★★★★★ This film invented the “cinéma verité”, the true cinema, although in reality it questions whether cinema can be true. Rouch was an anthropologist -and the father of an extraordinary way of cinema- and Morin, an extraordinary sociologist whose first book was Las estrellas de cine. In 1960 Paris, they interviewed and followed a group of people, who in some circumstances are related to each other. They talk about intimate things and trivial things, they walk, have fun, discuss and tell their fears and dreams. But what is most interesting is whether all that we see has the spontaneity and color of the true. Or, to put it another way, if “reality” is equivalent to “truth”. Paradoxically, Crónica… is a prodigy of both natural observation and manipulation of time, space and the creatures that inhabit it. Cinema ends up being cinema: a rare idea today, in times of (other) virtual worlds.
