chronique d’un eté (d. edgar morin, jean rouch)

At the start of the film, the filmmakers declare their objective is to document the city of Paris over the course of summer, 1960. This is clearly an unviable objective and the filmmakers make clear that they are conscious of the limits of their project. Things open with a straightforward device, as two young women stop people in the street and ask them, bluntly, if they are happy, with predictably humorous results. It’s vox pop, ahead of its time, which allows the film to engage with a variety of people from differing backgrounds, but it’s a limited strategy. Then the methodology shifts as we move into a series of interviews with seemingly random characters: a worker in a Renault factory, an Ivory Coast immigrant, Marceline, one of the young women doing the interviews. Gradually the film starts to piece these seemingly random elements together. They meet, they interact, they discuss the events of the day, including the post-imperialist wars in Algiers and the Congo. They even go on holiday, to Saint Tropez, a paradoxically essential element of the Parisian summer. Along the way there are surprises and moments of raw emotion. Some of the characters open up, others are more guarded. The joys and futilities of living in the French capital are laid bare. The film closes with a sequence where the participants are shown the film in preview, a device which allows for more surprises and a further layer of commentary on the viability of the project in itself.

What do we get out of all this as viewers? Well, on the one hand, we do indeed get an idea of what Paris was like over the course of the summer of 1960. We get to see what it looked like, and what the concerns and hopes and fears of its citizens were. We also get an investigation into the limits of a certain observational fly-on-the-wall filmmaking style, what it reveals and what it hides. Where the traps might lie. But more than all of this, we also get a sometimes marvellous study of humanity, the simplicity of humanity, its everyday charm and its everyday despair, a life clothed in the secrets that every soul carries around with them.