Looking back at it, I think that we had a crazy chance to live through a crazy time. Everything that my generation learned during the previous twenty years was revealed to be an illusion in just one month in May 1940. The army, Verdun, France, honor, dignity, money, church, work, society, family, economic man, libido, historical materialism – everything had been taken away by the winds of one of the brightest springs the world has known. And by a strange paradox I had started my life as an engineer of bridges and roads by blowing up the most prestigious bridges in France. Among them was Chateau-Thierry, so well known to us in the fables of Jean de la Fontaine, and the bridge of the Briare Canal, a stream of steel and water running above the Loire, frozen and still and out of this world like a Magritte painting. Never had a generation of youth been so rich: because we had nothing left, and absolutely nothing left to lose (103).

Some years ago, when the proponents of the so-called crisis of representation in ethnographic writing were at the peak of their influence, ethnographic film-makers and visual anthropologists couldn’t resist smiling at their proposed “solutions” – collaboratively authored texts, polyphony, pastiche, reflexivity and fictional accounts. These were all advocated in print, with little recognition of the fact that ethnographic film had been achieving these ends for decades. Only in the past decade, as academic anthropology has rediscovered the ethnographic museum, the world of goods and sensory experience and the bodies in which the knowledge of society is ingrained, has ethnographic and folkloristic film come to be seen as an ideal medium not merely to document but to explore and to engage with the process of living (Marcus Banks, 1998). [1]

… it’s in a bar in Treichville, a Sunday night; a friend and I have wandered in, in pursuit of the splendid festivities only the people of these parts know how to put on, in the middle of the sordid streets, in the middle of the slums. The contrast between the ephemeral Sunday gaiety and the daily misfortune is so strong that I know it will haunt me until the very moment when I am able to express it. How? Go out of this bar and shout in the streets? Write a general book for the public on this investigation we are now doing on the migrations in the Ivory Coast, which, otherwise, if it ever sees the light of day, will interest only a few specialists? The only solution was to make a film about it, where it would not be me crying out my joy or my revolt, but one of these people for whom Treichville was both heaven and hell. So in this bar ambience on a lugubrious evening in 1957, Moi, un noir appeared to me a necessity (266-7).

When he presented his own film, Rouch in Reverse (UK/USA, 1995), at the Margaret Mead Film Festival in 1995, Manthia Diawara noted that Rouch and Moi, un noir [I, a black man] (1958) tended to disappear in English translations of writings on the French New Wave. Perhaps Rouch has been too hard to categorize, not fitting neatly into documentary or fiction slots. It is also hard to get to see Moi, un noir in subtitled versions. Could its neglect have anything to do with the fact that this pioneering New Wave film had a black protagonist hero who told his own story, directly to the audience? [2]

In this “fiction” revealing layers of facts, young migrants come to Abidjan, “the capital of money”, to earn a living by casual labour. To reveal themselves, they take on roles, actors/characters from films and paperback thrillers, expressing their reality through fantasy, dreams, improvising scenarios a long way from official reports, including the scholarly, and in this very way, evoking their unscripted daily life. The immigrant “family” includes Eddie Constantine (Lemme Caution), Little Jules, Tarzan and Dorothy Lamour. The improvised narration is from the hero, Edward G. Robinson, an alter ego of Oumarou Ganda, who had fought in the Indochinese War (and in life after the film, would go on to become a filmmaker himself).

Obliged by constraints “to break taboos, to commit sacrileges” (165), Rouch filmed cheaply on 16mm, doing without cutaways, or connecting shots. The narration was put together in two days, recorded at the radio station in Abidjan. As his Bell and Howell camera had had to be rewound every twenty-five seconds, no sentences in the narration could be longer than that. Among enthusiasts for this film that promised the possibility of a new cinema, was Jean-Luc Godard, whose praise had some of the boldness, verve and spontaneity that he found in Rouch films: “Like Jeanne d’Arc of old, our friend Jean set out with a camera to save, if not France, French cinema at least” (133). Rouch’s films, said Godard, were those of a “free man”. [3] Gilles Deleuze too evoked the heroic existentialist dimension of cinema Rouch: “It may be objected that Jean Rouch can only with difficulty be considered a third world author, but no one has done so much to put the West to flight, to flee himself, to break with a cinema of ethnology and say Moi, un Noir …” (16). [4]
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Each year when I show Rouch films to students more familiar with Godard or Deleuze, they are a revelation. I can count on them being surprised, provoked, pleased, and a little troubled. I can also count on conversations about the films, about the ways they touch the students’ lives, after the “official” course is over. Of course “Club Rouch” has branches all over the world. With its touch of Francophilia, it’s a little exclusive, but not by choice – it’s just that not enough people have been initiated yet. The appearance of Ciné-Ethnography, edited and translated by Steven Feld, should make a change here. The back-cover blurb is to be taken seriously. It isthe “most thorough resource on Rouch available in any language”.[5]

While Rouch has been filming for over half a century, only a handful of his films have been available outside of Europe and Africa. Only in the 70s and 80s did some of his writings and interviews appear in English. Yet their influence has been disproportionate to their availability. In 1977, Rouch was guest of honour at the Margaret Mead Film Festival at the American Museum of Natural History. More recently, Faye Ginsburg, at New York University’s Center for Media, Culture, and History, produced Rouch 2000, a weeklong retrospective of his films. Having translated some of Rouch years before, Feld decided on a book in Rouch’s own voice.

In four parts, Ciné-Ethnography consists of key Rouch essays, interviews and conversations, a “film book” on Chronicle of a Summer (Chronique d’un été), the pathbreaking documentary Rouch made with Edgar Morin in 1960, and “Works by Rouch”, comprising an annotated filmography and selective bibliography. Like myself, Feld has loved seeing a new generation of film and anthropology students respond so profoundly to Rouch’s work, and his Editor’s Introduction is friendly to the neophyte as well as the initiated, driven by his conviction that the work matters for cinema and anthropology.

As Rouch put it to Enrico Fulchignoni in 1981:

For me, as an ethnographer and filmmaker, there is almost no boundary between documentary film and films of fiction. The cinema, the art of the double, is already the transition from the real world to the imaginary world, and ethnography, the science of the thought systems of others, is a permanent crossing point from one conceptual universe to another; acrobatic gymnastics, where losing one’s footing is the least of the risks (185).

