One of media’s greatest potentials is capturing reality and preserving it for generations to follow. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of documentaries that have achieved this goal and can transport us back to the early 20th century to discover how the world was. At the same time, I think that there’s something appealing about artists finding ways to mold the truth through a mix of pseudo-fiction, where they’re not being totally honest but in adding fantasy to everyday life reveals something greater about our subconscious. It’s what has made artists like Andy Kaufman and Sacha Baron Cohen so appealing, or how I’m Still Here (2010) reinvented Joaquin Phoenix’s career only to explore how ridiculous our obsession with celebrity culture is.
What’s interesting is that despite this being a fairly common trope in the modern age, the idea of breaking reality isn’t a new concept. There’s been a handful of great documentaries out there, including Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1968) which takes a film shoot and shows the very fabric of the medium being broken down. There’s no understanding if what we’re watching is real or if the actors or, ahem, acting as actors to present some greater point for director William Greaves. Because there is a potential reality, the story works so much better than if Greaves openly created a work of fiction. Similarly, the playfulness of F for Fake (1975) finds Orson Welles challenging how we process other people’s opinions. To some extent, this trend continues with the phenomenal Stories We Tell (2013), which is a true story broken down by reenacted memories and differing perspectives that maybe challenge credulity but reveal the impact a narrator can have on a story.
In short, I believe that breaking reality can help reveal some greater truths about humanity. When I find a documentary that challenges this fabric, I find my ears perking up. I’m eager to see where these filmmakers go, and it’s usually somewhere much more compelling than the vanilla tagline usually suggests. The same can be true for Chronicle of a Summer (1961), which is one of the shining beacons of breaking reality. Considered to be the first major documentary in the cinema verite movement, I find myself amazed that the premise evolves from French filmmakers asking “Are you happy?” into this greater study of society. It’s an easy question on its surface, but the more that it’s asked, the more doubt that enters the frame. We say that we’re happy, but what about that bad day at work we had last week? What about that fight we had with a spouse? Do those things constitute a happy life?
I do worry that contemporary audiences can watch the closing minutes of this and find it all a bit too quaint. As a film that came on the waves of French New Wave, it has all the hallmarks of French intellectualism of the time. It ends with a series of filmmakers looking at their work in a projection room and commenting on what they have just witnessed. There’s a sense that even if what they captured is reality, they are molding it as their version of the truth. They question people’s motives and whether certain scenes are necessary. Nowadays, it’s a conversation that anyone who watched Community and mapped out alternate timelines probably has had and advanced to something much more complicated. In the 1960s, it was something much more groundbreaking and substantial. It was more than a question they sought to ask. It was a time capsule that is unlike anything I have seen before.
The opening credits tout its success, claiming that it won major awards at Cannes that put it in the leagues of filmmakers like Federico Fellini. Maybe it’s a tassel added to later releases, but the tout is something that makes me envious. All of a sudden I wanted to be in the room when it first premiered, discovering a work that is genuinely pushing boundaries in new and exciting ways. There is a mundanity to the first 20 minutes as it comes across as a typical sociological experiment. Co-directors Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin lead a team as they take to the streets asking random people on their way to work whether or not they are happy. In the heat of the moment, it’s easy to say “Yes.” There’s no need to think too hard about it. We are programmed to believe that because we’re not at death’s door that life is great.
Chronicle of a Summer plays like an essay that saves its greatest details for further into the text. This opening section is akin to a filmmaker creating a setting. Once introducing the mission statement, the immediate man on the street segments allow the viewer to see what type of people this is geared at. This is a story of the working class, who toil in garages and various shops around town. There is a safety to asking them questions because they will remain anonymous, serving as nothing more than a percentage number in the final tally. More than anything, it gives a vision of France as it is, a perceptive safety where everything is as it should be. The world is progressing in a satisfactory manner, and there’s no need to challenge their comfortable lives.
Then at some point, the narrative begins to add layers. Of course, the working class is happy. There’s little challenging them directly. What about the other people in Paris? It can be argued that doing this story from a white man’s perspective limits how nuanced the remaining conversations will be, but I’ll commend Rouch and Morin for what follows.
