Chronique of a Summer.
Chronique of a Summer filmed in 1960 by anthropolgiest and Filmaker Jean Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morin. Chronic of Summer show us middle-class French people including the foreigners who live in Paris, asking the question about happiness in society and introducing us to the sensitive questions of antisemitism and colonialism. Cinema verité the step to find the truth through showing us the truth. All movies build on informal interviews and conversations. The film starts with the conversation between the filmmakers and one of the protagonists, explaining what they want to film and discussing how Marceline would feel on the camera. There is always a doubt that even if it is a documentary you are not sure where is acting and where is a true person. As further she came up with an explanation that she acted in a scene where she has a monologue with her father, who was killed by the Nazi in a concentration camp. Why she acted it? Why did she confess that it was acting? I tried to understand it, and my conclusion was that maybe she agreed to be filmed in this movie only because of this monologue scene. Where she acting as an actress in a fiction movie, but she already replayed these scenes in her head so many times that it became her reality. The pain of loss needed to be documented, to be told even in a pretentious way to be free from it, to make it heard to masses because it was in front of the camera. For me, this monologue was an intimate scream to the public. Directors using Marceline for their so-called experiment to ask Parisians if they are happy? Her daily job is as a market researcher for the film industry who conducts and then transcribes the interviews, so she knew how to approach people on the streets. This street questionnaire about happiness also shows the diversity of people, some of them were willing to share private stories about why they happy or not, some tried to find philosophical meaning in this question, some just refused to answer anything. Some people were too honest on camera as a mechanic whose wife was complaining about the luck of money and he explains how sometimes you need to go against the system to survive and live better. Through all these interviews about happiness, I perceived that the main problem of Parisians in that time was money, or how to gain them enough to live good but not to kill themselves. Everything was returning to the question of financial well-being and only after how it can affect the quality of life to be happy. It reminded me of the similar but fiction movie of Godard “ Two or Three Things I Know About Her”. It was filmed 7 years later, but still covering the question of Fordist theory and how it kills the human being from enjoying life and not being only the slave of factories. For most of the work became so automatic and monotone that they lost the difference between days, they are unhappy with it. The way how simple factory worker describes their daily routine and attitude to it made me think that if so many people on this planet unsatisfied with what they do and it last for decades of our only existing life, why we do not do anything with it? We don’t. Most of the movies build on dialogues, when directors control the flow of conversation, exactly knowing what they want to know from interviews. However, most of the interviews have informal characters and mostly look like conversations between friends.
In the end, we were introduced to the scene of collective film watching with the protagonist and directors. What is truth and what is false in this movie? Who was acting and how? What was fake or is it cinema verité? But is this scene full of criticism towards each other was true or full of acting? Pretending that they know better what is trues and what is not? French observing french, pointing out issues in society he knows good, showing us all sides of french life from inside, what is really bother these people. Opinions were different but directors were satisfied by the result of the movie.