This crossing point, the nexus of cinematic and social theory, seems like a gulf to many more at home in their separate terrains. Too dangerous, perhaps too fantastic. Like the cliffs of Bandiagara in Dogon country – for Rouch, reminiscent of the paintings of Dali or Magritte, in a landscape by De Chirico. (“Just the name, the ‘falaises de Bandiagara‘ was fantastic”, says Rouch. 132) But there is nothing timid about Rouch, for whom crossings, dream and movement are central notions. We are used to seeing his images with such a dynamic eye, says Fulchignoni, that we have “the feeling of something closer to wings, or the wind” (147). As Rouch says to him:

We should be running across the Place du Trocadéro, we should go someplace else, we should slip on the winged shoes of Arthur Rimbaud and go off somewhere else and, from that somewhere else, bring back bits of flying carpets that we could share with others – but this is a dream! (148)

Rimbaud, Dali, De Chirico – these artist dreamers didn’t much figure in my schooling in anthropology or my later acquaintance with film studies, including, and perhaps especially, in their Marxified, ritually conscience-stricken versions. As David MacDougall has suggested, quoting Talal Asad:

‘The anthropological audience is waiting to read about another mode of life and to manipulate the text it reads according to established rules, not to learn to live a new mode of life’. … In a similar vein, Dipesh Chakrabarty observes that Western intellectuals are uncomfortable dealing with many aspects of non-Western life except by ‘anthropologizing’ them, because the master-code of Western thought (Marxist thought included) is a secular, historicist discourse. [6]

So what made Rouch? What made the playful scholar – more anarchist than Marxist, needing neither to “anthropologise” his subjects, nor redeem them as objects of the sins of the West? Rouch’s “Life on the edge of film and anthropology” started auspiciously, his Catalan scientist father, a naval officer on Dr Charcot’s expedition to the Antarctic on the Pourquoi Pas?  (the “Why Not?”), getting to know a man from a family of artists, whose sister he will marry. Born in 1917, child of the Pourquoi Pas? , Rouch grew up painting and drawing, surrounded by artists, writers and scientists, his family connection to the avant-garde central to his upbringing. As this storyteller sees it, his father taking him to see Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North, and his mother to Douglas Fairbanks’ Robin Hood, were formative experiences. Rouch grew up in Algiers, Germany and Morocco, and after his baccalauréat in Paris, joined his family in Athens and Istanbul. Later enrolled at the École des Ponts et Chaussées to study engineering, Rouch discovered the Cinémathèque and the Musée de l’Homme at a time when Paris “was a kind of Paradise” (130). Fascinated and profoundly influenced by the surrealists, dance, theatre, cinema and music (Stravinsky, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong), were a part of everyday life. “Gourmands for everything”, Rouch and his very modern friends had the keys to “go back” in time (132). Through De Chirico, he discovered Bakunin, through Bakunin, Nietzsche. Breton led him to Gérard de Nerval, Novalis and the German Romantics. And the work of poet anthropologist, Michel Leiris, also affected him, particularly his autobiography, L’Âge d’homme. (Manhood is the title of the English translation.) “When I read it”, says Rouch, “I just knew he had to be mad”! (131) [7]

While still a boy, Rouch had discovered the eclectic, surrealist journal, Minotaure, which devoted an issue to the famous Dakar-Djibouti Mission, under the direction of Marcel Griaule, and which included Leiris, whose critical account of the trip, and critique of colonialism, L’Afrique fantôme, is still too little known outside the Francophone countries. Minotaure drove Rouch and his friends from Breton’s “convulsive beauty” to “the funerary rites of the lower Ogol”. The Dogon “cross of Lorraine” mask, the kanaga, hung in their “imaginary museum next to Dalí’s Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach” (103). In the occupied Paris of 1941, the Musée de l’Homme was “the only open door to the rest of the world” (103). Rouch and engineering classmates, Jean Sauvy and Pierre Ponty, would go along to hear Griaule speak, to see films presented by Henri Langlois, and the photographs of Griaule’s assistant, Germaine Dieterlen. Unable to escape the occupied areas, the three friends decided to leave France officially to be engineers in colonial West Africa – militaristic, racist, and “more Vichyist than Pétain”. (After the war, they would take on the collective journalistic identity of “Jean Pierjean”, go down the Niger River and write articles, film and take photographs.)

The advice from the General Inspector of the Colonial Public Works Department in Dakar: “Above all, don’t niggerize yourselves!” (104). Rouch’s learning and redemption – through respect, affection and friendship – escalate. His job in Niger is to supervise the forced labour of “good volunteers” building roads under the unconditional authority of site bosses who ranged from romantic adventurers to caricatures of cruelty one might find in bad novels on the American West. To understand the context of Rouch’s transformation from engineer to anthropologist filmmaker, we would do better to think back to the building of the pyramids than anything resembling “roadwork” today. Twenty thousand labourers, says Rouch, without “tools or machinery … had to carry the earth for the roads in baskets. We made bridges like Romans, just cutting the stones. There was no concrete, no tarmac – no maps, nothing at all. I realized then that the most important problems were not technical but human” (134).

Rouch gets to know Damouré Zika, young public works employee, Sorko fisherman, and master of the beautiful and terrifying Niger River, with whom he will make films over the next fifty years. Before he is expelled from Niger (for observed closeness to workers, presumed Gaullist sympathies), and before he goes on to fight against the Germans back in Europe, Rouch’s African initiation has begun. When ten men are killed by lightning at a worksite, Rouch asks a faithful Muslim in the Public Works Department what to do. The latter could not say, as the workers had nothing to do with Islam. Damouré Zika takes Rouch to his grandmother, Kalia Daoudou, ritual chieftain of the Sorko fishers in the Niamey region, and she directs the necessary ceremony of purification. When soon after, the “thunder spirit” strikes again, killing another fisherman, Damouré and Jean follow Kalia with a notebook and camera. When they develop the photos, translate and transcribe the ritual texts, minutely describing the details of the ceremony, they send off the material to Griaule at the Society for Africanists in Paris. Germaine Dieterlen encourages Rouch’s enquiry, sending him a model questionnaire on the cult of the water spirits. Rouch asks Kalia one of the questions, whether the victims of the water spirits have their nostrils and their navel cut, and Kalia surprises him: “Of course! But if you already know so many things, why bother me with all these simple questions?” (107). It is the beginning of Rouch’s ethnographic career.

