Film Forum

(1961) “Are you happy? How do you live?” Tough questions, but that’s just the beginning of the discussions among a researcher, a student, a secretary, workers, a discouraged former militant, a holocaust survivor, plus soon-to-be regular Nadine Ballot (The Human Pyramid, Punishment), with a film critique session with the participants the coda. A publicist suggested the term cinéma vérité, now part of film history. DCP. Approx. 90 min.

Presented with support from The George Fasel Memorial Fund for Classic French Cinema.

Reviews

“[Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin] dove into French society—into the private lives and political frustrations of strangers and friends—without a protective suit, rendering themselves as vulnerable as the people they were interrogating, making themselves onscreen participants in their own investigations, revealing their own practices and concerns along with those of the participants they filmed. In the process, they veered from filming external reality into filming the imagination at work. They veered from documentary into fiction.”
– Richard Brody, The New Yorker

“What makes Chronique d’un été such an exceptionally rich film is that one discovers other film in it–to the nth degree­–hidden under the first film. What is revealed is a film about the influence of cinema which provides us with more information about this subject than all the works of filmology past and future.”
– Fereydoun Hoveyda, Cahiers du Cinéma

“ONE OF THE GREATEST, MOST AUDACIOUS, MOST ORIGINAL DOCUMENTARIES EVER MADE, one that poses—and, what’s more, responds to—questions of cinematic form and moral engagement that underlie the very genre, the very idea of nonfiction film.”
– Richard Brody, The New Yorker (2013)