Chronique d’un été

Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin (1961)

Chronicle of a Summer is considered a seminal piece of cinéma vérité.  The term was coined, according to Richard Brody of the New Yorker[1], by one of the film’s directors, the sociologist Edgar Morin; the other, Jean Rouch, an anthropologist and film-maker, was a pioneer of the genre.  The Wikipedia article on Chronicle of a Summer provides the following summary:

‘The film begins with a discussion between Rouch and Morin on whether or not it is possible to act [sic] sincerely in front of a camera. A cast of real-life individuals are then introduced and are led by the filmmakers to discuss topics on the themes of French society and happiness in the working class[[2]]. At the end of the movie, the filmmakers show their subjects the compiled footage and have the subjects discuss the level of reality that they thought the movie obtained.’

The first person with whom Rouch and Morin talk, in the opening discussion referred to on Wikipedia, is a thirtyish woman called Marceline.  She immediately seems self- and camera-conscious and indicates that she is likely to feel emotionally vulnerable being interviewed.  We understand that she has a job, one that she says she doesn’t like, doing market research.  Rouch and Morin suggest that she use her experience on their behalf, to ask passers-by on the streets of Paris if they’re happy.  We next see Marceline and another young woman conducting a series of vox pop interviews – asking people if they are happy or unhappy and why – and getting some interesting replies.  Most of the subsequent questioning in the film, however, is done by Rouch and/or Morin, and a trio of young blue-collar workers are among their early interviewees.   Angelo is initially the quietest of the three – he has to be encouraged to join in the discussion – but, like Marceline, he turns out to be one of the principal subjects of Chronicle of a Summer.  The developing roles of these two people come to epitomise its distinctiveness.

At the very start, we are told that all those whom we’ll see are ‘non-actors’.  My instant reaction was to wonder why documentarians needed to give the audience that assurance but, as the film progresses, the contributions are increasingly ‘dramatised’.  Rouch and Morin describe Angelo’s typical working day at a Renault factory.  This is – or is sufficiently skilful to seem like – pure documentary record.  It’s absorbing and affecting to watch:  as Angelo says, he works such long hours there’s barely time in the evening to do more than sleep in preparation for the next day, although we see him, once he’s home, doing physical exercises in the back yard and reading a book in bed.   (Rouch and Morin’s team of cinematographers – Michel Brault, Raoul Coutard, Roger Morillière and Jean-Jacques Tarbès – do especially fine work in this sequence.)    We next see Angelo sitting in a stairwell talking with someone who will turn out to be another of the film’s most memorable subjects – an African student called Landry, whose first appearance this is.  Angelo explains that he wanted to talk with Landry.  It’s clear (as another contributor mentions – in the discussion that takes place after Rouch and Morin have screened their footage to all concerned) that these two men like and interest each other but their conversation is also an early example of an obviously staged sequence.  As Angelo becomes a central presence in Chronicle of a Summer, he also becomes less compelling.   It’s puzzling when he gets into trouble with his bosses at work (‘So you’re a film star now, are you?’, or sarcastic words to that effect) and walks out.  Didn’t the bosses notice the cameras at the factory from the start?

Marceline is a more definitely ‘dramatic’ figure.   It’s revealed that she spent her teenage years in Auschwitz.  The first indication of this comes when the camera picks up, as if casually, the number stamped on her arm.  However innovative this may have been in 1960, it’s impossible for a seasoned filmgoer, seeing Chronicle of a Summer for the first time now, not to experience this camera movement as a cliché of later movie dramas about Holocaust survivors.  Although that doesn’t, of course, detract from the originality of what Rouch and Morin were doing, there were other details that made me wonder about that.   Mary-Lou, an Italian working as a secretary at Cahiers du Cinéma, is very distressed in her first interview with Morin, and the camera records the anxious movements of her hands.  Such movements have long become standard editorial images in television news reports but, even if they were novel in Chronicle of a Summer, they are superfluous in this particular context:  Mary-Lou’s hands aren’t revealing anything her unhappy face and voice haven’t already conveyed.

In the climax to the account of Marceline’s suffering in Auschwitz, she is filmed walking in the Place de la Concorde, her voiceover recalling how she lost her father in the camp.  When others see this sequence in the footage that Rouch and Morin show them, one of the young men in the film says that what Marceline did wasn’t natural, that she was ‘acting’.   She acknowledges this but insists that she was ‘acting truthfully’.  According to Jonathan Rosenbaum:

‘Rouch as a filmmaker had already discovered in his innovative African documentaries that you best catch people ‘being themselves’ if you film them ‘playing themselves’.’

In the same piece (an extract from which BFI used as their programme note), Rosenbaum also describes Chronicle of a Summer as an:

‘… investigation into what Parisians – regarded as a ‘strange tribe’ – were thinking and feeling during the summer of 1960.  This was when the war in Algeria was still a hot issue, although many other topics are discussed as well, private as well as public.’

The film is a lot more remarkable as an exercise in expressing a kind of truth about people in contrived situations than it is instructive about contemporary public concerns.  (And the situations really are increasingly contrived:  by late on in the narrative, some of the interview subjects are on holiday together in St Tropez, presumably with the film-makers footing the bill …)   At the start, the directors decide on a round table debate about political issues of the day.  The discussion we eventually see, while it may express the real views of the participants, still comes across as more staged than illuminating, about either the issues or the people arguing them.  In contrast, the reactions to Rouch and Morin’s screening of the footage are convincing and expressive:  this occasion is no less staged than the round table but putting the interview subjects together in this situation makes natural sense – and the participants’ awareness of themselves and that they’re still being filmed is by now a virtually authentic part of the people we’re watching.  (The phrase ‘act sincerely’ in the Wikipedia quote above may be a kind of Freudian slip but it’s nonetheless apt.)

The co-directors are performers no less than their interviewees.  Jean Rouch isn’t as aggressive as Edgar Morin, either as an interviewer or as a presence in his own right:  I found Morin – fiercely articulate and dogmatic about what he wants to get out of the enterprise – hard to take.   The film ends with the two men, walking together through the Musée de l’Homme and discussing the validity of what they’ve put on the screen.  When they speculate as to why some of their subjects, in the screening just seen, dismissed others as ‘hams or exhibitionists’, you wonder for a moment if the directors realise that’s what they – Morin, especially – may seem to be to the film audience.  No doubt they do:  Chronicle of a Summer is such an intellectually considered piece of cinema that Rouch and Morin could be seen to have put themselves out of reach of criticism.  It was almost a relief to get immediate proof they hadn’t fully succeeded.  Halfway through, the elderly man sitting next to me in NFT2 had had enough.  ‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered – perhaps stage whispered – as he passed in front of me, ‘but I’m not finding this at all interesting’.  I found the film very interesting yet part of me sympathised with what he said.

30 July 2015

[1]  http://tinyurl.com/p9lzpa5

[2] In fact, some of the interview subjects are ‘working class’ only in the sense that they need to work for a living.   A man called Henri, for example, is a professional painter of pictures rather than houses.