A Sort of Psychodrama

This chapter explores the political and cultural contours of the late 1950s impetus for autocritique in France, focusing on two films engaged with antiracist role-play and self-awareness: The Human Pyramid (Jean Rouch, 1959) and Chronicle of a Summer (Rouch and Morin, 1961). The chapter tracks the reception of psychodrama and group dynamics in late 1950s France correlating interests on authenticity, self-determination, and racism apparent in publications such as Arguments (Morin’s coedited journal) to cinema verité’s intent to stage a transformative process on camera. This program coalesces in Chronicle’s notorious postscreening scene, and it also emerges in The Human Pyramid’s suspended resolution in achieving an integration between French and African students at a high school in Ivory Coast. The quandaries of trying to register process in film are highlighted in the fixation with authentic emergent speech in cinema verité and in analyses of the brilliant ruptures of registers in The Human Pyramid.