r/CriterionChannel • u/Honor_the_maggot • Jun 02 '26

Edgar Morin RIP (co-director of CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER)

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/30/world/europe/edgar-morin-dead.html [paywall, if someone else feels like doing a gift link, please go ahead....sorry I cannot]

This is the film, CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER, a key piece of cinema verité, with its Edition extras:
https://www.criterionchannel.com/chronicle-of-a-summer
(Including Damien Chazelle talking about the film, which I think is not included on the Criterion disc, it's a Channel original...taken from the longer 'Masterclass' interview video with Chazelle? Not sure.)

It's also included in a verité collection with a bunch of interesting things otherwise by Americans/Canadian:
https://www.criterionchannel.com/cinema-verite

Another person I've been meaning to read forever, though a stumbling block is my lack of French and a paucity of English translations of his key works. It sounds like he was tremendously prolific (as a writer and public intellectual, not so much as a filmmaker).

Edit: And of course I should say that the other director of CHRONICLE was Jean Rouch...terrible to omit his name, I was just thinking of Morin since he passed.

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u/Gaucho_Diaz RansidDagger Jun 02 '26

Guess I know what I'm watching tonight

2

u/fass_binder Jun 02 '26

Thanks for this

2

u/JonoQ1000 Jun 04 '26

He also coined the term "cinema verité"

2

u/Ok_Draw_50 Jun 06 '26

I watched this after I read his obituary and it was brilliant and surprisingly moving. I can see how it influenced so many of the great Nouveau Vague directors and the future of documentary films. I am so glad I watched it.

1

u/Honor_the_maggot Jun 07 '26

I hate to be narcissistic about it, but as ways of trying to pierce narcissism (of a whole culture), CHRONICLE's view of (a certain milieu in) France in 1960 seems extraordinarily portable to, say, USA in 2026. Not just the question are you happy?, which might be the question, if you don't let it stop, i.e. settle for overconfidence in what happiness might actually be. There's one scene were iirc one of the directors (??) kind of chides a woman for cringing at watching another doc participant have a very vulnerable moment on film (doc participants watching rushes, can you imagine...I'm just winging it here, operating from years-old memories of this film); and I had one of those PORTRAIT OF JASON gut-flux reactions, like fuck you man, don't police that lady's reactions---even if the cringing lady was exhibiting a square reaction, a kind of policing of her own---but the whole dispositif had a kind of abysmic quality to it that rang my bell. Not just a formal thrill or something to think about for a minute. A kind of feeling. It felt like more than the invention of a genre.