Chronique d’un Été [Chronicle of a Summer] is a documentary film studying young working people in Paris, made by visual anthropologist Jean Rouch, sociologist Edgar Morin, as well as Québécois cinematographer Michel Brault. The film is important for its early and concise expression of cinéma vérité aesthetics. For Chronique d’un Été, Rouch, together with engineer André Coutant, prototyped the first lightweight sync-sound 16mm camera operated in France. The film begins with Morin asking several people: ‘Are you happy?’ The question leads to political discussions ranging from colonialism, racism, and the Algerian War to the Holocaust. In one sequence demonstrating the film’s reflexivity, Marceline Loridan-Ivens, a Holocaust survivor and member of the French Resistance, walks alongside a tracking camera while dictating her grief-stricken memories into a hidden microphone. The film cuts to a separate long take of her walking forward while the camera accelerates away from its subject, her silhouette contracting while the volume of her speech remains static. Thus, Marceline’s voice becomes contrapuntal to her diminishing profile. This formal decision highlights the technically managed coordination between image and voice in documentary’s observational veracity. Does this signal that the documentary has intervened in reality? Or does it emphasise how the interview is aestheticised, constructing the spectator’s sense of truth? Such formal ambiguity defines cinéma vérité’s reflexivity.