each other is especially grating as it lends it self even more to a Dali-esquire surrealism where the characters are watching themselves as we watch them.

Jean Rouch is remembered as an oddity in film history, an artist working in between of fact and fiction as well as the era of colonialism and post-colonialism. He is especially often crowned as the founder of ethnographic cinema, but "Chronicle of a Summer" (1961) made by Rouch and Edgar Morin is something a little different. It is the breakthrough film of cinéma vérite or "truth cinema" which had a huge impact on the following French New Wave, most of whose filmmakers admired Rouch.

Already in his earliest documentaries, Rouch isolates himself from his own time by focusing on engagement and immersion instead of observation. Interaction between the observer and his object -- or rather between subjects -- becomes vital. As vital is embracing the presented subjects' personal and collective world views, which form a fascinating entirety in Rouch's "I, a Black Man" (1958). In a word, the other and the self are of the same reality to Rouch.

Although a representative of so-called truth cinema, Rouch and Morin's film does not concern any epistemic and scientific truth, but rather the truth of the appearance of the intersubjective reality. The camera takes part in action, ceases to exist, but at the same is inseparably present. A fabric of real emotions, thoughts, lies and acts is born which can be taken as a truth of one kind. On the one hand, Rouch and Morin attempt to revolutionize the cinema or at least to turn its lens to itself, but on the other, their sociological mission is to find out how does the modern man live. Hence they ask "Are you happy?" from random people in the streets.

Rouch's "The Human Pyramid" (1961) might be more well organized, though utterly poetic, than "Chronicle of a Summer", but the latter is more essay-like which also associates it with the new wave. The remarks of the meta-level are not as detached from the rest of the film as in "The Human Pyramid", but still fact and fiction merge in an essential fashion.

However, Rouch didn't only affect new wave filmmakers for his cinematic methods but also for his image of the world and man. There is indeed great human beauty in the film. During the interviews and other scenes, the camera becomes a penetrating mirror to whom one can reveal all of one's secrets. Perhaps this also happens to the viewer in a lesser extent. On one level, Rouch and Morin reveal the need to talk and share in an individualistic society. On the other, they tell something enduring about man, life and cinema.