The horror of the Nazi death camps placed a chilling prohibition on imagery in postwar Europe. Resnais’s stirring documentary essay broke that taboo with images of incomparable power, culled from the archives and from his own revisitation to the now abandoned sites. The lyrical commentary of Jean Cayrol, a concentration-camp survivor himself, is at once understated and blisteringly cautionary as it invokes "the cry that never ends."

A pioneering work of French cinéma vérité, Chronicle of a Summer attempted to assess the mood of the country through direct contact with passersby on the Parisian boulevards, who were asked to respond to a single question posed by the sociologist Edgar Morin: "Are you happy?" The resulting portraits mix spontaneous response with Morin’s own interpretive glosses. The camera itself plays a very real role in the drama, as in other films by the great ethnographic filmmaker Rouch.