The other Chronicle of a Summer; or, Caribbean layovers of transnational vérité
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Published Version
Date
2025-10-23
Authors
Doreste Rodríguez, Pedro Noel
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Film and Screen Media, University College Cork
Published Version
Abstract
The early Flaherty Seminars served as incubator for the emergent form of cinéma vérité, bringing together major practitioners of a new mode that promised immediacy, objectivity, and realism. One notable collaboration between two Flaherty alumni—Michel Brault and Jean Rouch—would result in the landmark Chronicle of a Summer (1961). Before joining Rouch in Paris in the summer of 1960, however, Brault filmed Festival in Puerto Rico (1961) on location as an unofficial collaboration between the Canadian National Film Board and its Puerto Rican counterpart, the Division of Community Education. While a fulsome examination of the island’s colonial status—Free Associated Statehood—the film demonstrates a shared sensibility for vérité experimentation between the two stateless nations of Puerto Rico and Québec, each in varying stages of waging “quiet revolutions” against their respective imperial centers. Despite these political and aesthetic solidarities, Festival in Puerto Rico offers the newly ratified colonial status in Puerto Rico as a model for Québecois decolonization. Resting on this false cognate, this unlikely collaboration nevertheless inverts the presumed triangulation of cinematic new waves between North America, Europe, and Latin America and recenters the South in the proliferation of global vérité—not as its debtor, but as collaborator.
Description
Keywords
Puerto Rican cinema , Canadian cinema , Government film , Vérité , Observational cinema
Citation
Doreste Rodríguez, P. N. (2025) ’The Other Chronicle of a Summer; or, Caribbean layovers of transnational vérité’, Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, 29–30, pp. 127–145. https://doi.org/10.33178/alpha.2930.07