(Chronique d'un été). This landmark documentary, one of the first shot with the lightweight, mobile camera that became a key tool of cinema verité, was an influence on the French New Wave and subsequent documentary filmmaking. To capture the mood of Paris in the summer of 1960, filmmaker Jean 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 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. As an alternative to the metaphor of the hunter-cameraman, Rouch sees in this dance a transformation of the cameraman, with his mechanical eye and electronic ear, into a state which he calls, 'by analogy with phenomena of possession, the “cine-trance”.' For Rouch, the audience is the subject: ‘Film is the only method I have to show another just how I see him.' ”

Read Richard Brody's recent New Yorker appreciation of Chronicle of a Summer.