美好的五月 Le Joli Mai(1963)
简介：
- 影片以1962年5月的巴黎风貌为题材，背景却是法国结束了与阿尔及利亚的战争使国家真正实现和平。影片分为两个部分，第一部分是通过对各色人物的采访来反映当时法国社会的众生相，第二部分则是针对刚结束的战争，请来不同的人物谈论和调查阿尔及利亚事件的真相，采用了公开行动与私人谈话的交替方式。
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原文地址：
这是巴黎1962年的5月：太阳照耀了185小时，比平时少了40小时；平均气温为华氏53°；50吨蔬菜被运送进来；3.6吨水果和1.25吨土豆、2.1万吨肉类、44吨牛奶被消耗；84亿旧法币被存进国家银行；降雨量43毫米，灰尘600吨；雪铁龙制造了2.6万辆车；迎来了3762名新生儿，为2036人哀悼，参加1055次婚礼……
这是一个直观但苍白的“数字巴黎”，但一切都在消耗都在发生都在变化，“但是对于巴黎的5065名囚犯来说，5月的每一天都是一样的。”变化中的不变——当克里斯·马克在播报数字巴黎的时候，镜头是从白天延伸夜晚有从夜晚过渡到白天的凯旋门，匆匆的行人和车辆组成了一个活动的巴黎，而他的最后一个镜头是五月的监狱：六方形，铁窗口和屋顶上的十字架，它们是静态的，在凯旋门，人流和车流以及白天黑夜的交替中，对比的世界里指向另一个巴黎。
5065名囚犯在监狱里，在牢房里，在封闭而不变的生活里，或者他们也感受到了185小时的光照、53°的平均气温、43毫米的降雨量，或者他们也和800万巴黎人一起消耗掉了水果牛奶和食物，但是对于他们来说，巴黎仿佛是隔阂的。但是，当克里斯·马克将最后一个镜头给了独具特色的六方形监狱，世界并不是被分离的，变与不变都是巴黎的一部分，都是五月的一天，“我们的命运总是相连的。”于是，“只要贫穷还存在，就没有富足；只要悲伤还存在，就没有快乐；只要监狱还存在，就没有自由。”
5065名囚犯在监狱里，并不代表着所有巴黎人都没有自由，克里斯·马克相关连的命运所指涉的是生存，生活和生命，是巴黎五月应该迎来的美好，是消除封闭世界面对的自由，“真理也许不是目的地，但也许在路上。”在路上意味着没有到达目的地，但是它来了，向着巴黎而来，走过五月而来，要成为未来而来。一种期许，一种希望，在最后的抒情中似乎变得乐观，“我们见到了自由人，这才是电影的最大意义。”
真理在路上，没有监狱而迎来自由，命运相连在一起，克里斯·马克似乎就喊出了巴黎的宣言，似乎就要看见一个“美好的五月”。从第一部《埃菲尔铁塔的祈祷》到第二部《方托马斯的回归》，从巴黎人的生活观到政治观，克里斯·马克像是以现象为切入口，将镜头对准五月的巴黎，越来越沉重地谈论巴黎的今天和明天，对于他来说，这种意图甚至是一种倒置的运用：先谈巴黎目前的困境，巴黎人的困惑，然后再让巴黎人说出对未来生活的向往，也就是在“方托马斯的回归”之后探讨巴黎问题，然后让所有巴黎人在埃菲尔铁塔下祈祷。为什么要倒置过来？难道真正美好的五月只是一种祈祷一种奢望，在存在监狱的巴黎，这一切这不过是一种天方夜谭？
“献给幸福的人们”是电影的题辞，从一开始，关于幸福就成为克里斯·马克想要阐述的一个主题词，“这是世界上最美的城市吗？”巴黎，是浪漫之都，是国际化城市，当镜头下的女人缓缓走向塔尖的高处，她所看见的巴黎正是克里斯·马克所俯瞰的城市，他们在行走，影子在行走，阳光下的阴影组合在一起，巴黎是800万人的巴黎，巴黎也是800个影子的巴黎，所以在俯瞰的世界里，克里斯·马克几乎以反讽的口吻问道：“是什么使得巴黎在五月变得如此美好？”