Post expulsion from Niger, Rouch would be “saved” by Théodore Monod, director of the Institut Français d’Afrique Noire in Dakar, and meet Paul Rivet, co-founder of the Musée de l’Homme. He devoured classic texts on African history, and read Griaule’s Masques Dogons. When in 1966, Rouch is filming the Sigui, an itinerant Dogon ceremony commemorating the death of the first ancestor (performed over a seven year period every sixty years), he is able to draw on the minute descriptions of Griaule and Leiris, who had not attended the 1907-1914 Sigui, but twenty years after its performance, devoted a great deal of study to its customs, rituals, language and signification. “And here we were”, said Rouch, in “The Mad Fox and the Pale Master”, “the first spectators of this fabulous opera whose libretto we knew by heart before the curtain went up” (118).

Rouch tells Fulchignoni of the Dogon masks, invented by the Pale Fox, master of disorder, “scarlet masks, which are, as Ogotemmêli [8]  said, dancing pieces of the sun” (178), of funerary rites so beautiful that men, previously immortal, wanted to die. Such poetic conceptions are a long way from what Paul Stoller describes as “plain style” anthropology, in which “ethnographic film” supplements a written text where the proper analysis is done and the real theory lies. [9]  Is Rouch, the European storyteller with the poetic sensibility perhaps imposing it, inappropriately, on the “natives”? The answer could be an easy yes only if poetry, narrative and drama were not already built into everyday life. While much anthropology has dealt with the symbolism and sought the meaning of rituals, and much theoretical film study “explained” what appears on the screen, actual sensible/sensuous phenomena – the subtle fragments, multiple explosions and “savage” character of expressive experience – has too often been lost. [10]  Rituals “are supposed to be dramatic”, says Rouch. “They are creations of people who want them to be interesting and exciting” (216). In Africa he is working with people “who are champions of the oral tradition” and he is obliged to surrender himself to “this improvisation that is the art of the Logos, the art of the word and the gesture” (149). Rouch always comes back to recalcitrant, “wonderful and mysterious” human beings who refuse to live “theoretically”, believing that the trouble in anthropology and film studies is the construction of ever more theory out of sync with practice. [11]  As Feld puts it, Rouch shows that ethnographic cinema can be exciting and liberating “precisely because of the capacity to intimately project the richness of local sensibilities” (16). [12]  Says Feld:

It is a recognition of the parallel intersubjective, improvisatory, and dramaturgical qualities of both everyday life and direct filming that signals the intersection of social and cinematic theory in Rouch’s oeuvre. And it is from this recognition that his work so forcefully dissolves and obliterates parochial distinctions between fact and story, documentary and fiction, knowledge and feeling, improvisation and composition, observation and participation (20).

Rouch’s “observation and participation” entail long-term commitment. When Fulchignoni talks about the “Dionysian” quality, the “double possibility of maximum joy and maximum tragic furor” in some of the Dogon films, Rouch insists that while he began to shoot the films about death among the Dogon of the Bandiagara Cliffs in 1951, it is only thirty years later that he begins to understand what is happening. And real understanding needs not one lifetime but generations of researchers (150-151). The Sigui ceremonies posed questions, not answers, to initiates, and this, he thinks, is what he has tried to do in films, “to pose riddles, to circulate disquieting objects” (152). One of his stories casts a magical light on his way of working:

When Nietzsche was walking in the streets of Torino and wrote those sublime lines … ‘In autumn, at dusk, when the shadows are low, when the statues come down from their pedestals (because in Torino there are statues placed almost at ground level), you meet such astonishing phantoms as you will not find anywhere else’ – this simple sentence was enough to make a marvellous madman, Giorgio De Chirico, go to Torino to walk around in autumn and, between 1908 and 1917, paint the most extraordinary collection of metaphysical and poetic paintings opening to dream. And this poetry was made up of factory smokestacks, of the outskirts, of walls of crumbling brick, of smoking locomotives, and of those infinite shadows that announced something more. He too had dreamed of creating a myth, a modern myth that is the world of those avenues. I know there are places in the world where I walk around and I suddenly come upon this peculiar perspective: ‘grace,’ a grace which depends on a certain mood, which depends on a certain season. So when I make my films, it’s sort of like that. I would like to paint with movement, with color, moments like those that ask questions of the viewer and give no answer (152).

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In Rouch’s 1954 film, Les maîtres fous [The mad masters], we can experience, particularly vividly, some of what is mentioned above. This film, made at the request of participants of the Hauka possession cult, cannot be said to be guilty of the “flight from truth’s terror” which Nietzsche evoked, or the “need to create textual order out of experiential chaos”, which has such a long history in the Western philosophical tradition. [13]

Starting in Niger among indigenous people at the wrong end of French and English colonial power and African chiefly collaboration with colonial systems, Hauka practitioners became possessed by spirits of figures like “Commandant Mugu, the wicked major”, “Gomno, the Governor-General” and “General Malia, General of the Red Sea”, the “mad” colonial masters. In what Stoller has called “horrific comedy”, and Rouch “entertainment which was better than cinema, full of fantastic things” (190), participants go into trance, become possessed, speak a polyglot language (part pigeon English, part broken French), handle fire and reach into boiling water, without being burned. They break traditional religious taboos, eating pig, and, in this ceremony, a dog. In Les maîtres fous, the banal and the extreme cohabit. Music orchestrates movement in this public, out-of-town ritual, performed under the sun. People’s limbs stiffen, they walk like monsters, their bodies losing softness, familiarity; they foam at the mouth. We watch what we would normally look away from, “matter out of place”, uncontrolled body substances usually seen only briefly on the faces of babies, the ill, the dying. The blood of the dog mixes with the foam, and on the face of one young man, eyes look with a wildness, a terror, something language, ordinary or scholarly, would struggle to describe. Yet the actors communicate, make decisions, and after a time, look at their watches. If they do not wrap up the ceremony, they will pay overtime for the taxi waiting to take them back to Accra. Rouch ends the film revisiting the participants in town the next day, looking straight to camera, with open faces, smiling, with everything back to “normal” at the workplace.

