Chronicle of a Summer

Jean Rouch was an ethnographic film-maker who had spent years in West Africa; Edgar Morin was a sociologist who wanted to turn the same instruments on Paris. Working with the new lightweight synchronous-sound equipment developed for the project, they made a film in the summer of 1960 that won the critics' prize at Cannes and gave the world the term cinéma vérité. It was voted the sixth greatest documentary of all time in the 2014 Sight & Sound poll.

The question that opens it — are you happy? — is put to strangers on the street by Marceline Loridan, who becomes one of the film's central figures. A group assembles: a Renault worker, students, an Ivorian student named Landry, a young woman working at Cahiers du Cinéma. They talk about work, about money, about the war in Algeria that nobody is supposed to mention. Loridan walks through Les Halles alone, recorded on a hidden mic, talking about being deported as a girl — the first time the technology allowed a person's private voice to be captured while they moved through a public space.

The film's most radical passage comes at the end, when the participants are shown the footage and asked what they make of it, and disagree loudly about who was sincere. Everything reflexive in documentary since — the camera acknowledging itself, the subject allowed to object — descends from that scene.