In 1968, two nuns with microphones hit the streets of Chicago, asking passersby one question: Are you happy? Their encounters were documented by Gordon Quinn and Gerald Temaner in their film Inquiring Nuns, produced against the backdrop of an especially fractured American city at the height of the Vietnam War, though the origin of their query comes from France, by way of Africa. The nuns’ question is a quote from Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s pioneering cinema verité film Chronicle of a Summer, shot on the streets of Paris in the summer of 1960, in the midst of Algeria’s long struggle for independence from France. That film, which Morin called “an experiment in cinematographic interrogation,” was a form of ethnographic research—aided by new, lightweight camera and portable sound recording technology—provoked by a series of questions on seemingly simple topics, including happiness, about how people manage in life. Three years later, Chris Marker released La Jolie Mai, a challenging response to Chronicle, also shot on the streets of Paris, in the first spring of peace in France since 1939, and intercut with newsreel footage of the political turmoil collected throughout 1962.
An illustrated lecture on learning how to look at how we live, originally given as part of Obvious Dimensions, Light Industry at X-initiative’s NO SOUL FOR SALE