1962年5月的巴黎真的如此美好吗？凌晨5点的城市醒来，广播里传出最新的新闻，人们上街工作，街道开始热闹起来，证券交易所里热闹非凡，一对情侣畅想着美好生活，新的住宅高楼正在规划，幸福生活似乎从安置在自己想要的那个小区开始。的确，巴黎人对生活充满了美好期待，方知街上摆服装摊的男人说：“工作就是为了忘掉工作。”喜欢杀人电影和历史电影的他每天忙碌工作，就是为了赚到足够的钱，“政治对我来说就是要活得好。”幕费塔街的伯格纳特已经计划好了买电视机，他肯定了这个城市的改造行动，也对自家搬迁有了一种目标：“我想要搬到温馨友好的街道去。”广播里正在播出新建设的居民区将朝着现代化的目标迈进；种花的女人已经失业了，但是从她微笑的脸上依然能读出乐观的心态，“我爱花。”她说，尽管现在的塑料花比不上真花哪那样鲜艳；孚月广场正在进行诗歌大会，一个男人高声说着：“我们寻找美，就像诗歌寻找诗意。”而在证券交易市场，两个未成年人关注股价变化，“有钱就好，我喜欢权力。”一个说；女人一家终于有了安置房，过不了几天，她和丈夫、8个孩子和一个收养的“侄女”将搬进大的房子，即使一张大床还有睡4个孩子，她也已经很高兴了，“感觉像是新婚不久。”明天将要迎来21岁生日的女孩紧紧拉着男朋友的手，在镜头前总是微笑，即使10天后男人要去阿尔及利亚，但是他们仍然相信美好的爱情不会因为时空隔离而冲淡，他们畅想幸福会一直持续着……
这是巴黎人的生活，这是巴黎人的一天，这是巴黎人的五月，关于财富，关于物质，关于住房，关于爱情，在“埃菲尔铁塔的祈祷”中，一个充满期待的明天正徐徐展开。但是这些普通巴黎人真实的一天，是不是都有美好的畅想，都有幸福的期许？“黄昏是否还有猫头鹰在叫？”克里斯·马克像是在问他们，也在问自己，密涅瓦的猫头鹰在黄昏起飞，它携带的是理性，是反思，甚至是“对反思的反思”，而在克里斯·马克的镜头下，一个女人的确抚摸着猫头鹰的头，那只猫头鹰带着满足的表情，“鸽子是肮脏和邪恶的，猫头鹰才漂亮，快乐而深沉。”再次说到猫头鹰，是在诗歌大会上，漂亮的女人手上抱着一只白鸽，却木然地看着她——男人像是在朗诵一首诗，白鸽和猫头鹰的对比，仿佛变成了感性和理性、现象和内质的区别，所以，从埃菲尔铁塔之上俯瞰巴黎，就是为了让密涅瓦的猫头鹰开始起飞，开始对这个城市进行反思。
卖衣服的男人为什么抱怨工作太忙，为什么不关心真正的政治？伯格纳特为什么不愿搬迁离开这里？证券交易所面前的两个小孩为什么对权力有着那么大的欲望？被安置的妇人怎么会有8个孩子，还收养了一个“侄女”？相信未来幸福会持续的女孩难道不害怕自己的男友去了阿尔及利亚却永不返回？其实“真实电影”里的巴黎人生活，只是一种现象，克里斯·马克需要从这些日常生活入手，审视巴黎美好生活的可能性。第二部分《方托马斯的回归》似乎一下子就把巴黎推向了一个悬疑的世界。“1962年5月，方托马斯似乎从他的墓穴中出来，将他巨大的阴影投射到了巴黎。”
《方托马斯》是巴黎尽人皆知的一个虚构形象，他是Marcel Allain和Pierre Souvestre两人在1911年-1913年撰写的惊险小说，32部小说展现的舞台是第一次世界大战前的巴黎。在小说里，被塑造的方托马斯是犯罪天才、恐怖的代言人、恶魔的使者，他领导着一个庞大的犯罪集团，在战前歌舞升平的巴黎，以他那近乎不可思议的头脑，制造着一件件骇人听闻的犯罪案件，手段高超狡诈，每次均玩弄警方于股掌之中。而当1962年5月的巴黎出现了这一道阴影，方托马斯到底是谁？第一部分的最后被采访者是一对情侣，男人10天后将去阿尔及利亚，这是克里斯·马克故意设置好的情节，第一部分结束，就像是男人的消失，他在走向战场的那一刻让世界从第一部跳到了第二部，从日常生活跳到了政治博弈，从埃菲尔铁塔下的祈祷跳到了方托马斯的阴影——关键词：阿尔及利亚。这个词意味着什么？殖民主义？战争？权力？种族主义？还是社会革命？
