A “sort of psychodrama”: Cinema verité and France’s self-analysis

Abstract

Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch conceived of cinema verite as a “sort of psychodrama” elevating cinema to a medium for self-analysis, to test and promote authentic social relations. This essay locates their self-reflective poetics as part of a conspicuous trend for psychosocial methodologies throughout the fifties, and it contextualizes the migration of two psychosocial praxes and ideas into cinema—Kurt Lewin’s Research Center for Group Dynamics and Jacob L. Moreno’s sociometric and psychodramatic sessions—at a moment of heightened identity crisis and self-examination in France. Boldly pushing the effects of drama into a real zone of disturbance, Rouch asked French and African students in a high school to act out the roles of racists in The Human Pyramid (Rouch, 1959–61), revealing the impasses in changing interracial relations in West Africa. A similar sensitivity to the gaps in French discourse is at stake in Chronicle of a Summer’s (1960) attempt to counter the specter of forced confessionals (in Algeria) and the shadow of Stalinist authoritarianism, by promoting collective and democratic forms of self-baring. The essay rethinks the potential and limits of these two films as laboratories of self-awareness. It discusses the effectiveness of role reversal in revealing and combating racism in THP and it analyses the relevance of psychodynamic for Marxist discussions around the representation of labor, leisure and self-determination, as Chronicle essays a transition in leftist politics.