As they move from the people in the city, they turn to urban neighborhoods where immigrants live. In one of the documentary’s most staggering scenes, they interview a Black man in a stairwell, eagerly listening to every comment. He has come to France in search of a better life. The contrast to his homeland is apparent. There wasn’t as much happiness to be found there and some symbolic freedom would be found in Europe. The only issue is that this came with socioeconomic issues, where racial inequality is a major issue and he hasn’t exactly afforded the luxuries that make others around him happy. He represents the inequality at its core, who turn to cinema and see the fantasy of how life should be. Like the people at the end of the documentary, he’s critical of the story sold to him. He wants something much more real.
It should be noted that up until this point, the filmmakers are sincere and have presented a straightforward reality. There’s no need to question the form of the medium. It isn’t until this stairwell scene that the doubt of being happy is introduced. Suddenly the story becomes more interested in following individual perspectives, asking them to delve into their complicated lives. The immigrant survives in a state of melancholy. Another character finds herself splitting time between a boring job and prostitution, never quite feeling satisfied with where her life has taken her. She talks of The Holocaust and experiencing love in a hopeless place. Suddenly Chronicle of a Summer is about more than an emotion, it’s about history. What this section unlocks is an effort to have a genuine conversation about our lives as a whole.
My personal favorite scene comes when the woman is given the chance to express herself in voice-over. As she wanders the street, she speaks the story of being in a concentration camp and finding someone she loves there. The visuals begin to have a calculated, cinematic approach that finds her feeling distant from everyone in the frame. They’re walking against her, far away. The moment she describes would answer the question of when she was most happy, and there’s some sadness of it coming in a time of utter grief. In one of the smartest moves that the entire documentary takes, her speech concludes with her quiet, walking forward but still being outpaced by the camera as she grows smaller in the frame until she’s a speck. It’s a moment where the interior becomes external, and it achieves the ultimate goal of the work. We can convince the world that we’re happy, but if we’re not honest with ourselves, we’re more than likely to feel alone even in a public environment.
By the final third, there’s less of a form and more of a conversation. The immigrant and the woman sitting with the documentarians talking about their dreams and wondering what would make them happy. Again, nothing is necessarily breaking reality in a deceitful way, but it feels like a far cry from where we began. Suddenly it ends not by simply answering yes or no, but by helping those who haven’t known happiness experience a small moment of it. They take the immigrant to Saint-Tropez and let him see the joy around him. There’s something beautiful with how the co-directors have built empathy for him, allowing this moment to feel like the most genuine of conclusion. It may be the filmmakers interfering with society’s reality, but is that such a bad thing in this case? Isn’t everyone worthy of happiness?
What makes this documentary essential isn’t just the brilliant way in which they explore the topic. Yes, there is something substantial with them breaking reality enough to better understand the social pressures that keep us from happiness. However, those watching it in 2023 may find it easy to see a few too many parallels between then and now. There’s the economic disparity, racism, the negative reputation of sex workers, Despite the 60 years, a lot of these themes are still ongoing, revealing how universal some of these truths are. On the one hand, it’s sad how little has changed in that time. However, it also shows how the human condition limits us from something greater.
Chronicle of a Summer is astounding because it asks the question “Are you happy?” and whittles it down so that the audience has no choice but to take a serious look at their lives. What are they doing to make the world a better place? Are they being genuine every time they step out the door? What is stopping us from removing the negative? This is a story that goes into a metatextual level as well, finding one asking how cinema molds our expectations of happiness and fantasy. How does it manipulate our emotions and reshape the way we see the world? There’s the idea that even in a vision of reality that some of this isn’t real. Nobody is coming to save an immigrant from a miserable afternoon. Even then, it did happen so is it a lie?
For me, this is a documentary that succeeds less because it embraces a whole host of gimmicks, but uses them to find a greater humanity in society. It embodies what breaking reality can do. By stopping to ask people a simple question, it allows for a richer conversation to form. By letting them sit down for an afternoon at a café, you can discover so much more about where they’re coming from. It’s a study of humanity, of the society that they inhabit. Even if this comes up short of interviewing everyone in Paris, it feels like the perfect embodiment of the era. We don’t need to get everyone’s opinion. We have enough to get a thematic resonance of what matters to the country during a pivotal time. Even with limited resources, they can determine the ways that society and ourselves can keep “Are you happy?” from being an easy answer. Much like the execution of this documentary, it’s best just to accept how complicated it all is.
Comments
Post a Comment