Paper Title
Chronicle of a Summer: New Ethnography Experiment
Abstract
This paper presents the proposal and the idea on anthropological thought of the documentary cum ethnographical experiment – ‘Chronicle of a Summer’ (1960). While this Jean Rouch’s and Edgar Morin’s film is perhaps the primordial documentary—rendered in the style called Cinema Vérité—isremembered as a masterpiece in observatory and participatory documentary film making. However, it does not belong to a discipline of ethnographic cinema in the strict sense of the term, yet it gives an emergence to new ways to Ethnography with a provocative crucial compilation of interviews and responses in it. I propose that, the film comprises of disciplinary protocol of anthropology, which advocates the incorporation of the self or the use of reflexivity to enhance the quality of ethnography. Use of reflexivity and elicitation are the results of the anthropologist’s presence with the camera rather than being ameans to a deeper truth as in Rouch’s cinéma-vérité. Arguably, the film is made in the style of Cinema- vérité but what is new is the kind of ethnographic approach taken therein.
Keywords - Cinema vérité, Anthropology, Ciné-Ethnography, Reflexive mode cinema, New Ethnographical experimentation.