“So what do you think about the screening?” says Rouch to Morin at the closing scene of Chronicle of a Summer (Rouch & Morin, 1961), walking down the corridor of Musée de l’Homme, surrounded by historical anthropological artefacts, and recorded by an advanced – at least at the time – technological device. Past and future, history and modernity, psychology and philosophy, science and art; Rouch and Morin, artist and philosopher, compose a film which, intentionally or not, raises one of the most ancient philosophical questions: “Where is the truth?” (Morin, 1985: 29). But even more profound than any existential philosophical enquiry is the invaluable sociological impact of “shared anthropology” and the “cinema of brotherhood” (Morin, 1985: 5).

The last 8 minutes of the film reveal an astonishing fractal-like morphology, as we transition from the singing family to the screening room, and later on to the Museum. The film-within-the-film finishes, the projector switches off, the lights switch on, and we find ourselves slowly distancing from a filmic pattern with strong ethnographic elements (film-within-the-film), then immersing in a chaotic structure of reflexive cinematic moments (screening), and finally evidencing the presence of fractal self-similarity at the self-reflexive discussion of the authors (Museum scene); what are the boundaries of the film, who is the author, and where is the truth?  

The sequence in the screening room is a revolutionary moment in the history of documentary and ethnographic filmmaking, not only as it poses the question of “What happens to the film and its audience after the lights go on?”, but because of its inclusive character and revelatory truths. After the screening, the film subjects comment on the film, the other characters and themselves, juxtaposing true selves and fictional friendships, intimacy and indecency, and embarrassment and boredom. Morin’s powerful statement about the nature of the film seems as if it was explicitly written for that sequence: “This film is research … This is not a documentary film … it is an experiment lived by its authors and its actors. It is an ethnological film in the strong sense of the term: it studies mankind” (Morin, 1985: 6). Rouch’s camera penetrates the characters’ emotional skin and Morin’s questions break the fourth wall, ultimately exchanging the initial question from the beginning of the film “How do you live?” to the final question in the screening room and at the Museum “Where is the truth?” (Morin, 1985: 29). Rouch’s cinema-vérité is based on this powerful ability that the camera imposes against its subjects “to reveal aspects of themselves that are fictional, to reveal themselves as the creatures of imagination, fantasy, and myth they are” (Rothman, 1997: 70), or as Morin (1985: 28) describes, “to be more real than in daily life but at the same time more false”. This interplay of reality and fiction, an intrinsic characteristic of documentary filmmaking, is foregrounded in these two last sequences of the film, in a fraternal collaboration among authors and subjects.

The sociological significance of these two scenes is a paradigm of Rouch’s “shared anthropology” and his lifelong purpose of breaking cultural and social hierarchical boundaries in human communication, and thereof the practice of anthropology. Rouch, with his participatory filmmaking, gives voice to the marginalized and creates an opportunity to a more democratized practice of ethnography (Rothman, 1997: 94). Watching the sequence in the sceening room, one cannot help but evidence the parallelism with the contemporary social media and how its users would react to a post: judgmental comments, contradictory truths, ideological alignments, and emotional bursts. Even Rouch and Morin share their own comments at the final scene, and by accepting reality and its multifaceted character offer an optimistic take on human communication and its occasional “diffculty to communicate”. Stoller (2017: 368) and Thornburg (2017: 185) relate Rouch’s work with modern ethnography and prognose the future of cultures’ communication and practice of “autoethnography” by the use of social media, fiction, drama, poetry, multi-media art and museum installations, and advances such as remote video editing and mobile digital story telling.

Chronicle of a Summer accepts human communication and its chaotic texture, but most importantly its self-similar fractal patterns of an infinite and futile search for a truth, despite knowing its subjective character or even the inexistence of it. Rouch and Morin teach us that what matters is questioning and interacting as human beings, enjoying that we can even come up with crazy ideas like these.

Filmography

Rouch, Jean & Morin, Edgar, Chronicles of a Summer/Chronique d’une été, 1961. Film. France 

Bibliography

Morin, E. (1985) ‘Chronicle of a Film’, Studies in Visual Communication, 11(1), pp. 4–29. 

Rothman, W. (1997) ‘Chronicle of a Summer’, in Documentary Film

Classics. New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, pp. 69-108.

Stoller, P. (2017) ‘Jean Rouch, ethnologue et cinéaste: Storytelling, Rouch and the Anthropological Future’, Journal des Africanistes, 87–1/2, pp. 368–378. 

Thornburg, A. (2017) ‘Digital Storytelling as Autoethnography in Anthropological Pedagogy and Practice’, in Thornburg, A. et al. (eds) Deep Stories. 1st edn. De Gruyter (Practicing, Teaching, and Learning Anthropology with Digital Storytelling), pp. 179–190.