CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER

Thursday April 8th - 8:00PM

92Y-Tribeca

200 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10013

Co-presented with RED CHANNELS

"There is a whole series of intermediaries and these are lying intermediaries. We contract time, we extend it, we chose an angle for the shot, we deform the people we’re shooting, we speed things up and follow one movement to the detriment of another movement. So there is whole work of lies. But, for me and Edgar Morin, at the time we made that film this was more real than the truth. That is to say, there are a certain number of things happening, human facts surrounding us….which people would not be able to say any other way….it’s a sort of catalyst which allows us to reveal, with doubts, a fictional part of all of us, but which for me is the most real part of an individual." Jean Rouch

In Walter Benjamin's essay "The Image of Proust" (1929)* he writes, "all great works of literature either found a genre or dissolve one." But sometimes they do both, simultaneously, as in the case of Morin and Rouch's Chronicle of a Summer. In the very same process in which these "special cases" introduce a genre--a new method for a new form--they so perfectly execute its new rules as to render any subsequent attempt immediately outdated*.

Chronicle of a Summer exploits the then brand-new audio-visual technology, instantly bringing it to its artistic pinnacle, and demonstrating a still-unmatched conceptual and technical virtuosity. It both asks and answers all of the questions that would plague the history of direct/cinema/verite for generations. What Morin and Rouch understood then, exactly 50 years ago, was that the focus shouldn't be a mystification with the tools or the subjects; but rather on the confrontations and interventions this new technology allows. And this is perhaps the main reason to look at the film again today.

Chronicle combines an all-star cast and crew, including anthropologist and filmmaker Jean Rouch*, here teaming up with sociologist Edgar Morin*; Marceline Loridan-Ivens in the "lead"; a very young Regis Debray listed as "student"; the gorgeous handheld cinematography of Michel Brault and Raoul Coutard; and all brought together and produced by Anatole Dauman* and Argos Films.

--Chronicle of a Summer: Paris 1960 - Edgar Morin & Jean Rouch, 1961, 85 minutes
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 85 minutes | BetaSP Projection

92yTribeca