To point a camera at a human being and ask, “Are you happy?” is an act of both unprecedented violence and delicacy. It is a gesture that could be mistaken for sociological naivete, but which in fact conceals the cruelty of an alchemical experiment: to transform the lead of daily existence into the ephemeral, unstable gold of truth. "Chronicle of a Summer," the anomalous, pulsating artifact conceived by ethnologist Jean Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morin in the Parisian summer of 1960, is not a documentary. It is a seismograph of the soul, a philosophical inquiry disguised as a film, an anthropological safari among the tribes of the Parisian asphalt conducted by two sorcerers unafraid to show their tricks.

Cinema, at that particular turn in its history, was undergoing its greatest revolution since the advent of sound. A few blocks away, the young Turks of the Nouvelle Vague—Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol—were dismantling the grammar of classical cinema with the same joyful impetuosity as a bank heist. They used non-professional actors, shot in the streets with handheld cameras, and broke every rule of editing in pursuit of a new form of realism. Rouch and Morin, however, perform a mirror-image operation that is, in some ways, even more radical. If the Nouvelle Vague used fiction to simulate life, they used life to interrogate fiction. The question that hovers over every frame is not just “Are you happy?” but the far more vertiginous and meta-textual: “Is it possible to film the truth?”

To do so, they armed themselves with a technology that was itself a poetic manifesto: a 16mm Coutant-Mathot camera, an ultralight prototype, and the Nagra audio recorder, which for the first time allowed for synchronized direct sound without the clumsiness of studio equipment. This technological liberation allows them to tail their characters, to follow them from work to their private lives, to capture conversations in a café or solitary outpourings. The result is a cinema that breathes, that stumbles, that lives in symbiosis with its subjects. It is the official birth certificate of cinéma-vérité, a label Rouch himself preferred to the American Direct Cinema. The difference is not trivial: while their transatlantic colleagues like Pennebaker or the Maysles brothers sought to be a “fly on the wall,” invisible and objective, Rouch and Morin are proudly a “fly in the soup.” They provoke, intervene, and stimulate crisis. Theirs is not passive observation, but a Socratic midwifery through images.

The Paris that emerges is not the picture-postcard city of Hollywood musicals, nor the romantic, cinephilic one of the Cahiers du cinéma. It is a ghost city, haunted by specters. The most cumbersome specter is that of the Algerian War, a dirty, repressed conflict that snakes through conversations, in the fears of young men called up for service, in a political tension so thick you could cut it with a knife. But there are even more ancient ghosts. When Marceline Loridan, one of the protagonists, walks alone through a deserted Place de la Concorde at dawn, her voiceover recalls her father, deported to Auschwitz. The number tattooed on her arm, which the camera does not shy away from framing, becomes a black hole that sucks in all the summer’s lightness, a palimpsest of indelible pain beneath the skin of modernity. In that sequence, the film transcends sociology and becomes a meditation on memory reminiscent of the literary peregrinations of W.G. Sebald, where the contemporary landscape is infested with the invisible traces of historical catastrophe.

The cast of “non-actors” is a human cross-section of disarming power. There is Angelo, a Renault factory worker, whose description of alienating labor anticipates by a decade the workers’ struggles and the analysis of the fragmentation of work. There is Marilù, the Italian office worker tormented by a sense of guilt and inadequacy who seems to have stepped out of a Pavese novel or an Antonioni film, a soul lost in the emotional desert of the metropolis. There are the African students who discuss racism with a ruthless lucidity, unmasking the hypocrisy of French colonialism just as it was living out its final, bloody chapters. Each of them, when faced with the initial question, never gives a simple answer. Happiness reveals itself to be a fragile, bourgeois, almost obscene concept in the face of the hardship of living, political injustice, and the weight of history.

But the true stroke of genius, the moment "Chronicle of a Summer" twists in on itself like a Möbius strip, is the finale. Rouch and Morin decide to show the edited film to its own protagonists. The reaction is explosive. Some feel betrayed, others see themselves as if in a distorting mirror, still others accuse the directors of having manipulated reality. Marilù, in tears, feels “laid bare” and judged. The supposed truth captured by the camera shatters into a thousand subjectivities. This ending is one of the most extraordinary reflections on the power and responsibility of the cinematic gaze ever made. The film devours its own tail, becoming a celluloid Ouroboros. The experiment is no longer just about Parisians, but about cinema itself. By staging a “trial” of their own work, Rouch and Morin commit an act of almost unprecedented intellectual honesty, admitting that every documentary is, in the end, a construction, a point of view, a fiction of the real.

Viewed today, "Chronicle of a Summer" is an extraordinary document that works on multiple levels. It is a historical artifact of a society poised between the post-war economic boom and the anxieties that would erupt in May ’68. It is an essay in urban anthropology studying the rites, neuroses, and dreams of the Parisian tribe. But above all, it is an avant-garde work that poses epistemological questions that remain unresolved to this day. In an age of reality shows, social media, and endless performative self-narration, Rouch and Morin’s question—“How does a person behave in front of a camera?”—resonates with prophetic force. Their conclusion, whispered as they walk through the halls of the Musée de l’Homme after the screening-debate, is as bitter as it is lucid: perhaps they failed to capture the truth, but they undoubtedly created a film. And in this apparent failure lies its greatest triumph: to have shown that cinema is not a mirror to reflect the world, but a hammer with which to shape it, a tool for asking uncomfortable questions, for making the invisible visible, for transforming a simple summer into a timeless investigation of the human condition.