Chronique d’un été (1961) co-directed by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin is recognised as one of the most innovative documentary films made. The most important innovations of the film relate to what Nichols (1991) calls the interactive mode of representation, introduced for the first time by Flaherty in Nanook of the North (1922), and the reflexive mode of representation in documentary film, first seen in Vertov’s Man with a Moving Camera (1929). Rouch (1974) calls these two filmmakers the first geniuses. Chronique brings together and redefines these modes of representation into a new form of documentary film that is often referred to as cinema verite. The strength of this film lays in my opinion in this interplay between interaction and reflexion, because it shows how one depends on and informs the other. I want to outline in this entry the forms of interaction and reflexion present in the film, their mutual constitution, and explore how they influenced and were influenced by documentary filmmaking, ethnographic film and anthropology.

Interactions

The interaction mode of representation refers to the display of the encounter between the filmmaker(s) and the subjects of the film (Nichols 1991). First, the most common form of interaction in documentary film is through interviews. This interaction was made possible by the portable synchronous sound recording equipment developed in the 1950’s. In Chronique we see the directors interviewing, especially Morin. The latter interviews Mary Lou, the Italian immigrant working in the redaction of the famous Cahiers du Cinema, Jacques and Simone, a middle-class family, Jean Pierre, a student and his former lover Marceline, a researcher, and even his own children. This type of interaction has become ubiquitous in documentary, TV and sometimes one can see it in fiction film too. It is also still one of the most utilised methods of gathering qualitative data and there is probably no anthropological or ethnographic work, visual, textual or otherwise, that does not employ interviews.

Second, the filmmakers interact by creating situations for conversations to take place between the subjects and themselves. The scenes where several people stand at a table drinking and discussing are very much part of this type of interaction. As is the Saint Tropez trip. One exemplary scene is when Rouch asks at one of these get togethers the African students at the table if they know what Marceline’s tattoo represents, provoking a conversation about the cross cultural perception of tattoos, numbers and the Holocaust. Another one of these scenes is the one when Morin introduces Landry, the African student, to Angelo, the worker at the Renault factory provoking a discussion about racism and working class living conditions. This form of interaction has also become pervasive in documentary film and TV shows. Michael Moore’s Roger and Me (1989) is a famous example of documentary film uses this type of interaction. A more recent and successful documentary using this form is Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2012), where a member of the far right paramilitary group that killed 1 million people in the 1960s in Indonesia for alleged communist affiliation after a failed coup is confronted with his killing practices. But it can be seen also in reality TV shows like An Idiot Abroad (2010-2012) or The Amazing Race (2001- ). This form of interaction anticipated the dialogic turn in anthropology, popularized in the early works of Crapanzano (1980), Dwyer (1982) and Rabinow (1977). In ethnographic film one can see it pushed to a more complex situation in Stephane Breton’s Eux et moi (2001).

A third form of interaction is one in which the filmmakers encourage the subjects to create and perform psychodramas (or sociodramas). This is a ‘strategy of encouraging subjects to play out their lives before the camera in order to release otherwise hidden aspects of their imaginations’ (Henley 2010). It has been a form present in Flaherty’s Nannok from which Rouch got inspired and which he used before and after Chronique in some of his ethnofictions: Moi, un noir (1958), La pyramide humaine (1961), Jaguar (1967), Petit a Petit (1969), Cocorico Monsieur Poulet (1974). Most of the observational footage showing the main characters in Chronique is played out by the film’s subjects. But the one which had the most impact is the scene of Marceline walking through the Concorde Square, recounting her father’s and her family’s experience in the concentration camps. This form of interaction in ethnographic film developed into a body of visual and textual work that promotes indigenous media production. It has also been fairly present reality TV shows, as well as in documentaries, like in Born into Brothels (2004), the Academy Awards winner of best documentary feature film. In the latter, the representation of sex workers’ children lives through their own photographs of their everyday becomes more militant – telling their story themselves is not only for the visual pleasure but to instigate the viewer to action and to give them representational agency. Renzo Martens used the same form of interaction but to a different effect in his Episode III: Enjoy Poverty (2008), where the empowering of the subjects never occurs and the promise of a better life turns out to be an illusion. The problem with this form and the previous one is that it always borders the limits of what is ethical. In fact, most of the films employing these forms are criticised for their ethical position.