在方托马斯从墓穴中钻出来的这个五月之前，1962年2月8日，在巴黎发生了一次大事件：警察向反对殖民的游行者开枪，8人倒下而死亡。“塑性炸弹”成了法语新名词，它等同于德语的“暴动”，而这个同源词几乎就和德国法西斯联系在一起：“此地长眠着E·勒马尔尚，1962年2月8日死于反法西斯战争。”人们举着蜡烛，出现在葬礼仪式上，8个生命在和平的巴黎倒下。当3个月过去，“这个5月到底发生了什么？”克里斯·马克面对摄像机前面的巴黎人，这样问道。5月的巴黎是糟糕的天气和运气，5月的巴黎土豆涨价，工人罢工，5月的巴黎是“法国内战迫在眉睫”，5月的巴黎“勿谈国事”——对于巴黎人来说，政治变成一个具有恐怖意味的符号，像方托马斯的阴影，在那场冲突、那次葬礼中变成了投射在他们身上难以逃脱的恐惧。
有人说：“我们正变得民主，也许。”有人说：“不卷入政治是幸福的。”有人说：“独裁可以忍受，但需要一个睿智的独裁者。”即使有人拒绝克里斯·马克的采访，把扛摄像机的人都看成是“政府的马屁精”，但是这也只是生活在巴黎的巴黎人的观点，而那些从异国他乡来到巴黎，甚至遭受过战争和屈辱的人，又如何回答“这个5月到底发生了什么”这个问题？一个从从非洲来的黑人说从小祖母就告诉他不要去法国，因为他们曾经统治过我们，但是他还是偷偷来了，“他们打败了我们，这是我的第一印象；我现在打不过他们，这是我的第二印象。”他对克里斯·马克这样说，“但是我来到发过之后，发现这里的白人都是平凡的人。”他接着说，也许这可以称为对巴黎的“第三印象”，从第一、第二印象隐含着反殖民思想的反抗情绪，到第三印象的平等，或许也是巴黎真正需要宽容的地方，而这个黑人还喜欢巴黎，他认为这里的文明程度更高，科技更发达，生活更好。
和他有着不同感受的是另一个年轻人，从阿尔及利亚来，因为有着一身的技能，他在巴黎找到了工作，但是因为抢走了另一个巴黎人的饭碗，他只好去找第二份工作，但是更惨的是，他因为言辞有抱怨被人告密，喝醉了酒的警察闯进了他居住的工棚，将他带走最后还送到了精神病医院——在他讲述遭遇的时候，克里斯·马克却让画面播放了阴暗潮湿狭窄的工棚过道，几个孩子正在过道上。这个年轻人遭遇了不公，甚至遭受了种族主义的戕害，所以他既不想回到在没有亲人的故乡，也对自己的未来不报希望，他不相信政治，没有宗教信仰，当然更不相信来世，对于他来说，巴黎意味着孤独，意味着偏狭，但是作为可能的未来巴黎人，他用充满温情的口气说：“人与人不是生来就应该相互憎恨的。”
殖民主义、种族主义的做法，甚至法西斯主义的镇压，使得巴黎的方托马斯变成了另一种象征，就像电影里逐渐转型的形象，他变成了一个惩恶扬善的正义英雄，在巴黎的5月，在反对战争、反对独裁，反对殖民的呼声中，成了讽刺政府与公共媒体的一面镜子——在“真实电影”的采访过程中，总是出现猫，一只躺在那里的猫，一只张开大嘴的猫，一只安静的猫，当猫在克里斯·马克的镜头下出现，它以一种温情方式给电影带来了超越人类利益的启示，加上黄昏的猫头鹰已经起飞，5月的巴黎在反思、批评和言说中开始面向明天。
所以从现象到内质，从生活到政治，从埃菲尔铁塔的祈祷到方托马斯的回归，克里斯·马克所构筑的影像5月并非是一种倒置，它在最后打开问题寻找答案的过程中已经把巴黎赤裸裸展现出来，而真正的目的是为了让真理走在路上，是为了让命运彼此相连，当然，最后也是为了让巴黎5月的每一天都在变化中迎来新生，没有贫穷，没有绝望，没有监狱——“巴黎在五月变得如此美好。”是原因，也是最后的结果。
- 每天说出听进，再说溜嘴不走心的人，也会有几句真言，细听端详，越想越不可捉摸。从别人的故事里听出时代的脉搏，宇宙在琐碎的语言之间跳动，像废墟里的猫。1962年的巴黎很像80年代的中国，动荡过后，世代流传的淳朴受到冲击，人、车、鸟在同一个时空穿梭，路径无序；旧屋厚重，羞愧地苦着脸，只有孩子露出容易满足的笑容。人扎堆站在马路上，好像生来就在那里，等待着那个五月。
