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Wednesday
Jan082014

Rouch & Morin: Chronique d'un été (Chronicle of a Summer) (1960)

A collaboration between documentary film maker Jean Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morin, this unusual film is a critical document in articulating and theorising the texture of everyday life. It’s made up of a variety of segments, some directed by Rouch, some directed by Morin, encompassing staged and unstaged interviews, neorealist narrative segments and conversations with the directors themselves. In some way, the street interviews are the most haunting, shot through with the confessional spontaneity that comes in the midst of a crowd, while many of the staged interviews also aspire to feel shot in transit, in the brief space between shifts, the fugitive zone between working and sleeping. Not all the segments are equally compelling, but nor do they seem designed to be, since it’s precisely that heterogeneous quality that ensures that, when the participants are finally shown the final cut of the film, in the film’s last scene, they’re unable to reach a consensus – an inability that draws them into dialogue, creates a critical community, however momentarily. And so it feels as if the fragmented, piecemeal nature of the film is an invitation to its audience to disagree and, in disagreeing, to reconceptualise themselves as an audience; it is a film that demands participation, rather than spectatorship. As Morin himself puts it, in the concluding conversation with Rouch, “this film, unlike standard cinema, places us back into life,” and in that sense it’s also an injunction to sousveillance, a manifesto for a bottom-up sociology of everyday life in which an accurate account can only emerge, kaleidoscopically, if each citizen imagines themselves as both sociologist and subject, camera and citizen; it’s no coincidence that the final screening of the film models itself on Man With a Movie Camera. In its own way, then, its “chance encounters in Paris” are as self-reflexive as the most experimental and audacious of the New Wave auteurs, except where, say, Godard pursued an alienation effect, here we’re presented with something more like an immanence effect, a collapse of cinema into its own infrastructure in the name of the movie theatre as a revived and renewed public sphere, a venue for "people the audience could meet."

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