Jean Rouch, working in Africa, had already reinvented the ethnographic documentary with a radical approach that invited subjects to participate in the filmmaking process when he was approached by sociologist Edgar Morin with another radical idea: making an ethnographic film about Paris, the place where they lived, by asking a cross-section of Parisians the same question: “Are you happy?” The resulting film, Chronicle of a Summer, not only rewrote the aural and visual language of nonfiction filmmaking through using new, lightweight equipment, but offered a singularly insightful and emotional representation of Paris and Parisians from all walks of life at the end of the long, terrible Algerian War.