Chapter IV - Chronicle of a Summer

Summary

The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory, and to do something without knowing how or why; in short, to draw a new circle. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. The way of life is wonderful; it is by abandonment.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Circles”

In the concluding sequence of Chronicle of a Summer, the pioneering experiment in “cinéma-vérité” they filmed in 1960 and released the following year, Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin walk the corridors of the Musée de l'Homme in Paris conducting a postmortem of the event that has just taken place. They have screened rough-cut sequences from their work-in-progress to the ordinary men and women of various walks of life who are in it, whose everyday lives are what the film is about, and presided over a discussion, at times heated, of the film's strengths and weaknesses.

A chagrined Morin sums this discussion up by saying, “They either criticized our characters as not being true to life or else they found them too true.” That is, they complained that the people in the film came across as actors who masked their true selves, or else as exhibitionists who stripped their souls bare to the point of indecency. Morin laments the audience's unwillingness or inability to recognize sincerity when it is, as he puts it, “a bit more than life-size.”