Film Description

Paris. The summer of 1960. While war rages in Algeria and pre-independence Congo seethes with violence, ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morin send two women out into the streets of the city to interview passersby.

Rouch, whose previous groundbreaking films were shot in Africa, and Morin, an academic and writer, were experimenting with a new kind of documentary film about their own society that would reveal the innermost truth of peoples' lives.

From a simple starting question - Are you happy, sir? - CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER delves deeper and deeper into the lives of its characters. They include Marceline, a Holocaust survivor; Angelo, who works grueling shifts in a Renault factory; Landry, a student from the Ivory Coast; and Marilou, a young, beautiful and deeply depressed Italian immigrant. As the film progresses, the light opening scenes give way to intimate revelations and hotly contested political arguments.

CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER is a true landmark in film history. Rouch and Morin were among the first filmmakers to use hand held
sync sound 16mm equipment. They also coined the term cinema verite to describe their approach, although their practice,
placing people in situations and provoking responses, differs from what later came to be called verite films. Their use of
the urban landscape and groundbreaking cinematography (cameraman Raoul Coutard was among the crew members working on the
film) deeply affected the French New Wave and much of subsequent documentary practice. The film's self-reflexive
structure, in which Rouch and Morin screen the film for the participants to critique it on-screen, as well as their own
reactions to the critique, is still, amazingly, contemporary.

More than 40 years later, CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER remains as ambitious, forward-looking and powerful as the day it was first
released.

"With CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER Jean Rouch proved that (in his own words) 'you can film anything anywhere.' The film
that invented cinema verite and cinema-direct is as provocative now as it was forty years ago. Today we take the walking
camera, portable sync-sound, and filming the intimacies of everyday life for-granted; in CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER you can see
the filmic birth of these techniques. And see workers, deportees, Africans, intellectuals, students, and people on the
street live the Parisian life in the summer of 1960." - Steven Feld, Editor of the book Cine-Ethnography, by Jean Rouch,
and Professor of Music and Anthropology, Columbia University

"I think the reason why CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER still works today, and is an important film, is that Rouch and Morin made a
cinema-verite documentary which tries to include the truth of 'fiction.'" - Ellen Freyer, Author of Chronicle of a
Summer - Ten Years After, in Lewis Jacob (ed.), The Documentary Tradition

"What this film engages is humanity itself." - Roland Barthes

"The key cinema verite film." - Brian Winston, Claiming the Real

"A seminal work!" - Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

Paris. The summer of 1960. While war rages in Algeria and pre-independence Congo seethes with violence, ethnographic
filmmaker Jean Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morin send two women out into the streets of the city to interview passersby.

Rouch, whose previous groundbreaking films were shot in Africa, and Morin, an academic and writer, were experimenting with
a new kind of documentary film about their own society that would reveal the innermost truth of peoples' lives.

From a simple starting question - Are you happy, sir? - CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER delves deeper and deeper into the lives of
its characters. They include Marceline, a Holocaust survivor; Angelo, who works grueling shifts in a Renault factory;
Landry, a student from the Ivory Coast; and Marilou, a young, beautiful and deeply depressed Italian immigrant. As the film
progresses, the light opening scenes give way to intimate revelations and hotly contested political arguments.

CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER is a true landmark in film history. Rouch and Morin were among the first filmmakers to use hand held
sync sound 16mm equipment. They also coined the term cinema verite to describe their approach, although their practice,
placing people in situations and provoking responses, differs from what later came to be called verite films. Their use of
the urban landscape and groundbreaking cinematography (cameraman Raoul Coutard was among the crew members working on the
film) deeply affected the French New Wave and much of subsequent documentary practice. The film's self-reflexive
structure, in which Rouch and Morin screen the film for the participants to critique it on-screen, as well as their own
reactions to the critique, is still, amazingly, contemporary.

More than 40 years later, CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER remains as ambitious, forward-looking and powerful as the day it was first
released.

"With CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER Jean Rouch proved that (in his own words) 'you can film anything anywhere.' The film
that invented cinema verite and cinema-direct is as provocative now as it was forty years ago. Today we take the walking
camera, portable sync-sound, and filming the intimacies of everyday life for-granted; in CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER you can see
the filmic birth of these techniques. And see workers, deportees, Africans, intellectuals, students, and people on the
street live the Parisian life in the summer of 1960." - Steven Feld, Editor of the book Cine-Ethnography, by Jean Rouch,
and Professor of Music and Anthropology, Columbia University

"I think the reason why CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER still works today, and is an important film, is that Rouch and Morin made a
cinema-verite documentary which tries to include the truth of 'fiction.'" - Ellen Freyer, Author of Chronicle of a
Summer - Ten Years After, in Lewis Jacob (ed.), The Documentary Tradition

"What this film engages is humanity itself." - Roland Barthes

"The key cinema verite film." - Brian Winston, Claiming the Real

"A seminal work!" - Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

** Fipresci Award, 1961 Cannes Film Festival