Screening of “The Chronicle of a Summer”

Fri 18 May 2012, 6 pm
DOCLAB

From DOCLAB:

Doclab cordially invites you to the screening of  “Chronicle of a Summer – Chronique d’un été” by two French filmmakers, Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin. Paris. The summer of 1960. While war rages in Algeria and pre-independence Congo seethes with violence, ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morin send two women out into the streets of the city to interview passersby.

CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER is a true landmark in film history. Rouch and Morin were among the first filmmakers to use hand held sync sound 16mm equipment. They also coined the term cinéma vérité to describe their approach, although their practice, placing people in situations and provoking responses, differs from what later came to be called vérité films. Their use of the urban landscape and groundbreaking cinematography (cameraman Raoul Coutard was among the crew members working on the film) deeply affected the French New Wave and much of subsequent documentary practice. The film’s self-reflexive structure, in which Rouch and Morin screen the film for the participants to critique it on-screen, as well as their own reactions to the critique, is still, amazingly, contemporary.

More than 40 years later, CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER remains as ambitious, forward-looking and powerful as the day it was first released.
“I think the reason why CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER still works today, and is an important film, is that Rouch and Morin made a cinéma-vérité documentary which tries to include the truth of ‘fiction.'” – Ellen Freyer, Author of the essay Chronicle of a Summer – Ten Years After, in The Documentary Tradition by Lewis Jacob

“What this film engages is humanity itself.” – Roland Barthes

“The key cinema vérité film.” – Brian Winston, Claiming the Real

Languages: The film is in French with Vietnamese and English subtitles.

The screening is non-profit and aims for studies and research only.

Free Entrance.

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