Jean Rouch’s “Cinéma vérité”, inspired by Dziga Vertov works and Flaherty’s ideas and experiments on coparticipation of a documentalist in the filmed events, established a whole genre in visual anthropology. The dispute about the "Chronicles of a Summer" (1961) influence on professional filmmaking does not fade till now, but in visual anthropology it is rather opposed to classical cinema as a kind of a "canon" with the absence of a tripod, artificial light or staged shot, which usually create obstacles for the possibility for a truthful fixation of reality.
Young directors Magali Bragard and Séverine Enjolras, Jean Rouch's students, made the film "Remake of Summer" (Reprendrel'été, 2017), shown at different venues and as well at the Moscow International Festival of Visual Anthropology "Mediating Camera", organized by our team, receiving quite positive feedback from the audience. Authors follow the original structure of the 1961 Chronicles and use similar filming methods and style, including repetition of mise-en-scenes, to recreate its atmosphere. They continue the approach of Rouch’s participatory anthropology, asking people on the streets of Paris for their opinions and thoughts about life, going into deeper conversation with some of the characters and then engaging them in discussion of this new experience, keeping the main focus on the possibility of communication, understanding of each other, and the dialogue of cultures.
“Remake” raises interesting questions for us to analyze, like belonging to the genre and how it continues Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin concepts, and provides a wide field for comparison of epochs separated by more than a half of a century.
