The Factory of Facts: Against Mystification
Thursday April 8th - 8:00PM
92Y-Tribeca
200 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10013
$10
In Walter Benjamin's essay "The Image of Proust" (1929)* he writes, "all great works of literature either found a genre or dissolve one." But sometimes they do both, simultaneously, as in the case of Morin and Rouch's Chronicle of a Summer. In the very same process in which these "special cases" introduce a genre--a new method for a new form--they so perfectly execute its new rules as to render any subsequent attempt immediately outdated*.
Chronicle of a Summer exploits the then brand-new audio-visual technology, instantly bringing it to its artistic pinnacle, and demonstrating a still-unmatched conceptual and technical virtuosity. It both asks and answers all of the questions that would plague the history of direct/cinema/verite for generations. What Morin and Rouch understood then, exactly 50 years ago, was that the focus shouldn't be a mystification with the tools or the subjects; but rather on the confrontations and interventions this new technology allows. And this is perhaps the main reason to look at the film again today.
Chronicle combines an all-star cast and crew, including anthropologist and filmmaker Jean Rouch*, here teaming up with sociologist Edgar Morin*; Marceline Loridan-Ivens in the "lead"; a very young Regis Debray listed as "student"; the gorgeous handheld cinematography of Michel Brault and Raoul Coutard; and all brought together and produced by Anatole Dauman* and Argos Films.
--Chronicle of a Summer: Paris 1960 - Edgar Morin & Jean Rouch, 1961, 85 minutes
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 85 minutes | BetaSP Projection
Discussion with:
--Ayreen Anastas - filmmaker, professor; member of the 16 Beaver Group
--Jamie Berthe - PhD candidate at NYU; webmaster of maitres-fous.net
--Josh Glick - PhD candidate at Yale
Co-presented by DocTruck
Co-sponsored by the Flaherty Film Seminar
Special thanks to Steve Holmgren.
*The title of this program is taken from the writings of Dziga Vertov.
*Benjamin is writing about Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time (1927). He goes on to say it is "the result of an unconstruable synthesis in which the absorption of a mystic, the art of a prose writer, the verve of a satirist, the erudition of a scholar, and the self-consciousness of monomaniac have combined in an autobiographical work... Among these cases this is one of the most unfathomable. From its structure, which is fiction, autobiography, and commentary in one, to the syntax of endless sentences (the Nile of language, which here overflows and fructifies the regions of truth), everything transcends the norm."
*We might also think of films such as Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Chris Marker's La Jetee (1963) (also produced by Dauman), and the list goes on...
*It was the third feature film directed by Jean Rouch, after Moi, un Noir (1959) and The Human Pyramid (1961).
*Prior to directing Chronicle of a Summer, Edgar Morin wrote The Cinema, or the Imaginary Man (1956) and The Stars (1957).
*Anatole Dauman produced films by Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, Nagisa Oshima, Alain Resnais, Volker Schlondorff, and Wim Wenders, among others.
(We have previously screened Jean Rouch's Gare du Nord (1965), as well as Jackie Raynal's A Brief History of Cinema (2002/2009), a portrait of the filmmaker shot shortly before his death. This is the third screening we have presented in partnership with DocTruck, following November 21st's "Jackie Raynal: Realisation" and April 4th's "Resurrecting a Revolutionary Cinema." This is the second program we have presented at the 92nd Street Y-Tribeca, following February 17th's "The Savage Eye.")