Chronicle of a Summer

Chronicle of a Summer (Chronique d'un été, 1961) is a French documentary by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin you can watch online on iFILM. Paris, summer 1960: the camera steps into the street and asks strangers a single question — are you happy?

Rouch, an anthropologist, and Morin, a sociologist, refuse to stay behind the lens. They argue with their subjects, seat them around the same table, then screen the finished footage back to them and ask how it feels to watch yourself. Factory workers, students, immigrants and Auschwitz survivor Marceline Loridan all speak for themselves. Out of this comes the method the pair named cinéma vérité — truthful cinema where the camera provokes rather than spies.

This modest experiment became a starting point for postwar documentary film and left its mark on the French New Wave. Raw, uneven and occasionally uncomfortable, it still works like a mirror you'd rather not look into. Stream Chronicle of a Summer (1961) online on iFILM.