有人能够轻易就“解放天性”，有人永远紧绷，其实天性本善本恶，大相径庭，自己都不知道释放出来的真我是如何一幅模样，未见得都是撒泼打滚吧。Chris Marker的采访大都是正儿八经的，问题直接、不间断，回答者毫无隐瞒之意，音节突突突喷向天空。法语有一种优雅而滑稽的意味，镜头里的这些法国人也是（包括导演在内）——同时具备这两种品质，既滑稽，又优雅。1962年的移动镜头，走上街头去拍摄，现场随机收音，技术为表达方式提供更多可能性；噪音和无声都是人生的配乐，电影里的音乐是单独的表演，两次音乐响起，都配以黑屏，同时仿佛听到一个命令：倾听！
Chris狂热地爱猫，甚至专门拍过一部《巴黎墙上的猫》，1962年的五月，他用猫的表情来回答政治、经济、文化的种种问题——绝妙的点子！因为无从回答。现场采访了这么多形形色色的人，几乎每张嘴都在说，沉默的呼哧呼哧喘气，但没人能真的解答什么，这些语言的意义在于它们在五月集结为一部电影。绝望和希望总是并肩，站在哪一边都是徒劳，尾声的镜头快速穿梭在巴黎市内，写出这样的旁白真令人钦佩：“只要贫穷还存在，就没有富足；只要悲伤还存在，就没有快乐；只要监狱还存在，就没有自由。”
孩童时坐在飞驰的公共汽车上希望它永远不要停的心情，今天又悄悄占据了我。 冗长的黑白纪录片，播放到一半时身后传来极富节奏感的呼噜声，忍不住发笑。
穿越时间空间，我对1962年5月的巴黎是有些新奇的。对巴黎有浪漫滤镜，这是座多么美的城市，爬上埃菲尔铁塔，道路纵横交错，楼宇鳞次栉比，俯瞰众生，灵感之神轻轻降临在你身上。印象中巴黎的人们，也是热爱革命勇于抗争的，血色中政权更迭，背后是永不服输的民族精神。
影片里出现形形色色的人——只关心卖出西服幻想自己变成超人绝不要花钱在电影院思考的男人，热爱侍弄花草的妇人，投身工会的牧师，享受当下的年轻爱侣，曾被种族歧视却将法国看作母亲的阿尔及利亚帅小伙，满口成功学衬衫上却爬着蜘蛛的年轻人......人们谈论股市谈论宗教谈论政治，生活得如此紧密，不同的人群彼此间却又像隔着银河。
未来是什么？我们都信誓旦旦说未来这会是片自由的土地，当下却下意识绕过敏感话题。可是，尚有人在奋斗在争取在流血流泪，剩下的人却仍只关心于自己的生活？我们都知道，死亡是个必然降临的节日，你在害怕什么呢，害怕因为自己高尚的行为而死去吗？
当导演一行从监狱出发，用全然陌生的目光看待这座城市和城市里的人们，他看到人们的心中有座监狱。我们有太多不确定和没把握，渴求普通的幸福内心却仿佛走在悬崖边上。监狱是我们亲手造就，正如影片最后所言，“只要贫穷存在，你就不富有；只要绝望存在，你就不快乐；只要监狱存在，你就不自由。”你当然可以选择闭上眼呼呼大睡，只是。
人们的命运终究是紧密相连的。
Amy Taubin on Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s Chronique d’un été (1961) and Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme’s Le Joli Mai (1963)
Still from Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a Summer), 1961, 16 mm and 35 mm transferred to 35 mm, black-and-white, sound, 90 minutes. Photo: The Criterion Collection.
