Chronicle of a Summer
In the summer of 1960 anthropologist filmmaker Jean Rouch (Moi, un noir, Les Maîtres fous) and sociologist Edgar Morin set out to chronicle the everyday lives of Parisians using a mixture of intimate interviews, debates and observations. Artists, factory workers, office employees, students and others open up to the camera to share their experiences, fears and aspirations. The result became one of the decade's most influential films, and redefined the documentary form.
Rouch, whose work inspired the likes of Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette and Roberto Rossellini, trained his ethnographic lens on the metropolis, recording a series of extraordinary sequences, including a French survivor's Holocaust testimony, to reveal the political underlying the personal in a society struggling into the post-colonial era.
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Supplements
- Un été + 50 (Florence Daumon, 2011, 75 mins): documentary on the making of Chronicle of a Summer featuring new interviews with the participants including Edgar Morin and Régis Debray
- Jean Rouch at the NFT (1978, 55 mins): audio recording of a lecture delivered by Jean Rouch on Dziga Vertov and Robert Flaherty's influence on his work and that of his peers
- Illustrated booklet with newly commissioned essays by Professor Ginette Vincendeau