A fourth type of interaction is between the subjects and their visual representation created by the filmmakers, which is done at the end of the film. In a sense this third form contains the previous, second form. The directors create the situation for conversations to take place between the film’s subjects and themselves but in this case the conversation is mediated by how the filmmakers represents the subjects. The filmmakers are not only the creators of the interactive situation but also its subject, opening themselves up for criticism coming from their subjects. This ‘feedback strategy’ has been a less explored form of interaction on display in documentary or ethnographic film, although it has been used by filmmakers in the process of making the film. However, this might be one way of avoiding the problematic ethics of the two previous forms, even though it did not help much in the case of Chronique.

Reflexions

According to Nichols (1991), the reflexion mode of representation is one in which the focus is on the filmmakers’ encounter with the audience. The process of representation basically becomes a subject of the film, like in the scene of Chronique were the subject watch the edited film. As Nichols (1991) argues, the interactive mode of representation is a form of reflexivity. Hence, the forms of interaction outlined above overlap with the forms of reflexivity used in Chronique. Nichols (1991) identifies two major forms of reflexivity, political and formal, as well as five variations of the formal form: stylistic, deconstructive, interactive, ironic and parodic/satiric.

Out of these, one of the forms used in Chronique is the stylistic reflexivity, achieved by breaking with the convention of documentary film that the filmmakers should be invisible. This has been done before by Vertov in his Man with a Moving Camera. Unlike in the latter, the man with the camera is not seen in Chronique, but the filmmakers are seen as recurrent characters in the film and the sound equipment, the technological innovation that made this film possible in the first place, is revealed in the last scene taped to Rouch’s body. Often the interview interaction form is used in conjunction with this form of reflexivity. The filmmakers are not only interacting with their subjects through the interview or by creating conversational situations but they are also shown doing it. And, like the interview interaction, this form of reflexivity has become mainstream. Hence, a convention that a contemporary reflexive film would need to break in order to expose its conventionality?

The second form of reflexivity is outlined by the presentation of the motive and method of the film in the beginning and in the conclusion at the end of the film. This is also a stylistic reflexion that makes the film narrative logic resemble more a scientific paper than a novel, breaking in a way with the poetic perspectives seen in Flaherty or Grierson. The directors achieve this reflexivity in the introduction of the film both by using a conventional voice commentary over establishing shots, but also through a conversation between the two filmmakers and one of the main characters of the film that follows the establishing shots. The voice over says that this is “a new experience of cinema verite”, while Morin develops the intention addressing Marceline: “What Rouch and I want to do is a film about how you live […] what do you do with your live”. The voice over says how this is done “[t]his film was not played by actors but was lived by men and women who devoted some moments of their existence”, while Morin says to Marceline that she will not know the questions they will ask and that in fact they don’t know them either. A similar stylistic reflexivity can be seen also in Trinh Minh-Ha’s Reassemblage (1982).

The first mode of representation of the motive and methods positions the film in a conventional expository mode of representation typical of Flaherty and Grierson, the second places it in the observational mode (see Nichols 1991 about the characteristics of these modes – if also discussed them in a previous post). I wonder if this has been an accident or if it is the result of disagreement between the directors. It clearly marks a breaking point in Rouch’s style, who prior to Chronique employed the expository mode and after it resorted more to the observational one. But regardless of the reasons, this apparently redundant edit manages to create an interesting deconstructive effect, similar to the one in Chris Marker’s Letters from Siberia (1958) scene where the same footage is shown three times in a row using each time a different voice and soundtrack re-signifying the footage and thus radically altering the viewer’s perception of it. It shows that the directors were not reflexive only about the scope and method of their inquiry but also the visual form it takes. Several decades after Chronique Timothy Asch and Napoleon Chagnon have employed this deconstructive reflexivity in their Yanomami series, of which the 30 minutes The Ax Fight (1975) is the most well known. In Reassemblage Trinh Minh-Ha also uses repetition to create a deconstructive effect. Her strategy is closer to that of Marker than that of Rouch and Morin or Asch and Chagnon.

