“Sometimes, when I leave home, I have things to do. But I don’t necessarily do them. I never know what I’ll do the next day. I live by the principle that tomorrow’s another day. For me, adventure is always just around the corner.”

Two films, one a documentary, the other a mockumentary, give a sense of the birth and immediate parodying of the cinéma vérité genre. Chronicle of a Summer (1961), directed by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin, offers a snapshot of Paris and Saint-Tropez through raw and revealing interviews with academics, artists, mechanics, photographers. Each interview tackles the question of what makes the individuals happy, where their contentment or discontentment come from. Through this decptively simple approach come anecdotes and personal philopsophies that reveal much about the 1960s, France and the nature of class in the city. Added to this is an extra layer in which the directors examine how their own film works, how the ‘direct’ approach to documentary making (as opposed to the approach of, to use an example referenced in the film itself, Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog (1955)) gives a paradixical ‘realness’ and ‘fakeness’.

Speaking of ‘fakeness’, David Holzman’s Diary (1967), directed by James McBride, offers a skewed depiction of a city, this time New York, through the eyes (and lens) of Holzman, a fictional filmmaker. Holzman, played by L. M. Kit Carson, records his everyday life from his relationship breakdown owing to his obsessive compulsion for capturing everything to the mundane details of his existence including, in one memorable scene, a rapid montage of the television he is watching in one evening. The film gives a slightly sinister feeling of being complicit in Holzman’s small and frustrating life, the perspective is so submerged in his personality and actions it becomes almost impossible not to empathise with him. The themes that run through this film are similar to Chronicle but with an additional level of recreated reality – or perhaps with one level removed. In some respects, this film gives a more authentic view of urban life in the 1960s.

Both films are undoubtedly pioneering in their particular forms, and both are essential viewing if you’re interested in the avante garde 1960s filmmaking communities of Paris and New York. They are also, given their small scale and rawness, surprisingly engaging.