DVD Review: Chronicle of a Summer (1961)
Cast: Angelo, Régis Debray, Jacques
Director: Edgar Morin, Jean Rouch
Country: France
Genre: Documentary
Official Trailer: Here
Editor’s Notes: Chronicle of a Summer was release on Criterion Blu-ray and DVD today.
The summer of 1960 in Paris: the sound of a siren blares from the belly of the city, and Parisians as subject-Other emerge from an underground metro station, like a strange species coming up for air to meet the camera’s gaze, at once playful and analytic. So begins Chronicle of a Summer, the unique socio-cinematic collaboration not only between two cultural figures, anthropologist documentarian Jean Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morin, but also between two generations. Even after fifty years of documentary filmmaking behind it, Chronicle of a Summer remains as invigorating, confrontational, groundbreaking, and absorbing as it had been the first time it was released, for its examination of different sectors of everyday Parisian life, experimental and uneven form, and uncompromising diversity of voices captured, especially at a time when France saw itself transitioning from the immediate postwar period to the emerging postcolonial period and French cinema in particular fully shedding the cinéma de qualité for une nouvelle vague.
So begins Chronicle of a Summer, the unique socio-cinematic collaboration not only between two cultural figures, anthropologist documentarian Jean Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morin, but also between two generations.
Rouch and Morin collaborated with a group of participants to piece together encounters and conversations between themselves, in pursuit of what Morin had termed cinéma vérité (“film truth”). By cinéma vérité Morin meant not unadulterated truth simply caught by a camera but a provocation and revelation of truth with the camera. Through a mix of candid interviews on the streets; one-on-one seated interviews with some of the participants; and group conversations around a table, following the principle of commensality, Rouch and Morin attempted to find the everyday pulse of Parisians at the time, and to explore alternative cinematic representational forms to best convey this pulse in a manner more familiar, even conspiratorial, and uncomfortably revealing.
Marceline Loridan, one of the principal participants, conducts the candid ‘moving’ interviews on the streets of Paris, equipped with a portable microphone and accompanied by fellow participant Nadine Ballot. Marceline proceeds to ask passersby of all ages the question, ‘Are you happy?’ with mixed results. In contrast to Marceline and Nadine’s kinetic interviews are the ‘static,’ seated, one-on-one interviews between Morin and several participants. Instead of encompassing place, body, and voice like the ‘moving’ interviews, these ‘static’ interviews focus intensely on the participant’s face, as if to draw out a truth alongside that uttered by the voice. One of the film’s most uncomfortably revealing moments, in fact, is Morin’s second interview with Marilù Parolini, an Italian woman who moved to France. Marilù appears to be unraveling emotionally, her face and hands a portrait of nerves and tics, while in one particular shot during the interview Morin’s profile on the right side of the frame looks penetratingly at Marilù like an ominous rock, as if silently pushing her to bare herself ever more. Providing a mix of play and analysis are the group conversations including Rouch and Morin.
Chronicle of a Summer’s three principal types of social encounter demonstrate its collaborative nature, and therefore its uneven and dynamic form, on several levels. One, at the level of form. The street interviews conducted by Marceline and Nadine express what Rouch termed “pedovision,” a walking-camera approach that moved with and registered the flow of space and bodies in the city, enabled by Rouch and engineer André Coutant’s development of a prototype of the first handheld 16mm camera to be used in France, and also Canadian cameraman Michel Brault, whom Rouch had requested to operate said camera. For his part, Morin’s very one-on-one interviews (often composed of close-ups) betray his belief in the filmmaker-film subject relationship like that of the analyst-analysand in psychoanalysis. Two, at the level of participants. In one of the group conversations headed by Rouch, to his left are those he brought to the project—Modeste Landry, Nadine, and Raymond, with African students Landry and Raymond referencing Rouch’s ethnographic work in West Africa—while to his right are those that Morin brought to the project—Régis Debray, Marceline, and Jean-Pierre Sergent, all of whom constituted the new generation of French activists. Rouch and Morin stage a similar, though more intimate, encounter earlier in the film—between Landry and Angelo, a French worker with a very strong political consciousness—one that is consciously related to the newspaper headlines detailing African decolonisation efforts that the film presents.
Chronicle of a Summer’s three principal types of social encounter demonstrate its collaborative nature, and therefore its uneven and dynamic form, on several levels.
A question of adaptation, Landry says, with regards to acclimating Parisian life. A question of coming up against reality, Marilù states, with regards to her own migration to France from Italy. ‘Adaptation’ and ‘coming up against reality’ describe rather closely the film’s attempts to provoke a variety of truths from encounters between participants, and to concretise abstract terms such as ‘happiness,’ ‘reality,’ ‘politics’ and ‘to live.’ The collective and individual attempts to make sense of these aforementioned terms in the everyday look to the past and present, and link the personal to the historical-political and back again, which is one of the film’s undeniable strengths.
On the one hand, the film looks to the personal-historical past through Marceline, a death camp survivor, her solitary walk across the Place de la Concorde as she remembers being deported and being reunited with her father and then returning to France alone. On the other hand, the film looks to the personal-political present through newspaper headlines of the violent decolonisation taking place in Africa, including the French-Algerian War and the Congo, for which Landry and Raymond provide perspectives against those of the French.
The film’s organisation is itself provocative, underneath the cloak of haphazardness. Following discussions and headlines of decolonisation wars, sequences of leisure follow: dancing, sunbathing, rock climbing, and Landry the “black explorer” investigating the mores of French vacationers in the French Rivier, including a “fake” Bardot. One of its most provocative moments is precisely the moment when the participants view the resulting film and conduct a Q&A amongst themselves
Bookending the film are conversations between Rouch and Morin on the parameters of their project and their reflections on what eventually transpired, with the concluding conversation taking place where Rouch worked, at the Musée de l’homme (Museum of Man), appropriately enough. These bookend conversations reinforce the film’s self-interrogating nature concerning documentary and performance, as well as the instability of truths and shifting subject positions in representation, all of which make documentary filmmaking the dynamic social process that it is.
DVD Supplements
Faye Ginsburg’s interview is insightful and thoughtful, as it teases out Rouch’s significance as a filmmaker, a marvelous complement to Sam Di Iorio’s equally informative booklet essay that provides a lengthy historical context to the film’s production and Rouch and Morin’s respective motivations for making the film. The documentary Un été + 50 (2011) presents outtakes from the film, some beautifully composed as to look like a fiction film (hence their status as outtakes), interspersed with interviews with Morin and some of the other participants, fifty years after. One of the archival interviews included is interesting because in it Rouch downplays his role as simply photographing Morin’s social investigation, which contrasts with Ginsburg’s and Di Iorio’s discussions of the film and Rouch’s immense contributions to it.
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