The Ax Fight however raises some questions about the relation between reflexivity and interaction. Namely, how much of the interaction between filmmakers and their subjects is reflected upon? It has been suggested that the fight was provoked by the filmmakers, who in their attempt to interact with the Yanomami have traded objects like machete’s and that this created conflicts within their society over who has access to these resources. Hence, the fight is less the result of some inherent predisposition to align oneself with the more genetically close member of the group than the result of struggle over resources. When confronted with this hypothesis in a interview for Adam Curtis’ The Trap (2007) Chagnon got angry and left the interview. But Chronique manages to address this problem in a form of ethical reflexivity. The most eloquent scene in this regard is the one where Rouch, Morin and Angelo discuss about the problems the latter has encountered at work with his supervisor that might have been caused by his participation in the film.

Rouch and Morin also employ an ironic reflexive form. It appears at the beginning when we find out that the filmmakers will ask questions to people about how they live and first they will start with Marceline who says that she works as a researcher in a marketing research company and that her job is to make interviews, analyse them and report the findings – which is what Rouch and Morin are doing. When Rouch asks if she likes it she replies “No, not at all!”. Then the next scene shows her on the streets of Paris asking people if they are happy. It is used both in Reassemblage and in Martens Episode III: Enjoy Poverty extensively. The ironic reflexivity however is not used often for, like in the interaction forms on which it rests, is always tinkering the limits of the ethical.

The ironic reflexivity moves into parody and satire in the scenes from Saint Tropez when Sophie, ‘a cover girl’ becomes one of the character of the film and a conversation between her and Landry about Western visual culture begins. The parodic and satiric emerges because of the intervention of the filmmakers in creating this conversation and the cross-cultural interaction between the film’s subjects. Landry is paired with Sophie to reveal the double standards of the Westerners, between nudity at home, the women in bikini followed by photographers, and nudity in the colonies, the women in certain region of Africa that wear only a leave and are being laughed at. The visual juxtaposition between Landry who is fully dressed, unlike the image of the African men in ethnographic films, walking side by side with Sophie, who wears her cover girl revealing shorts and top, is elaborating on the self-reflexive parody/satire form. This reflexion becomes more clear towards the end of the film, when after the screening of the film to the film’s subjects one of the women in the audience criticises the emotional exposure of Mary Lou during the interview with Morin as being too indecent. It shows how conventional and acceptable the cover girl body exposure became in visual culture, although as Sophie says, she does it only for money, it’s a job, a pose, a pretend, and how the directors’ exploration of the possibility of revealing someone’s authentic self in front of the camera is both disrupting and reproducing this convention.

Another form of reflexivity, a political reflexivity, is present in the content not the exposure of the intention of making the film. A voice commentary over establishing shots of Parisian street life announces that “[t]his film was not played by actors but was lived by men and women who devoted some moments of their existence to a new experience of cinema verite”. The scene ends and the next one starts with Rouch addressing Morin and saying that the idea of bringing people at the same table (literally) to have a discussion is an excellent idea, but: “I am not sure if we will be able to record a normal conversation as if the camera wouldn’t be present”. Rouch turns towards Marceline and says “for example, we don’t know if Marceline will be able to relax and be able to have an absolutely normal conversation”. Morin replies “she can try”. Reflexivity here is an inquiry into film as a medium of representation and its ability to convey ‘the truth’. Can film record, represent reality and if so what kind of reality is represented? Is Mary Lou’s emotional confession real or too real? How is reality visually codified and what is the political implication of these codes? How and to what extend can reality be visually de-codified and to what political outcomes?

Beyond interaction and reflexion

In Chronique interaction and reflexion constitute each other. The filmmakers interact with their subjects in different forms because of their reflexivity of the medium and their reflexivity is revealed in different forms throughout these interactions. However, interactive and reflexive forms are not used for the sake of interaction and reflexion. In fact, besides the innovation brought to film grammar, Chronique reveals the social interactions that define the Paris of the 1960s. The film shows through the portrayal of various encounters the effects of colonialism, nationalism, the failure of revolutionary action, middle class conformism, working class struggle, racism, sexism and paternalism. It shows these however by being reflexive about the partial reality or the cinematic truth that the film manages to capture as an inherently ambivalent medium of representation.

References

Crapanzano, Vincent. 1980. Tuhami, portrait of a Moroccan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Dwyer, Kevin. 1982. Moroccan dialogues: anthropology in question. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Henley, Paul. 2009. The adventure of the real: Jean Rouch and the craft of ethnographic cinema. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Nichols, Bill. 1991. Representing Reality. Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Rabinow, Paul. 1977. Reflections on fieldwork in Morocco. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Rouch, Jean. 1974. “The Camera and Man”. Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication. 1 (1): 37-44.