When the French filmmaker Jean Rouch died in February, in a car crash in Niger, at the age of 86, cinema lost a true explorer. Rouch's life work focused on Africa, where he made ethnographic films in the cinema verité style of which he was a pioneer. “Rouch aimed for the immediacy of television, without its superficiality. He believed that the camera's intervention stimulated people to greater spontaneity, expression and truth without asking them...to act as though the camera was not there” (The Guardian, London). He applied the same theory to films made with and about the French such as Chronicle of a Summer.

(Chronique d'un été). “Are you happy?” That is the question posed by the interview-sociologist Edgar Morin to passersby in Paris in the summer of 1960. Chronicle of a Summer is perhaps the most sophisticated anthropological film yet made-involving psychodrama, self-presentations by director Jean Rouch and Morin, comments on the film by the subjects themselves. Rouch calls upon ethnographic filmmakers to climb down from the “observation post” stance of the zoom, to take their cameras into their hands and enter into a ballet improvised to the movements of their subjects.