IT IS SURELY SOMETHING more than a felicitous coincidence that two foundational films in the history of the modern documentary—Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s Chronique d’un été(Chronicle of a Summer, 1961) and Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme’s Le Joli Mai (The Lovely Month of May, 1963)—employ the same opening gambit: posing the eternal question “Are you happy?” to a seemingly random selection of Parisians. Inured as we are now to the tired charms of the “man on the street” interview, it may come as something of a shock to those who wisely seek out the newly restored versions of these works how utterly contemporary they still seem in form, content, and iconography. (Despite its recognized importance, Chronicle was all but unavailable in the US until the issued it on Blu-ray and DVD a few months ago; Le Joli Mai, which has been even more difficult to see, opens at in New York on September 13 and will subsequently be released on DVD by .)
For those who know only a modern-day Paris, the various statistics cited by Marker—that one in twelve Parisian homes had no electricity and one in twenty no water—may, to some degree, undercut the sense of immediacy that is the strength of both films. But the core issues of documentary form—in Chronicle, the problem of truth (vérité) as relative to the effect that the camera’s presence has on the people and situations it records (in theory, objectively) as well as to the parti pris of the filmmakers; in Le Joli Mai, how that very bias can be rendered essayistic, even poetic—have rarely been engaged as directly and articulately in the fifty years since. Nor are the social, economic, and political concerns that both films address—the growing disparity between rich and poor, racism, the labor struggle, technology and the threat of unemployment, overpopulation, gentrification, and a festering warfare state in which torture and murder are passively countenanced by the majority of citizens—any less critical today. Both films spoke then to the future that is now.
Chronicle of a Summer and Le Joli Mai owe their existence to a revolutionary piece of film technology: the portable, sync-sound, 16-mm camera. In the late 1950s, the documentarian Richard Leacock and the producer Robert Drew began experimenting with jerry-built sync-sound rigs, using one of those cumbersome but liberating units to shoot Primary (1960), the groundbreaking work of what in North America would be dubbed Direct Cinema. Rouch and Morin, who were fascinated by the mobile (although nonsynchronous) camera work in Karel Reisz’s We Are the Lambeth Boys (1958), a key film of Britain’s Free Cinema movement, tasked André Coutant, an engineer at the French camera company Éclair, with building a portable sync-sound rig; they subsequently hired the Canadian cameraman Michel Brault, who had experience with a handheld sync camera (the blimped Arriflex) to work, along with Raoul Coutard (soon to become the indispensable New Wave cinematographer) and two other camera operators, on Chronicle. Although Rouch and Morin employed several kinds of cameras—Chronicle was shot in both 16 mm and 35 mm—it was the prototype of the KMT Coutant-Mathot Éclair that allowed them to explore a more complex relationship of place to action and speech than had previously been possible in documentary film. As critic Raymond Bellour remarks in Un Été + 50 (2011), Florence Dauman’s fascinating documentary on the making of Chronicle (an extra on the Criterion disc), “With the synchronous [handheld] camera, sound led the way and cinema gained the power to sneak into reality, right into the heart of things.” A year after Rouch and Morin’s film won the International Critics Prize at Cannes, Marker and Lhomme would use the KMT to shoot Le Joli Mai.