Rouch’s impromptu finishing commentary suggests that far from these men being insane, their performance of the ritual was like a therapy that enabled them to cope in the colonial situation, “to function in normal society with less pain” (216). While he now has no particular commitment to what may be an outdated Freudian summation, it should be noted that his practice of spontaneous voice-over narration is important to him. In La chasse au lion à l’arc (The Lion Hunters, made between 1957 and 1964), his editing and commentary tried to give the audience the feel of what he himself experienced, learning the way of the hunt. But the American distributor cut out these segments of the film, and the narration also let it down. Since the narration of professional actors has tended to betray communication, intruding with false drama in the foreign versions of his films, Rouch prefers to do the narration himself “even in bad English and with a bad accent” (41). (Subtitles, once sync sound is possible, present no simple solution. Apart from “mutilating the image”, it is often impossible to condense and cover everything said within a given screen time. Rouch advocates companion pamphlets or booklets to accompany films for those who want to know more.)

Rouch’s narration in Les maîtres fous perhaps “domesticates” what is alien to us. We find the accent, the small mistakes in pronunciation, charming (the participants eat the “cook-ed” dog, one of the men is “imp-o-tent”, because he had “inter-courses” with his friend’s girlfriend). The fact that anthropologists contextualize what students will see beforehand, “arming” them against shock, tends to mean students find the film more assimilable than they otherwise might. And yet – it still tends to astound. We too know this intensity. Not cognitively, but imaginatively, carnally. The people performing the ceremony are different from us – yet like us. One showing, I remember the unexpected happened after class. A student, Michael Filipidis, had never thought, he said, he would find William Blake performed in film:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

Fifty years after it was made, Les maîtres fous remains controversial, problematic, and very much alive.

“What do the Africans have in mind when they take part in the ritual”, asked some young interlocutors from Cineaste at the Margaret Mead Film Festival in 1977. Rouch says they insist that they are not engaged in mockery or revenge, and he believes this to be true – at last at a conscious level. But the behaviour of the people possessed by the spirits meant they were seen to be dangerous. At the beginning the Islamic priest persecuted them as heretics. The French administration, fearing the revival of “strong animistic faiths that might turn political” did likewise. The Hauka breaking of taboos and possessed parody had something of Buñuel’s attitude to the church about it, said Rouch, “You cannot feel sacrilegious if you do not respect your opponent. What the Hauka did was creative and implicitly revolutionary, just as the authorities feared” (218). David MacDougall’s recent encapsulation of the problem of meaning could not be more pertinent:

In a sense ethnographic films do not ‘mean’ anything, but neither do they mean ‘anything’. They situate us in relation to objects, deploying what is suggestive and expressive in the world. … [A]s close correlatives of our physical interaction with the world through vision, touch, and our other senses, images assert the autonomy and, in a sense, the inviolability of other people’s experiences, which cannot always be assumed to be open to the power of language (266).
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Thirty years ago, in “The camera and the man”, Rouch was addressing head on questions of for whom and for what reason he made his ethnographic films. His first response was for himself. While he might be able to justify his filming scientifically (for archives), politically (“sharing in the revolt against an intolerable situation”), or aesthetically (to capture the fragility of beauty or movement), Rouch speaks of his own necessity to film (43).

His second response is that film is the only means he has to show someone else how he sees him. Unlike books and articles, the “participating camera” offers the possibility of direct communication with the group he studies (43). It opens up a new type of relationship between the anthropologist and the people, the first step toward shared anthropology. Feld notes that the attitude entailed in the latter term is similar to what is now called “self-reflexive” anthropology. This is true, but the term “self-reflexive”, I think, throws the limelight back onto the researcher and his or her intellectual/ethical problems, while for the romantic Rouch, shared anthropology is an ideal, an ongoing quest, shared between people who become friends, who share their dreams. The possibility of “feedback” film, which Rouch calls “audiovisual reciprocity”, becomes a stimulant for mutual awareness: “This type of research”, he says, “as idealistic as it might seem, appears to me to be the only morally and scientifically feasible anthropological attitude today” (44).

His third response to the question is that he makes his films for “everyone, for the largest viewing public possible”:

Why? Because we are people who believe that the world of tomorrow, the world we are in the process of building, cannot be viable without a regard for cultural differences; the other cannot be denied as his image transforms (45).

Let us be hard headed realists about this. The world of tomorrow looks like a nightmare if some understanding, respect for difference, recognition of political-economic injustice, doesn’t become the common concern of us all. Having lacked allegiance to either capitalist or communist blocs, Rouch would no doubt agree with Albert Camus’ argument for “relative utopias” as our only “realistic” choice today, realism forcing us to this “utopian” alternative. [14]

The “fiction”, Little by Little [Petit à petit, 1969)], was one of the several instances where Rouch stood ethnography on its head, featuring the young men (Damouré Zika, Lam Ibrahima and Illo Gaoudel) who ventured to the Gold Coast in Jaguar (1957-67), reaching their maturity, on a new adventure. Here fiction, as Feld suggests, “is taken to deeper levels of both fantasy and political statement” (18). Damouré Zika, head of Petit à Petit Imports (created in Jaguar), wanting to draw up plans to build a skyscraper in Ayarou, goes to Paris to see how people manage to live in high-rise buildings. In the French capital, he plays the African anthropologist, surprised and amused at the natives’ strange ways, using calipers to measure their heads in front of the Musée de l’Homme, politely requesting to inspect mouths and teeth. From Damouré’s “Parisian postcard” reports of the strange behaviour he finds in France, it appears that he has gone crazy, and Lam goes over to bring him back home. Among those met in Paris who will return with the pair to Ayorou, is Safi Faye, who after this collective improvisation, will herself go on to become a major African filmmaker.

It was in African writings on African cinema that I first saw an alternative title to the film, Petit à petit ou les lettres persanes 1968 (Little by Little, or the 1968 Persian Letters), with its very apt invocation of Montesquieu and his earlier denaturalisation of dominant mores. [15] And it was only from Fulchignoni’s interview that I learned that Damouré Zika had written a travel journal during the making of Jaguar, Mystérieux et dommages d’affaires, published by NRF. In reality, going to Paris on an internship for UNESCO, he kept an “explorer’s log” which became the starting point for Petit à petit.

The film is full of strange encounters, surrealist touches, music, movement and humour. (My favourite moment, of Damouré, Lam and Safi breaking up with laughter on a sofa in a well-to-do French apartment, seems inexplicable outside of some notion of pure fun.) But back in Africa, when things fall apart, Damouré and Lam abandon the enterprise, suggesting to Illo that they create the “old asses” company instead. As Rouch puts it:

Rediscovering horse, slingshot and canoe, Damouré, Lam and Illo retire to a straw hut on the edge of the river to think about what the ‘modern, new civilization’ should be: a civilization that could not be inspired by the grotesque model they discovered in Paris (365).

