Chronique d’un été (Paris 1960) [Chronicles of a Summer] (1961)

(On Cable TV, August 2022) Some movies become victims of their own successes, or (in breaking ground) anticipating what would later become far more commonplace. So it is that Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s Chronique d’un été (Paris 1960) set out to do something then groundbreaking by using a camera to give a voice to ordinary people in their magnificently mundane thoughts. That aspect hasn’t necessarily aged badly, but what has aged is the film’s self-reflection on the nature of putting reality on film and how it may be transforming reality through selective excerpts. To which any twenty-first century viewer with a pulse and a TV (or YouTube account) will now answer something like OH BOY, YOU HAVE NOT SEEN ANYTHING YET. I don’t want to be overly dismissive of Chronique d’un été (Paris 1960)—what it did at the time was fresh and daring. (Indeed, the term “cinema-vérité” reportedly comes from this film’s marketing campaign.)  But it’s far better to approach the film knowing that it is a product of its era and represents a kind of proto-essay on the nature of media-mediated reality than anything overly interesting by itself.