Chronique d'un été (1961)
Directed by Edgar Morin, Jean Rouch

Film Review

It was after he had seen Lionel Rogosin's Come Back, Africa (1959) that the French sociologist and philosopher Edgar Morin made up his mind to make a similar film about white people, specifically Parisians.  He discussed the project with Jean Rouch, an eminent anthropologist, and the two agreed to make the film together, a film that would have a significant impact on the French New Wave and come to be regarded as one of the most important documentaries made in France.  Rouch was particularly keen to experiment with the cinéma vérité aesthetic that had originated in Canada and hired Michel Brault, one of the pioneers of cinéma vérité, as a camera operator.  What starts out as a somewhat clumsy anthropological exercise, in which Morin and Rouch ask French people how they live, concludes as something far more meaningful, a film that questions whether it is ever possible for cinema to get to the truth of things.

Chronique d'un été begins in a whimsically inept vein, with Morin and Rouch sending two pretty young things out into the streets of Paris with a microphone to ask passers-by whether they are happy or not.  The reaction to this asinine question is a predictable volley of scowls and titters, and even when the question is changed to the slightly more probing "How do you cope with life?" the responses are not much more revealing.  It is only when Morin and Rouch change tack and begin interviewing a selected handful of individuals that the film ceases resembling an early Jean-Luc Godard comedy and yields what its makers had intended: an insight into the French psyche as the country gave up its pretence to be a colonial power and embarked on a period of immense social and political change.  The participants cover a wider range of social groups and ages, and all have something to say, some using the opportunity to deliver a well-rehearsed political rant, others as a kind of therapy to heal private wounds.

The interviewee with the strongest presence is Angelo, a young worker at a Renault car factory who still lives with his mum, practices judo in his garden and reads Danton in bed.  Angelo leaves us in no doubt that he is dissatisfied with his life.  He loathes the conditions under which he works, resents being a lowly worker, but cannot see how he can improve his lot.  His nine-hour working day gives him no time for personal fulfilment and he looks contemptuously at others in his predicament who meekly accept the status quo.  Angelo's frustrations are echoed by students Jean-Pierre and Régis Debray (the latter to find prominence as a philosopher and journalist) - they scorn the impotence of politicians but consider themselves to be just as helpless when it comes to changing things for the better.  You just have to take what comes.

The film takes a more poignant turn when an Auschwitz survivor, Marceline Loridan, tentatively opens her heart to expose the wounds that will take a lifetime to heal.  As she wanders in a daze across the Place de la Concorde, like a lost soul searching for who knows what, Loridan seems to symbolise a generation of young people traversing the arid no-man's land between the France of yesterday and the France of tomorrow.  She has a kindred spirit in Marilù Parolini, a young woman who swapped her comfortable bourgeois life in Italy for independence and an unheated garret in Paris.  Although Parolini would later find professional success (working as a screenwriter for Jacques Rivette), here she appears to be at the end of her tether, mortally wounded by love and by life.  The third female presence is a Brigitte Bardot look-a-like, whose wry observations on life have a razor-sharp acuity.  If the yé-yé generation harboured illusions, there is precious little sign of it in this film.

To upset the applecart slightly, Morin throws in a wildcard, a baby-faced student from the Ivory Coast named Landry who is making a tour of France.  The one outsider, Landry plays the role of the catalyst, most memorably in the sequence in which he is confronted with Angelo.  Almost immediately, the cynical white factory worker and naive black student establish an intense cross-culture rapport, and Landry is visibly moved when Angelo tells him the unpleasant truth about his life as blue collar drone.  Later in the film, Landry stimulates a friendly argument about racism which ends with Morin drawing attention to a number tattooed on Marceline's arm.  "Oh, it must be her telephone number!" quips one of the youngsters around the lunch table.  A deathly silence descends on the group when Morin explains what the number really signifies, the passport to one of Hitler's death camps.  Tensions become even more visible during a heated discussion about the Algerian situation, the views expressed accurately reflecting the split in public opinion at the time.

The most revealing part of the film comes towards its end, when, having watched their own contributions, the various participants are invited to express an opinion as to whether or not the film is truthful.  Many of the contributors find it hard to recognise themselves, and one cynically observes that some of the interviewees are actors who reveal nothing, whilst others are exhibitionists who show too much.  In the final sequence, Morin and Rouch debate whether it is possible for cinema ever to be entirely truthful.  Their very visible presence in the film is a constant reminder of the inherent subjectivity of the medium and Morin almost seems to conclude that the term cinéma vérité is a contradiction in terms.  Cinema, by its very nature, can never be entirely truthful, and, as propaganda films have shown, it can be downright mendacious.

Despite Morin's reservations, Chronique d'un été takes us as close to the truth as cinema can get, giving us a sobering glimpse of the anxieties, frustrations and disillusionment that would quietly fester in the early troubled years of the Fifth Republic.  In the bitterness that taints much of what the contributors have to say (especially Angelo and Jean-Pierre), we can glimpse the sparks that would later flare up into a conflagration of public protest: the demonstrations of 1968, a precursor to the socio-political upheavals of the 70s and 80s.

A critical success, Chronique d'un été was awarded the Critics' Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1961 and is now widely acknowledged as the film that brought cinéma vérité to France, giving a renewed impetus to the French New Wave just when it needed it.  In 2011, Florence Dauman, the daughter of the film's producer Anatole Dauman, made a follow-up feature, Un été + 50, which contains some unused footage recorded for the original film and further commentary from several of its participants - a reminder of the historical importance of a landmark documentary that helped to change the face of French cinema in the 1960s and dared to ask the most pertinent question of its time: "Are you happy...?

Film Synopsis

Paris, 1960.  The sociologist Edgar Morin and ethnologist filmmaker Jean Rouch embark on a study to probe the psyche of ordinary Parisians.  France seems to be on the threshold of a new era.  The Fifth Republic has recently been installed and the war in Algeria is going badly.  The Nouvelle Vague in French cinema is symptomatic of wider changes in French society as the nation embraces modernity and begins to put its colonialist past behind it.  By interviewing a handful of people, of all ages across the social spectrum, Morin and Rouch glean some surprising insights into the mentality of modern day France, but should they believe everything that they hear...?