This very political filmmaker, with his great suspicion of politics, said that the group decided at the outset that they would only agree to play businessmen if they could abandon everything at the end of the film (as in Jaguar they had gone to the Gold Coast knowing they would give away their wealth when they returned).

It is in relation to Cocorico, Monsieur Poulet (1974), where once again the “Rouch gang” undertook an adventure, that both Rouch’s way of filming and his deep politics clearly reveal themselves. His greatest popular success in Africa and perhaps the most fun to make, the film is a “collective improvisation on a Nigerian fable”. Lam, an itinerant chicken merchant at the time, Damouré and Tallou Mouzourine (who also did the music), go through the bush with the real star of the film, Lam’s car, a “patience mobile” that endlessly breaks down, provoking an equal number of step by step improvised solutions and improvised filming. Cocorico had its American premiere at the Margaret Mead Film Festival and Cineaste suggested that for those unfamiliar with the African situation, what they saw seemed to reinforce basic prejudices against Africa. It seemed that the Africans treated their car like stereotyped “dumb hillbillies” would, the type “used as comic relief in Hollywood films and on American television” (222). While the interviewers themselves might seem a little “rabid”, their criticisms very “of the period” (Feld notes that this interchange has an “edge” the other interviews do not), similar objections could easily be put today by those wanting their documentaries to expose political-economic realities, to picture third world people with dignity – and surely not joke like this. People are aware, say Cineaste, that Africa is in transition, but in this film “there doesn’t seem to be anything positive going on, concretely or in consciousness” (233).

For Rouch, on the contrary, “it is absolutely positive”. He praises the resourcefulness of the people in the film as “a kind of populist avant-garde”. They are “marginals” who see “the economic absurdity of the system” within with they must make a living without being trapped (222). As he expresses his criticisms of outsiders’ “goodwill” in other interviews, here he stresses the fact that national and international experts come and tell Africans what is wrong with the way they live and work, without learning what native Africans themselves know and do. Most experts deal in fast surveys, quick reports, while long commitment is needed for any worthwhile change. Cocorico, he argues, “shows some of the schemes and strategies used by the common African” (223). Rouch paints a picture of a kind of exemplary, low-budget, non-alienated labour. While Cineaste want some clear directions in regard to politics, aesthetics and praxis, what comes through the essays and interviews (as well as the films themselves), is an argument for a non-alienated politics: “if you take power, the power takes you” (140), Rouch firmly believes.

It is fortunate that in this collection we have Rouch’s 1961 essay, “The situation and tendencies of the cinema in Africa” to read in conjunction with the later essays, interviews and conversations. Full of information on the realities of film production, development and distribution, it is enlightening on many fronts, Feld rightly suggesting that it “can profitably be reread in the context of debates about the colonial gaze and representation, matters taken up critically in recent postcolonial histories of African film”.[16] Despite Moi, un noir, and a closeness and commitment that continues to this day, Rouch without ambiguity places himself among “European directors of African films” (63). A true African cinema must be made by Africans themselves. [17]

As he tells it to Lucien Taylor, he “felt it would be stupid to be a white Negro” (138) and insists (throughout the book) on the importance of returning to people who not only refuse to see themselves primarily as victims, but won’t be defined by the politics of any given moment. Well-meaning foreigners so often impose their own feelings of guilt on people who have been wronged. When he made Makwayela (1978) about people working in the gold mines in South Africa as a teaching film with students from the Institute of Cinema in Mozambique, there were people from elsewhere “trying to find their own revolution” there (207). As the film is described in his catalogue: “The workers from a bottle factory have formed a mixed chorus that sings and dances about their work in the gold mines … In the Barakolo language (a secret language of the miners), they denounce imperialism and apartheid” (378).

These people were slum dwellers – how could one joke about their conditions? The short answer, as Manthia Diawara, amongst others, has observed, is that Rouch cannot not be playful. Joking, including about the bleakest of conditions, is inbuilt. Certainly the formative joking relationship shared with his African friends is a desired model of relating. Rejecting racial, nationalist and Marxist politics, he places hope in the inventiveness of shared marginality. As Godard expressed it back in 1959:

There is a jokey side to Rouch which sometimes undermines his purpose. Not that the inhabitants of Treichville haven’t the right to poke fun of everything, but there is a certain facility about his acceptance of it. A joker can get to the bottom of things as well as another but this should not prevent him from self-discipline. This is the sort of criticism that may be levelled against Rouch, but no other. He knows it, moreover (133).

Despite his cheerful disposition, Rouch doesn’t lack his own credentials in pain. In his interview with John Marshall and John Adams, he tells a nice story about humour, even in the absurdity and horror of his experience in the Second World War, concluding, “I don’t know if it’s right, I don’t know if I’m following the right track” (see 207-209). But what he does feel sure of is that the “only way to go on is to recognize that the world is at the same time cruel and tender” (145). When Lucien Taylor expresses surprise at Rouch’s criticisms of surrealists who permitted politics to intrude into poetry, that the maker of Moi, un noir would draw such a rigid distinction between the two, Rouch is adamant: there being no easy solution to the problem of racism, what he did with Oumarou Ganda was try to share their dreams in film. “Moi, un Noir was the result of an encounter of two people” (139). [18]

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It was with another stoic romantic, Edgar Morin, that Rouch created the work best known to students of film around the world, Chronicle of a Summer. Less well known is their “Chronicle of a Summer: A Film Book”, which makes up fully one quarter of Ciné-Ethnography. [19]  Feld doesn’t exaggerate in his assessment:

While it is widely acknowledged that 1960’s Chronicle of a Summer was a tremendously innovative film that inspired many documentary, ethnographic, experimental, and New Wave films to follow, it will become equally clear that this book, too, is a historically innovative text. Far more than the transcript of an unscripted film, Morin’s and Rouch’s essays, interviews, and restoration of cut dialogue in the transcript are a deep exercise in intellectual reflexivity and autocritique, and a substantial contribution to discussing issues of intersubjectivity, realism, and deception in documentary cinema (22).

With Rouch and Morin forming something of a “Jerry Lewis-Dean Martin” team (257), Rouch naturally veering “toward what is cheerful and light” and himself “toward what is sad and sorrowful” (262), Morin conceived a film around the question, “How do you live?” Not a fictional film, nor a documentary, and not, strictly speaking, a sociological film, he proposed the film as research, an experiment lived by its authors and actors, an “ethnological film in the strong sense”, since “it studies mankind” (232). No beating around the bush here. With Rouch, the “filmmaker-diver” who “plunges” into real-life situations with his “ethnographer’s conscience” preventing betrayal or embellishment of the truth (230-231), Morin wanted to go direct to basic, existential questions.

