Art as method: Chronicle of a Summer
Trying to figure out how to say something with the tools at hand
Since my writing partner Alan Latham has been making me read Georges Perec, I made him (and his partner who nodded off, poor thing) watch my new Criterion Collection DVD of Chronique d’un été late one Saturday evening in May. Not unlike Perec, the film was a kind of experiment in social description through artistic form. Alan observed that it was definitely of its time, and I’m trying to work through what that means. Or maybe, why Perec’s way of intense description seems to continue to be interesting, but while Morin and Rouch’s way of prolonged, severe-close-up kinds of interviews is not (for me, at least). Or maybe, some other piece of this representational experiment is still provocative. Like they state at the beginning, this is an experiment in cinéma-vérité.
The thing that struck me most about this film when I first saw it in George C. Stoney’s documentary filmmaking class was that it inverts on itself at the end, when the interviewees become spectators and commentators themselves. Rewatching it, I realize that it’s inverting itself all along the way.
The film follows along, in now familiar documentary fashion, the lives and opinions of a slew of figures in Paris, 1960. We are being guided by the editorial — and sometimes visible — hands of sociologist Edgar Morin and ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch. Morin and Rouch are very explicit, in a staged sort of way, that they are trying to make a cinematic snapshot of Paris at this moment, ranging across different pressing issues (labor rights, the colonial situation, post-war legacies, the future of the younger generation in a racially mixed France) and across different ‘classes’ of society (in the credits, I noticed, participants are labeled as ‘students’, ‘workers’, etc.). Their repeated presence as ‘filmmakers’/‘interviewers’ weaves in something of a reflexive uncertainty into the authoritative voice — though I don’t know that I fully trust it to be as uncertain as they act. They still are the ones in white shirts and ties, posing questions and cutting up the answers.
Alongside them, we have a kind of guide/narrator/proxy in Marceline, who is first (uncomfortably) posing their question (“Are you happy?”) to people on the street, then, eventually, answering it herself. She is also a narrator that may not be fully trustworthy: she states from the beginning that she’s uncomfortable with the whole process of posing survey questions, even though it’s her profession. Furthermore, we lose sight of her for long stretches, following other characters who are more subjects of this ethnographic gaze rather than substantial participants in making it. At times, it becomes easier to dissolve into the gaze of unquestioning onlooker.
Until the final scene. What made me sit up and pay attention when I saw this in class 15 long years ago was the denouement, when what feels like the narrative of a documentary ends suddenly without a real ending, and we are in a screening room, discussing with the people who were just onscreen what we (they?) just saw onscreen. Even if they don’t all like each other (and we don’t necessarily like all of them), it feels like we have all just taken part in this experiment. Now we have to figure out what it means.
Faye Ginsberg points out in the Criterion commentary interview, cinéma-vérité was trying to provoke, in a different way than ‘fly-on-the-wall’ direct cinema; it’s making the use of a medium/method an purposeful art to interrogate social relationships. The liner notes essay by Sam Di Iorio points out the process of technological trial and error Rouch and Morin went through to create that sense of being along for the ride in these individuals’ lives, while simultaneously recognizing how little (or how much) we understand of each other’s lives from this fragile glimpse.
They famously end the film by pacing up and down a corridor in the Musée de l’Homme, trying to figure out what they’ve accomplished. It parallels what is left unsaid in nearly every academic paper on social life: the realization of how little they can say, and how much work is left to be done. Even if it remains a film ‘of its time’, the methodological provocation stands — they were, after all, building this intervention as anthropologist and sociologist. They were using an artistic medium of description and representation to poke into what was going on, to try to build commonality (or at least the potential for it) in what was a society in turmoil. That scene, and the famous ending, still has me sitting up straight — thinking this time about how to push forward into a realm where method is art, and thinking about what media can offer to forward a sociological imagination.