Rouch and Morin were both leftists concerned with issues of racism and colonialism; both believed that people could change personally and politically by working and conversing openly with one another. Morin was (and, at the age of ninety-two, still is) a sociologist, political activist, and film theorist; his Le Cinéma ou l’homme imaginaire (The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man, 1956) is one of the most engaging and provocative texts on why we are enamored of movies. He was also a central strategist in the resistance to the war in Algeria. Rouch, for his part, was a celebrated ethnographic filmmaker, working mainly in French West Africa. Chronicle largely developed out of two feature-length experimental fiction-documentary hybrids he had recently made: Moi, un noir (Me, a Black Man, 1958) and Le Pyramide humaine (The Human Pyramid, 1961 [shot in 1959]). But Chronicle’s opening and closing scenes leave no doubt that it was a fully collaborative work. Rouch subsequently described the process as his film direction of Morin’s sociological investigation.
Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme, Le Joli Mai (The Lovely Month of May), 1963, 16 mm transferred to 35 mm, black-and-white, sound, 165 minutes. Photo: Icarus Films.
Chronicle begins with a short statement, explaining that the film was made not with actors but “with a few people who gave their time to an experiment in cinema verité.” We then see Rouch, Morin, and Marceline, one of the principal subjects, sitting in a comfortable living room, talking and chain-smoking. Almost everyone in the film lights up in order to formulate a thought, a ritual that seems more antiquated than anything else depicted. Morin and Rouch explain to Marceline that they are going to pose the question “How do you live?” to a number of friends and acquaintances and then film their replies. The answer might entail a description of the person’s daily life or an assessment of whatever it is they do—and whether it makes them happy. The three also discuss whether the presence of the camera will make it impossible for people to speak and behave without self-consciousness. Since Marceline is a practiced interviewer (she works for psychosociologists), they send her out with a microphone and a tape recorder to buttonhole passing Parisians. That this setup seems a hapless spoof of the person-on-the-street format that was all the rage on French TV at the time only highlights, by way of contrast, how complex Morin and Rouch’s relationship to their subjects and the responses that they elicit become over the course of the filming. In Chronicle of a Summer, no one is unambivalently happy.
The film then proceeds episodically but with remarkable fluidity, although not at all in “real time”: Every sequence was edited from multiple, overlapping takes. (The invaluable Un Été + 50, which makes deft and sometimes hilarious use of outtakes, clarifies Rouch and Morin’s process.) People go about their daily routines, give testimony, discuss, argue, make conversation over food and wine. The personal and the political are entwined. Eighteen subjects are named in the credits; at least four of them emerge as memorable. There are scenes as dramatically rich as any you will see on-screen, and brief moments of thrilling spontaneity. Landry, an African student, and Angelo, an assembly-line worker, initially wary of one another, quickly realize that there is commonality in their experiences of alienation and become friends before our eyes. Marilù, who early in the film is so despairing that one fears her response to Morin’s “How do you live?” will be to commit suicide, has an emotional turnaround after the filmmakers recommend her for a job at Cahiers du Cinéma, and she and the then critic Jacques Rivette fall in love. Never identified in his brief appearances with Marilù, Rivette is the New Wave director most clearly influenced by the improvised dialogues and network of characters in Chronicle of a Summer.
