In the spring of 1962, France's eight-year war to hang on to Algeria, which had been a French colony for 100 years, had just ended. For the first time in 23 years, France was not at war. Filmmaker Chris Marker approached cinematographer Pierre Lhomme to collaborate with him on a documentary. Marker's aim was to provide a snapshot of what Parisians were thinking and saying in what he ironically called "the first spring of peace," by shooting man-on-the-street interviews during the entire month of May 1962. The resulting film, Le Joli Mai (1963, "The Lovely Month of May") has been called "cinema verite," but Marker disdained that description, preferring the term "direct cinema." However, he cautioned, "direct does not mean simple."

Some of the interview subjects were chosen in advance, others were selected spontaneously. New technology -- lightweight cameras with synchronized sound recording -- made the team's task easier. By the end of the month, they had amassed 55 hours of film, and Marker's first cut was seven hours long. He eventually cut the film down to about two and a half hours.

Le Joli Mai is divided into two parts. The first half, "A Prayer from the Eiffel Tower," begins with striking images of Paris, Lhomme's camera looking at the city's landmarks in non-traditional, non-touristic ways. The images are accompanied by a lilting, evocative score by Michel Legrand (who later admitted that he wrote it without seeing the film, based on Marker's instructions about sequences and lengths). The poetic narration is read by Yves Montand in the French version, and by Montand's wife Simone Signoret in the English-language version. (Montand is still heard in the English version, singing the film's title song.) The interviews are with ordinary people talking about their work, their lives, their hopes and dreams: a suit salesman, a mother of nine children, a group of stockbrokers concerned about how the Algerian situation is affecting the market; children examining a museum display of John Glenn's space capsule; a blissfully in love young couple unconcerned about anything but their own happiness.

Part two, "The Return of Fantomas," delves more deeply, exploring reactions to the Algerian situation and the political and economic atmosphere of the country. Among those interviewed are an African student and a young Algerian worker who discuss French racism, and a communist priest who chose his political convictions over his church. But there's also an eccentric young woman who designs costumes for her cat, saying she does so "to escape from those dead things that crush you."

What's remarkable about the interviews is how easily and expansively most of those included in the film talk about philosophical and social issues, about emotions and beliefs. Perhaps that has something to do with the French character. But more likely, it's because the directors tried as much as possible not to chop up the interviews. "One of the editing principles was to really give people a voice," Lhomme recalled in a 1997 interview. "That was our obsession, not to do what they do in the news or investigative film, where they only use parts of sentences, taken out of context." At a 1964 film society screening of Le Joli Mai, Marker cautioned the audience and filmmakers from "imposing our own convictions" on what participants were saying, and from what he called "the illusion of objectivity," arguing that it was not possible to present the work as totally objective. "What we tried to put into it, we could I think call a passionate objectivity."

For decades, the complete version of Le Joli Mai had not been seen anywhere but in France. Marker died in 2012, on his 91st birthday. The following year, codirector Lhomme supervised the restoration, which runs two and a half hours, based on Marker's instructions. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, and played at several other festivals and in various cities around the world. With the benefit of hindsight, reviews were ecstatic. "A sincere, brilliant, clever and highly idiosyncratic essay," raved Paris-Presse. In the New York Review of Books, J. Hoberman called it "An epic of inquiring photography." G. Allen Johnson of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote, "What was once a front-lines report of Parisian life has been deepened by time....This is a film to get lost in, and one of those films which beckons us to consider our own fate."

Seen today, Le Joli Mai seems prescient about the political upheavals of the 1960s and beyond, including Paris in 1968. Even before the film was made, Marker's note of intention, which he used to solicit funding, is striking in retrospect: "In 25 or 30 years, what will those who allude to the 1960s have retained? What will we fish out from our own years? Maybe something completely different from what we see as being most forward thinking now, the film Le Joli Mai would like to offer itself up as a petri dish for the future's fishers of the past. It will be up to them to sort out what truly made its mark and what was merely flotsam."

Director: Chris Marker, Pierre Lhomme
Producer: Catherine Winter
Screenplay: Chris Marker, Catherine Varlin
Cinematography: Pierre Lhomme
Editor: Eva Zora
Music: Michel Legrand
Principal Cast: Chris Marker (Interviewer), Simone Signoret (English narration), Yves Montand (French narration)
124 minutes

by Margarita Landazuri