At the First International Festival of Ethnographic Film in Florence, Morin and Rouch had voted for John Marshall and Robert Gardner’s film on the bushmen, The Hunters (USA, 1957), since it truly revealed our

inconveivable yet certain kinship with that tough and tenacious humanity, while all other films have shown us its exotic foreignness. …. Can we now hope for equally human films about workers, the petite bourgeoisie, the petty bureaucrats, about the men and women of our enormous cities? Must these people remain more foreign to us than Nanook the Eskimo, the fisherman of Aran, or the Bushman hunter? Can’t the cinema be one of the means of breaking the membrane that isolates each of us from others in the metro, on the street, or on the stairway of the apartment building? (231)

A tall order, with more to come. Recognizing the profound kinship between social life and theatre, it was hoped that this “sociodrama” with “psychoanalytic truth”, might awaken us to a human message:

It is then that we can feel for a moment that truth is that which is hidden in us, beneath our petrified relationships. It is then that modern cinema can realize, and it can only realize it through cinéma-vérité [film-truth], that lucid consciousness of brotherhood where the viewer finds himself to be less alien to his fellow man, less icy and inhuman, less encrusted in a false life (232). [20]

The summer of 1960 being weighed down by contemporary history, the events in the Congo and the war in Algeria (to which young men in the film could be conscripted on the side of the colonists), Morin wanted also to investigate private, subjective life, along with work and social relations. “The film should be a montage of images in which the question “How do you live?” is transformed into “How can one live?” and “What can one do?” which should bounce off the viewer” (237). For the participants themselves after the projection of the film, he dreamed of a final encounter (harking back, no less, than to the French revolution), a “big final scene where the scales would fall and consciousness would be awakened, where we would take a new ‘oath of the tennis court’ to construct a new life” (248).

Part of the power of Chronicle is that these beautiful ideals reverberate through the characters’ lives and relationships – which are more damaged, brutalised, compromised, indeed “shrunken”, than they want them to be. The shadow of the holocaust and of Stalinism hang over these who would change the world. It is eight years before the eruption of “poetic revolt” of May ’68 (a revolt that made Rouch more reconciled with his own country). And while Morin’s hopes are outrageous, in the film there is a lack of absolutism that is precisely one of its strengths, Morin himself aiming for something more humble, for “the possibility of being a bit of one’s self” (234). [21]

Commensality, bringing people together, feeling “at home” is Morin’s starting point, while Rouch’s, thanks to revolutions in filming technology, is “pédovision“, being able to take the camera to the street, to the home and factory, anywhere, combining the dreams of Flaherty and Dziga Vertov (whose acknowledged importance to Rouch I have shamefully neglected here). [22]  In a footnote to Morin’s text, Rouch suggests the “fine meal” idea was devised to satisfy Morin’s “demonic” gourmandising, “to get him in the mood for conversation”. But in fact it allowed “a feeling of trust to develop among the actors and crew, which was indispensable for suppressing inhibitions before the camera (always present and ready to record at any moment)” (264). Indeed, when Rouch and Morin provocatively suggest the young people don’t give a damn about the war in Algeria, the sound recordist and cameraman join in the ensuing argument. One of the young participants is Régis, who will go on after the film to join the Communist Party and become the politician we know as Régis Debray. As Morin notes, the discussion was “quite lively, violent”, at certain moments, “pathetic, at others comical”. And after many viewings, I at last know why Morin has a strange grin on his face that seems out of place in one segment of this scene – he was drunk, he tells us, half-way through the meal (238). Only “a few pale tatters” of the Algeria discussion remain, since the censor might have attacked the film and the young people for their criticisms of French policy.

Another key moment of commensality/provocation is a cruel one. Rouch and Morin are at a table with Marceline, a concentration camp survivor, her student boyfriend, Jean-Pierre, Landry and Nadine (a black and a white student from the Ivory Coast, whom we have met a year before in La pyramide humaine). Régis and Raymond too (the latter also from the Ivory Coast) are there to talk about the situation in the post-independence Congo, where violence in the present follows the violence of colonisation. Rouch and the others joke with Marceline over her proclamation that she would never marry a black, not finding blacks sexually attractive, but remembering dancing with one particular man, whose way of dancing was extraordinary. Amidst the friendly taunting, Landry wishes that the French could like blacks for more than their dancing. After Morin brings the conversation back to the Congo, Landry and Raymond speaking of their solidarity with all colonised Africans, Rouch returns to Marceline, and the number on her arm. What do Landry and Raymond think it is? Having no idea, the Africans and the others playfully try out ideas – then Marceline, with grace, explains, and the camera pans to a close-up of Landry, lowering his eyes. We see Nadine begin to cry, the scene ending with a freeze-frame of Marceline’s hand, stroking a rose.

Rouch notes his own cruel smile when he turned the tables on the unsuspecting young men, a smile that embarrasses him even now. We learn in his interview with Cineaste that there had been a discussion of anti-semitism and he had known that the Africans did not understand the French concern about the phenomenon. (Morin himself comes from a Salonican Jewish family that immigrated to France, “Morin” being his resistance name which he kept to honour his country. Jacques Gabillon, who appears in the film with his wife, Simone, was, like Marceline, a concentration camp survivor, known to Morin through the Federation of Resistant and Patriotic Deportees and Internees.) Rouch notes that with everyone deeply affected by what happened, the cameraman was so disturbed that the end of the sequence was out of focus. Morin says that they ran out of film precisely at that moment (238).

There is no shortage of discomfort for Chronicle‘s audience. (Italian Marilou’s revelation of despair, her unexpected “coming apart” before the camera, tends also to divide audiences in their response, as it did Chronicle‘s participants.) But there is also a sense of freedom and light – as if the French love of “clarté” finds fulfilment here in the filming.