Nearly as depressed as Marilù is Jean-Pierre, who, in a long, cryptic scene with Morin and Marceline, the lover with whom he’s breaking up, expresses his feelings of failure in politics and love. (What the film cannot reveal without endangering these two subjects, but which we learn from Un Ete + 50, is that Jean-Pierre and Marceline were members of the Jeanson network, a radical antiwar group with ties to Algeria’s National Liberation Front [FLN], who, unlike most of their confederates, narrowly escaped a police raid and subsequent imprisonment.) Frustrated by the vague generalities of this conversation, Morin and Rouch follow with a scene in which about ten participants—among them the student Régis Debray (today a prominent French academic), who would soon join Che Guevara and wind up in a Latin American prison for three years—openly discuss the war and their resistance to the draft, risking that the French government, which censored media support of the FLN, would bar the film’s release. When Morin and Rouch share an al fresco meal at a café with six of the film’s subjects, Marceline comments that she would never marry an African, that she simply isn’t attracted to them—and then suddenly remembers, confessing with embarrassment, that in fact there had been one time when she was. When Debray turns the conversation to Pan-African solidarity, Marceline expresses solidarity with those subject to anti-Semitism, whereupon Rouch asks Landry if he knows why Marceline has a number tattooed on her arm. This leads to the anomalous and powerful sequence—perhaps the film’s most famous scene—in which Marceline, equipped with a hidden microphone and recorder, walks through a strangely deserted Place de la Concorde and then a desolate arcade in Les Halles, recalling aloud her memories of Auschwitz and the death of her father there. For the most part, we see Marceline in long shot, although there is one close-up of her face (again,multiple takes are pieced together). The scene is both distant (the camera position) and intimate (the soft sound of Marceline’s voice)—the combination possible only because of the new sync-sound rig. And it is unsettling, not only because of Marceline’s grievous story, but because of the formal combination of documentary and theatricality. The sequence is clearly “staged,” and yet it is only through the staging that the truth of Marceline’s experience can be shared. The remoteness of the camera from its subject blocks conventional cinematic identification; rather, it places us in the position of empathetic witnesses.
Still from Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a Summer), 1961, 16 mm and 35 mm transferred to 35 mm, black-and-white, sound, 90 minutes. Photo: The Criterion Collection.
Chronicle concludes with two sessions of auto-critique. Having shown the film to the participants, Rouch and Morin face a barrage of contradictory comments from them. Some are moved by the authenticity of certain participants while others see only exhibitionism and theatrics. At one point Morin loses his temper when a woman attacks Marilù for her “indecent” display of emotion. Rushing to protect one of his most vulnerable subjects, Morin retorts, “Such reactions block the emergence of truth in life, in relationships.” Later, Rouch and Morin, obviously troubled by the reactions, walk through a corridor in the Musée de l’Homme, trying to come to terms with the film they have made. Could it be, they wonder, that because they did not overtly impose their point of view, they gave the audience as much freedom as the participants to respond spontaneously and draw their own conclusions? To the degree that Rouch and Morin undermined their authority as filmmakers, Chronicle became a model for the collective films of ’68 and of the American New Left. If Rouch and Morin’s experiment towers above those films, and also those of America’s Direct Cinema, it is because of the moral commitment of the filmmakers to their roles as group leaders—more empathetic, challenging, and intelligent than the fathers of our wildest, utopian dreams.
LE JOLI MAI opens with the seemingly cheerful dedication “To the happy many.” But by the end of Marker and Lhomme’s lyrical and argumentative, elegiac and lively film essay on the city of Paris in “May, 1962—designated by some at the time, as ‘the first spring of peace,’” Marker notes—that dedication will seem like an assault. The film’s similarities to Chronicle of a Summer are multiple: The centrality of interviews, the use of the KMT handheld sync camera to capture Parisians in their natural habitats, and the question of happiness in relation to political concerns about racism, consumerism, and the loss of community are only the most obvious. Marker’s project, however, was not cinema verité, but rather “ciné, ma vérité” (a bon mot often attributed to Marker himself). Le Joli Mai is couched entirely in Marker’s simultaneously engaged and alienated man-who-fell-to-earth POV, even though he never appears in the film, and, except to viewers who knew him personally, the sound of his voice is indistinguishable from the two or three other male offscreen interviewers. Where Rouch and Morin appear as characters in Chronicle, a film, in part, about the collective process of its own making, Marker is the disembodied auteur, Le Joli Mai the projection of his subjectivity.
Marker’s decision to give Lhomme, his cinematographer, codirecting credit was based on his sense of how expressive and essential to the film Lhomme’s images were. In the end, it was Lhomme who supervised the restoration of Le Joli Mai according to plans Marker left before his death in 2012. Originally released in 1963 at roughly 165 minutes, it was soon recut by Marker, and different French and English-language versions were then edited, some as short as two hours. For the French release, Yves Montand read Marker’s voiceover text; for the English-speaking market, Simone Signoret read a translation. (Icarus is releasing the film with Signoret’s narration, though the DVD will offer Montand’s voice-over, subtitled in English, as an option.)
