Chronique d'un été (Chronicle of a Summer). 1961. France. Directed by Jean Rouch, Edgar Morin. DCP. Restored by L’Immagine Ritrovata in collaboration with Argos Films, courtesy the Cineteca di Bologna. In French; English subtitles . 85 min.
While attending the fourth Flaherty Film Seminar, in 1959, Jean Rouch saw the films of Michel Brault, a Quebecois director at the forefront of a new handheld sync shooting style, and invited him to work on an upcoming film. The following summer, Brault joined Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morin’s experiment in cinéma vérité, filming a group of Paris residents over the course of several months. From on-the-street interviews (“Are you happy?,” they asked passersby), the film documents discussions within the group, ranging from their lived experience as workers, students, housewives, and immigrants, to unscripted debates about the Algerian War. Amy Taubin has observed of the film, “Chronicle became a model for the collective films of ’68 and of the American New Left. If Rouch and Morin’s experiment towers above those films, and also those of America’s Direct Cinema, it is because of the moral commitment of the filmmakers to their roles as group leaders—more empathetic, challenging, and intelligent than the fathers of our wildest, utopian dreams.”