criterionforum.org

Chronicle of a Summer




Few films can claim to be as influential to the course of cinema history as Chronicle of a Summer. The fascinating result of a collaboration between filmmaker-anthropologist Jean Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morin, this vanguard work of what Morin would term cinéma verité is a brilliantly conceived and realized sociopolitical diagnosis of the early sixties in France. By simply interviewing a group of Paris residents in the summer of 1960—beginning with the provocative and eternal question “Are you happy?” and expanding to political issues, including the ongoing Algerian War—Rouch and Morin reveal the hopes and dreams of a wide array of people, from artists to factory workers, from an Italian émigré to an African student. Chronicle of a Summer’s penetrative approach gives us a document of a time and place with extraordinary emotional depth.

• New high-definition digital transfer of the Cineteca di Bologna restoration of the film, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
• Un été + 50 (2011), a seventy-three-minute documentary featuring outtakes and new interviews with codirector Edgar Morin and some of the film’s subjects
• Archival interviews with codirector Jean Rouch and Marceline Loridan, one of the film’s subjects
• New interview with anthropology professor Faye Ginsburg, organizer of several Rouch retrospectives
• New and improved English subtitle translation
• PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by scholar Sam Di Iorio

Now, that's good news for sure.

I remember having read that Watchmaker would release 9 of Rouch' films on English-subtitled DVDs. Does anyone know if this might still happen some day?

Watchmaker is out of business to the best of my knowledge.

Oh, now that's bad news. But Henley's study on Rouch's been released in 2009, so, well ...

Wu.Qinghua wrote:Oh, now that's bad news.

But you get your choice of topping!

The Jean Rouch is also cursed

Can I go now?

Just saw it at UCLA tonight; what a great film. They screened a Blu-Ray of the remastered version from which the Criterion version will be based, and it looks great.

Michel Brault (Mon Oncle Antoine) was not only one of the cinematographers -- but was a consultant for the design of the camera used to shoot this. Raoul Coutard is another of the cinematographers. Pretty much a must-buy for me.

For those who are region-locked to Europe, the BFI has announced a dual-format release in May.

Specs have yet to be confirmed, but it should be exactly the same transfer of the main feature.

It doesn't exactly look like this is a popular favorite around these parts, but if you watch the film (or have already seen it and admire it), I want to urge you to watch the Un été + 50 documentary that's included on this disc. It's a combination of interviews with some of the participants of the original film (including Morin, Marceline, Jean-Pierre, and Régis) and outtakes from the film. That might sound like a snore, but let me assure you that this is eye-opening stuff. Not only do you get to see the people who appeared in the film opine upon their youthful selves, but the doc exposes exactly how much of the film was staged (or at least arranged so that conversation flowed along expected lines). It totally flips the original film on its head when you learn that sad-sack Mary Lou was actually pretty happy when filming was wrapping up because she had fallen in love with a guy at work (guy = Jacques Rivette, work = Cahiers du Cinéma), or when you see the young Jean-Pierre and Régis in conversations that outline exactly the kind of pompous, bullshitting undergrads they now readily admit they were. You also get a real sense of the collaboration between Morin and Rouch and what a disaster this film would have been if Rouch had not been involved. (He thought the film was too serious with all these heavy confessional conversations, so it was his idea to head to the beach and to film the Bardot look-alike!)

When I first saw Chronicle in grad school in the late '90s, I absolutely loved it. Seeing it again when this release came out, I was a little exasperated by the more serious parts (the Morin parts, basically). In memory, the "êtes-vous hereux?" part was the centerpiece of the film, but it's so short (though it's very funny to see Marceline in the outtakes suggest just going home instead of possibly getting slapped by some offended interviewee). I have even more respect for the film now after watching Un été + 50, and feel that the film has an even more complicated place in documentary history.

Matt wrote:It doesn't exactly look like this is a popular favorite around these parts...

My copy just arrived yesterday. So I should get a chance to comment on this, sooner or later. I'm a sucker for "revisitation" features.

Yeah, I would like to post, but want to wait till it sits better in my memory.

Watched both the film and the lengthy extra last night. Enjoyed them both.

When Mary Lou first showed up in the film, I said to my wife -- this segment feels pretty Rivettian. Only afterwards did I find out she was Rivette's girl friend at the time. (I wonder how long this romance lasted).

Marilou is Marilù Parolini, who collaborated with Rivette on the scripts for L'amour fou, Duelle, Noroît, and L'amour par terre, and with Bertolucci on The Spider's Stratagem. She was onset photographer for several of Godard's films in the 1960s, and trained Anne Wiazemksy in that role on the set of Truffaut's La mariée était en noir. She also performed onscreen in Straub and Huillet's Les yeux ne veulent pas en tout temps se fermer ou Peut-être qu'un jour Rome se permettra de choisir à son tour (aka Othon) and Toute révolution est un coup de dés.

Parolini was also the secretary at Cahiers du cinéma.

Finally got around to watching this, and it was terrific. I streamed it on Kanopy, but will purchase a copy at the next Criterion flash sale so I can watch the Un été + 50 documentary.

At any rate, while I suspect most viewers (and certainly the participants who watched a screening and commented on the film they were in!) are probably most taken with Parolini's segments, I thought Marceline's segments were riveting, not least when the camera tipped us off to the fact that she was a Holocaust survivor. In 1960, the Holocaust had only ended fifteen years before; by comparison, 9/11 was over two decades ago for us. And yet, Landry and some of the other participants didn't know what her tattoo signified. Obviously, there was a lot happening in France and its soon-to-be former colonies, but that moment was surprising, to say the least.

The last two sequences--of the participants debating the film and the directors discussing what had happened, respectively--really turned this into something else entirely. That the filmmakers were ostentatiously (or performatively, if you like) aware that they had failed in their initial intentions, yet created something both other than and more than a documentary and incorporated that into the film's structure sets the stage for so much subsequent cinematic history. Just a real gem of a film.

Michael Kerpan wrote: Mon Jan 13, 2014 4:20 pm Watched both the film and the lengthy extra last night. Enjoyed them both.

When Mary Lou first showed up in the film, I said to my wife -- this segment feels pretty Rivettian. Only afterwards did I find out she was Rivette's girl friend at the time. (I wonder how long this romance lasted).

Your partner seems steeped in French arthouse, lucky you.

If I turned to my partner at any time with that utterance she'd snatch the tangerine out of my hand.

My wife is fluent in French. Back when I had only unsubbed versions of some Rivette films, I had to rely on her to help keep me afloat. She really likes Rivette luckily. She is ambivalent about a lot of Godard -- but really enjoyed his 3D film....