After the dedication, we immediately see, as if through a telescope, one of those iconic, steeply sloping Parisian roofs and the tiny figure of a woman climbing without pause to the top. The muted chiming of distant church bells, otherworldly orchestral tone clusters, broken shortwave radio signals, and urgent sirens meld into an anxiety-provoking, slightly sci-fi sound track, against which the voice-over—written in haunted prose—describes Paris as seen through the eyes of a distant traveler who returns to the “most beautiful city in the world . . . to see if the same keys still open the same doors, if there remains the same proportion of light to fog, of cynicism to tenderness, if an owl still hoots at dusk, if a cat still lives on an island.”
Much of the film is encapsulated in this introductory text and the myriad exquisite shades-of-gray images that accompany it. The oppositions between light and fog or cynicism and tenderness are structuring principles: Marker is a dialectician of mood, of place, of history, and of his relationship to others and to himself. Le Joli Mai is a personal film—the evocation of the owl and the cat, Marker’s “familiars,” makes that immediately apparent—but in the interviews that are the core of the work, he never treats his subjects as mere foils, even when their narrowness and narcissism anger him. Unlike in Chronicle of a Summer, where most of the subjects were acquaintances (or friends of acquaintances) of the filmmakers, Le Joli Mai’s interviewees were, in almost all cases, strangers to Marker, who nevertheless puts them in the center of the frame and gives them the time and space necessary to reveal their internal contradictions and complexities. They are, he explains, actors on the stage that is Paris, and the way to find out what is happening to the city is to look closely at them. Among the many vivid portraits, the most inspiring is of the priest sent by the church to work on an assembly line. At first he was uncomfortable with the unionized workers, whom he believed were godless communists. But when the church decided that the experiment was over, he refused to leave. “Society has to change so men can be happier,” he has come to believe. “Until then, I have no time to concern myself with whether or not God exists.”
Still from Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a Summer), 1961, 16 mm and 35 mm transferred to 35 mm, black-and-white, sound, 90 minutes. Photo: The Criterion Collection.
In addition to the evocation through images and voice-over of the Paris that Marker wants for his personal time capsule and the person-on-the-street portraits, there are also several series of action montages, some of them bringing in contemporary news footage. The demonstrations outside the courthouse where General Raoul Salan, leader of an anti-Algerian terrorist group, was being tried for treason, is juxtaposed with one of the most thrilling jazz dance sequences ever committed to film, which, in turn, leads to a conversation with striking workers. How do you see the future, the off-screen interviewer asks one of them: “Pas joli, pas joli, pas joli,” he answers. “Not rosy.”
No, Paris in the first spring of peace was not joli. Racism and violence did not end with the war. The city was being radically reconfigured, the oldest neighborhoods gentrified or razed, their longtime residents sent off to the forbidding high-rise tower blocks that will become the banlieues. The “twin sorcerers of greed and anarchy” preside over this transformation, Marker explains. Overpopulation combined with the increasing elimination of jobs by technology is a problem not easily solved, two technocrats jawing at each other opine. It’s not good for cats either. Marker cuts away from this jargon-laced conversation to show close-ups of cats, some of them yawning, which is Marker’s way of saying cats find this endless kind of talk boring—and so does he. After a fast-motion sequence of cars and pedestrians moving through and around the Arc de Triomphe, accompanied by a vertiginous set of May 1962 statistics about births and deaths and food products consumed, the camera comes to rest on the panopticon structure of La Roquette, which housed 5,066 prisoners that month. The camera lingering on the exterior, we hear an unseen interviewer ask an unseen prisoner, “What was the worst thing about prison?” “The other girls,” she replies.
A movie about the most beautiful city in the world turns dystopic. (While shooting Le Joli Mai, Marker was using his free weekends to make his short film La Jetée [1962], a time-travel meditation intimating that we have already internalized the fascism of the future.) And the happy many? Fools or worse. “As long as poverty exists,” says Marker, speaking through the seductive voice of Montand or Signoret, “you are not rich. As long as despair exists, you are not happy. As long as prisons exist, you are not free.” A gentle chastisement? More like a kick in the teeth.
is a contributing editor of Film Comment and Sight & Sound.