Please note: we regret that due to a scheduling conflict, Michel Brault will be unable to attend this screening in person as originally announced.

(Chronique d'un été). Impressed by the innovative technique of Brault's early short The Snowshoers, French director Jean Rouch recruited Brault (along with Raoul Coutard, Roger Morillère, and Jean-Jacques Tarbes) to shoot this landmark documentary, using the lightweight, mobile camera that became a key tool of cinema verité. To capture the mood of Paris in the summer of 1960, Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morin posed a provocative question to passers-by: "Are you happy?" Late UC Berkeley professor William Nestrick called Chronicle of a Summer “perhaps the most sophisticated anthropological film yet made-involving psychodrama, self-presentations by the director and sociologist, 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.”