Several cameramen worked on a job that “involved more than talent”, but “sympathy and communication” (238). Raoul Coutard filmed between Godard’s À bout de souffle (Breathless) and Le petit soldat, shooting at the Renault factory where Angélo, Jean and Jacques work, with hand-held 35mm camera, telephoto lens and ultra-sensitive film, that needed no additional lighting. Michel Brault was brought over from Canada, where he had shot short films with hand-held camera and synchronous sound for the Canadian Film Board. He brought the lavalière microphone that Marceline will wear as she walks through the Place de la Concorde and Les Halles, recalling her transportation to Auschwitz with her father, and her return – without him. Brault’s camera follows Angélo home from work, through the street, on the bus, climbing “interminable”, picturesque steps (up to the Clamart plateau) that take the crew by surprise, then into rustic looking suburban streets, where he lives with his mother.

During the course of the filming, Rouch negotiated with engineer, André Coutant, to build a prototype electronic 16mm camera, light and soundproof, capable of going anywhere:

The creation of the camera proceeded with the creation of the film. I was overjoyed with the result. It was doubly wonderful because I was in front of these people who were always so serious, and I was joyous at seeing the camera being born (213).

The filming captures and creates the “film truth” of the participants’ lives, from the lyrical opening of working people’s Paris, the smokestacks and sirens, the daybreak with the crowd spilling from the metro, through apartments, workplaces, to the staircase of Morin’s own apartment building where Landry and Angélo get to know one another. After Rouch and Morin are pictured pacing up and down, discussing the film and the participants’ reactions to it, Chronicle ends as the pair take their departure on the streets of Paris in the rain.

The film also captures the charge of the interaction of those who chanced, risked, participation. Towards the end, the film cuts from a picnic in Fontainbleu, the picnickers’ song carrying over on the soundtrack as the beam of the projection lamp shines on the screen. The song ends, the beam goes out. The participants have been watching sequences of the film. The vibrations of hope, of friendships achieved and aborted, of tolerance and its lacerating opposite, feel tangible here – it’s like they’re damned up, then released as we hone in on the group discussion.

In Ciné-Ethnography, we get the point of view of characters who responded to a questionnaire on their participation. One thing they agree on is the one-sidedness of the portraits. They believe they are more rich and complex than their images on the screen. (Over twenty-five hours of material had to be cut down to one and a half.) What is certain, says Marceline, is that Rouch and Morin “did not always use the best things” (340). Yet while she insists she was in control, dramatizing herself in the deportation sequence, and that her “truth is not in this film”, even if the memories of deportation are real (341), other participants were deeply affected by the emotion released, by the authenticity of her “performance”.

Landry speaks of his trust in Rouch, his liking for what the director does, and at the same time addresses things still troubling in the film, “certain realities that escape a large part of the white masses”. Getting to know him, Angélo had asked him if he had an inferiority complex as a black. In the questionnaire commentary, he says: “I would really have liked to say more about mixed marriage and the worker situation in my country; to express myself more fully on the problem of the Congo; also to express myself more fully on this delicate problem they call the ‘skin complex'” (335).

If a book can have a “punctum”, for me it lies in the after comments of Simone and Jacques Gabillon. While her image in the film strikes her as superficial (she appears a delightful, sympathetic character, who tells a story of her first encounter with bedbugs!), she enjoyed the filming, having confidence in Morin as team leader. But she is frank, like each respondent, when she speaks of the attempt to attain the truth. While she has no “tragic past”, like her husband, she alludes to the effect on the couple, the repercussions of his deportation, the postwar housing shortage and the long years when he was out of work and “on the edge of madness” (336-7). Jacques regrets that the camera was never really turned toward Rouch, to capture those moments when he sat cross-legged on the floor of his house, playing to gain his son’s confidence. Sympathetic to the depictions of others in the film, with regard to himself, he says:

As for what could have been done, it would have required that the camera penetrate into my little world of anachronistic bureaucracy at SNCF, [23]  with its grotesque silhouettes and general grayness. The camera would have had to tune in to capture the after effects of the ordeal of deportation with the subsequent decline, and not the militant who never existed, and finally to throw a violent light on what had inevitably remained in the shadow, understanding that the camera will more quickly uncover a wound than evoke the humiliation or simple paltriness of daily life. … What is essentially lacking to a full understanding of me is as much the result of a certain dissimulation of my personality. It’s why I don’t assume what I really am, what’s deep within me. Here enters the ‘pathology’ of the wounded idealist, of the former concentration camp internee, coming to grips with the reality of a society to which he is poorly adapted, a society that, in fact, repudiates him and has, up till now, assailed his greatly diminished vitality. What is pathetic in my adventure is that for long years, the scream that was tearing me apart never left my throat. I no longer had the energy to scream (332).

In The World Viewed, Stanley Cavell speaks of “the mismatch between the depth to which an ordinary human life requires expression and the surface of ordinary means through which that life must express itself”.[24]  I think Gabillon, in Chronicle and its companion book, at last found a form of at least some adequacy.

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How do students respond to Chronicle in Melbourne, Australia, forty years later, students who have been warned that many of its techniques have been taken on board, that their video copy will lack the crispness, the beauty, of the no longer available 16mm print? The characters are exotic, from another time and place. Conforming to their stereotypes, they smoke, converse with something of a philosophical ring to their arguments. Usually the students know little of French Left history, Algeria, the Ivory Coast, and my fascination seeing Régis Debray as such a young man means nothing to them. But after we joke a bit about the difference Prozac might have made to the characters’ lives, they indeed relate closely to the film and its participants – on each of the levels Morin had hoped to encompass. They talk about their own lives. They now have another resource to answer some of their questions. And pose new ones.

Have I no criticisms to make of this book or the body of Rouch’s work, for which I am so grateful? Only one. What a pity that in the final cut of Chronicle, the women tend to be questioned in relation to their involvement with men, that Marceline’s political convictions, Marilou’s political association with the male “wounded idealists”, don’t have a place. The “eternal” problem of representation of women is broached at various places in the book and readers can see for themselves Rouch’s comments on the difficulty of a male anthropologist/filmmaker having access to women’s worlds. His and Morin’s valued “fraternité” undoubtedly, in principle, includes everyone. But much of the time the solidarity, friendship and affection seem part of a male domain, a male imaginary. Speaking of Les maîtres fous at one point, Rouch suddenly mentions his then wife, Jane’s opinion, and it’s a little like learning part way through Claude Lévi-Strauss’s masterpiece, Tristes tropiques, that Madame Lévi-Strauss had accompanied him on what had seemed like a heroic, solitary male journey. It would be comforting if such omissions were “ancient history” now, but of course they are not. Yet if Rouch’s (and Morin’s) spirit, their approach to politics, poetry and research are really followed through, this “woman problem” (or rather, “man problem”) can surely be more effectively negotiated.

