Chronicle of a Summer (Criterion Collection)

Inventing Cinema Verite
Perhaps few other films are as important to our current cultural moment of reality tv shows as "Chronicle of a Summer." Chronicle of a Summer explicitly asks the audience to consider if it is possible to for people act sincerely in front of a camera.

The film is comprised of a series of interviews, often grabbing people off the streets and asking them "if they are happy." The interviewees often discuss politics, philosophy and war. In itself, the interviews are a fascinating slice of culture. But the filmmakers then add a fascinating layer to the film by having the subjects watch the video and make commentary on it.

As you might guess, this meta-film is the stuff of film studies classes. Chronicle of a Summer is credited with heralding a cinema verite movement. Viewers with an interest in film studies and history will be most rewarded by this blu ray.

I always appreciate Criterion's editions because they allow those of us not currently in school to...

Chronicle of a summer
A must see for everybody interested in documentary and direct camera shooting. The film innovated with small-concealed tape recorder, and hand-held 16mm camera shooting techniques that permitted improvisation in a sociological experiment by the unusual collaboration between Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin in the summer of 1960. Jean Rouch was an anthropolog who worked in Africa pioneering film and anthropology since the early 1940 and he became famous for "les Maitres Fous" in 1955 (Crazy Masters). Edgar Morin was known for his study of the star system. The collaboration is intriguing and the film that results from it is fascinating as it takes the pulse of France in the early 1960s, with the movement against torture and colonial war in Algeria, the examination of the aftermath of the horrors of World War ii and the scars it left on the young as well as the delight of being young in 1960 in Paris, France.
Jean Rouch is a pioneer of the French New Wave.

the 60s documented in Paris
The 60s changed all of western society and to see it documented in France is a special insight. Now French conservatives cry against the lazy worker but then Renault and French industrialism brutalized that same human robot. It reminds us that even as late as the 1960s France was holding a nation hostage to its whims and tyranny.

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