Chronicle of a Summer (1961)
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Review #1,284 |
THE SCOOP
Director: Jean Rouch & Edgar Morin
Plot: Real-life individuals discuss topics on society, happiness in the working class among others and with those testimonies the filmmakers create fictional moments based on their interviews. Later on, the individuals discuss the images created with their own words and see if the movie obtained their level of reality.
Genre: Documentary
Awards: Won International Critics Prize (Cannes).
Runtime: 85min
Rating: PG13 for brief coarse language.
International Sales: Tamasa Distribution
IN RETROSPECT (Spoilers: N/A)
Possibly
the most influential documentary of the French New Wave, and a highly important
work in the field of visual anthropology, Chronicle
of a Summer is essential viewing for any cinephile with an acute sense of
cinema history. More educational than
entertaining, the film is insightful if also curiously dull. It feels dated, not because it is old, but
because its novelty wears thin after a while.
Directed
by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin, Chronicle
of a Summer follows them as they interview the working-class French in
Paris. They start with the eternal
question: are you happy? A range of
reactions ensue, but what is interesting about the documentary is that it doesn’t
just chronicle the responses in one-to-one or group settings, but gives its
subjects a meta-cinematic experience by subjecting them to the footage that was
shot, as if they are seeing a slice of their lives up on screen.
Even
Rouch and Morin are seen having a private internal discussion on whether their approach
worked. The meta-nature of Chronicle of a Summer, as well as its
cinema-verite (i.e. film truth) style of filmmaking were considered
experimentally bold at that time – at the very least, this point needs to be
appreciated in context.
But
as a film, it doesn’t quite involve the audience. Maybe it did back then, but present-day
viewers will find Chronicle of a Summer largely
functioning as an uninspired socio-historical record of an experiment, as if it
is something you would be made to watch in class, rather than in a
theatre.
That
being said, the best part of the documentary is its visuals – it is a Paris not
unlike what we would have seen in, for example, Godard’s Breathless (1960) or Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959). Not surprisingly,
the legendary cinematographer Raoul Coutard, who worked extensively with Godard
and Truffaut in the 1960s, is one of four main camera operators in Chronicle of a Summer.
From
discussion topics ranging from racism, labour issues, and the mundanity of
life, Rouch and Morin’s work tries as best as it could to reveal as large a
spectrum as possible of how it was like living in Paris at that time. One person even mentioned France’s
involvement in the Algerian War, and how dramatic and fascinating it was that
it could even be made into a film – and indeed five years later The Battle of Algiers (1966) was made,
still considered today as a masterpiece.
Verdict:
An important film no doubt from a socio-historical perspective, this cinema-verite
documentary made at the height of the French New Wave is insightful if also curiously
dull.
GRADE: B-
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