Three Great Documentaries to Stream

The proliferation of documentaries on streaming services makes it difficult to choose what to watch. Each month, we’ll choose three nonfiction films — classics, overlooked recent docs and more — that will reward your time.

‘Chronicle of a Summer’ (1961)

Stream it on the Criterion Channel.

What better way to celebrate the summer than with a summer-set documentary essential to the proliferation of the term “cinema-vérité,” one of the major concepts in nonfiction filmmaking? Except that cinema-vérité as presented in “Chronicle of a Summer,” the pioneering work from the anthropologist Jean Rouch and the sociologist Edgar Morin, means something different from what it has come to connote today. “Chronicle of a Summer” doesn’t belong to the “direct cinema” school associated with filmmakers like the Maysles Brothers (“Grey Gardens”), who sought, with varying degrees of success, not to involve themselves in the action while the camera was rolling, or with Frederick Wiseman’s filmmaking methods. (Although Wiseman never asks questions, he always resists labels like “cinema-vérité” or “observational cinema”; he prefers the term “movies.”)

In “Chronicle of a Summer,” the filmmakers are on-camera presences. At the start, Rouch asks whether it is possible to record as natural a conversation as they might get without a camera present. In an early section of the film, Marceline, who assists the filmmakers in addition to serving as one of their subjects, approaches Parisians and asks about their lives, opening with the simple query, “Are you happy?” (Gordon Quinn, a founder of the Chicago documentary production company Kartemquin Films, would recycle this line of questioning in his 1968 film directed with Gerald Temaner, “Inquiring Nuns.”)

Eventually, “Chronicle of a Summer” settles on a group of major characters, who are shown interacting with one another. The movie also periodically diverges from its interrogative mode to follow their lives. After Angelo, who works in a Renault factory, describes the monotony of his routine (when not working, he says, “The rest of the time, you spend sleeping, and you sleep so that you can work”), “Chronicle of a Summer” shows an alarm clock ringing and Angelo waking up and going to the factory. Onscreen, Morin himself introduces Angelo to Landry, a student from the Ivory Coast whose insights open a window on racism in France and colonial attitudes in Africa. Other figures we get to know include Mary Lou, who speaks openly of her apparent depression (for her, cinema-vérité becomes something akin to cinema-therapy), and Marceline, a Holocaust survivor who wrenchingly shares memories of her father.