Review of Chronicle of a Summer

Dumont, Jean-Paul. (1978). American Anthropologist, 80(4), 1020-1022.

Dumont pointed out two aspects in Rouch and Morin's approach to anthropology in this film: (1) (2) "Rouch the ethnographer and Morin the sociologist eschew the pitfalls of typologies, samplings, and generalizations" (p. 1021). In this sense, Dumont argued that their project did not study Paris but in Paris; (2) precedence of methodology over the content. He put it, "From the outset, Morin and Rouch know what their method will be but not what it will lead them to" (p. 1021).

Dumont sharply stated the reason why this film was an anthropological success:
Morin and Rouch have been able to capture a slice of life, even though in reality the film has been edited and constructed. It is not of course a neutral slice of life, but the way they have (p. 1021)perceived it. Here it is offered to the viewer with little effort on their part to be didactic about it. It is not a thesis; it has little to prove; but it is a documentation of the way in which Parisians of 1960 lived. And yet, of course, Rouch's and Morin's biases, their personalities, their sensibilities are there also. After all, they too have something to say about antisemitism, racism
and class-consciousness. (p. 1022)

For Dumont, this film does not represent Parisian live but the ideology of their existence in the summer of 1960 and it prompts an audience to meaning-making out of it, instead of providing the full meaning of the topic of the film:

"[T]he topic of the film is strongly pulled toward an intersubjectivity in gestation, whereby the construction of meaning is a process which takes place right in front of my eyes. In this sense, the film is not representative of anything, but it represents less what it was to live in Paris in the summer of 1960 than the ideology of what this experience was." (p. 1022)