The last little story, however, is on me. In Paris in the mid 70s a young ami, a Tuareg from Mali, stopped at one of the cinemas in the Latin Quarter, pointing to stills from a film we should see. The director made great films, his comedies were much loved back in Africa. Film-literate, my tastes were European, Fassbinder, Sirk, Eastern European cinema, and of course, French. I could also dip into French film journals, like Cahiers and Positif, talk about the latter’s take on Cukor, Minnelli, etc., which earned me some prestige among my French friends, surprised that such knowledge could have been nurtured in the land of sheep and kangaroos. I’d never heard of this Jean Rouch. And as such a sophisticate, was I going to see a film called Cocorico, Monsieur Poulet–Cockadoodledoo, Mister Chicken? Alas, it was my loss.

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This essay is dedicated to the memory of Jean Rouch, who died at the age of 86 in a car accident in Niger in February this year. He was travelling with his wife, Jocelyne Lamothe, Niger filmmaker, Moustapha Alassane, and old friend, Damouré Zika, all of whom survived the accident. He was buried in Niamey, Niger.

Endnotes

[1] See Banks’ “Rites of footage”, in  The Times Literary Supplement, 4 December 1998, p.30.
[2] Along with his film, see Diawara’s  African Cinema: Politics and Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). Further references to this text appear as page numbers in brackets.
[3] See “Africa speaks of the end and the means”, in  Godard on Godard, ed. Jean Narboni, trans. and commentary by Tom Milne (London: Secker & Warburg, 1972). See also “Moi, un noir”, 129 and “Jean Rouch wins the Delluc Prize”, 104. Further references to this text appear as page numbers in brackets.
[4] See also Lucien Taylor’s interview with Rouch, “A life on the edge of film and anthropology”, 139. Feld and Taylor are quoting Deleuze in  Cinema 2: The Time Image.
[5] Mick Eaton’s short, edited collection,  Anthropology-Reality-Cinema: The films of Jean Rouch (London: British Film Institute), appeared in 1979, and Paul Stoller’s The Cinematic Griot: The Ethnography of Jean Rouch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), has been a good introduction for many English speakers.
[6] See MacDougall’s Transcultural Cinema  (Princeton: Princeton University Press, NJ, 1998), 266. Further references to this text appear as page numbers in brackets.
[7] See James Clifford’s “On ethnographic surrealism”, in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art  (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988), and Jeanette DeBouzek’s excellent, “The ethnographic surrealism of Jean Rouch”, in Visual Anthropology 2, no. 3-4 (1989). Among the “shared experiments” Rouch discussed with DeBouzek was the journal Documents, founded by jazz musician, Georges-Henri Rivière and Paul Rivet, eventual co-founder of the Musée de l’Homme. Documents was edited by dissident surrealist and co-founder of the Collège de Sociologie, Georges Bataille. The journal Minotaure appeared shortly after the demise of Documents.
[8] Ogotemmêli was a Dogon elder, an informant of Griaule. The English translation of Griaule’s Dieu d’eau, is called Conversations with Ogotemmêli.
[9] See Stoller, Ch. 12, “Rouch, theory, and ethnographic film”.
[10] See, for example, Rachel O. Moore’s Introduction to Savage Theory: Cinema as Modern Magic (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).
[11] See Rouch’s encapsulation of his rejection of positivist, Marxist, psychoanalytic and most ethnographic approaches to human beings and his tracing of his own orientation to Marcel Mauss. 143.
[12] This ties in directly with Lila Abu-Lughod’s call for “ethnographies of the particular” in “Writing against culture”, in Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, ed. R.G. Fox (Santa Fe NM: School of American Research Press, 1991).
[13] See Stoller’s “Rouch, theory, and ethnographic film” (203), and Ch. 9, “Les maîtres fous“, in The Cinematic Griot, along with his “Horrific comedy: cultural resistance and the Hauka movement in Niger”, Ethos 11 (1984).
[14] See Camus’ “Ni victimes ni bourreaux” (Neither victims nor executioners), Combat, 19-30 November 1946, L’homme révolté (The Rebel) (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), and my “Sweet finitude: relative utopias with live inhabitants”, French Cultural Studies 8, Part 2, no. 23 (June 1997).
[15] See Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike’s Black African Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), and the interview with Faye in his Questioning African Cinema: Conversations with Filmmakers (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 29-40.
[16] In writing, Rouch takes great care with empirical detail, so I regret not being able to recount more of the way history is here interwoven with his underlining of political, economic and technical considerations. Indeed, the article is a good one to read in conjunction with the interviews with post-independence African filmmakers in Questioning African Cinema
[17] Diawara’s African Cinema is a must read in relation to these questions. His account (see 93-103) of Rouch and Godard working, respectively, with Super 8 and video in Mozambique in the late 70s (at the invitation of the government under the guidance of Ruy Guerra, Head of the National Film Institute), is consistent with what we learn of Rouch in Ciné-Ethnography. Rouch wanted to demystify film production, believing in the use of the least expensive, least cumbersome equipment, in training to repair, even redesign equipment for local conditions. Godard, too, was strong on demystification, and the grass-roots notion of people being able to create their own images and sounds before televison arrived in Mozambique. Guerra ended up critical of the work they were doing. Although I can only gesture to his work here, I think Senegalese film director, Djibril Diop Mambety’s philosophy and films were in sync with many of Rouch’s convictions. Scathing of the corrupting love of money and power, Mambety’s not completed Histoires de petits gens (Stories of little people) focussed, unsentimentally, on the marginal poor, who would not give up, but managed to make lives for themselves against all odds. Tragically, Mambety died too young in 1998. Kenneth W. Harrow’s edited collection, African Cinema: Postcolonial and Feminist Readings (Trenton, NJ and Amsara, Eritrea: Africa World Press, 1999) is dedicated to his memory, noting the way his work resisted the “almost universally accepted” assumption of realism, and that along with his critique of the colonialists, he “challenged the entire African ruling class, and especially the Senegalese ruling classes and government” (xvi & xviii). Among younger contemporary filmmakers, Jean-Pierre Bekolo is an admirer of Mambety’s work, but I have so far been unable to see any of his films. Ukadike’s Questioning African Cinema has interviews with both these directors.
[18] Of course on one level, Rouch overstates his case. But on another level, he doesn’t. He is wary of politics that betray actual experience. (Cf. Djibril Diop Mambety, in his interview with Ukadike: “I am not an ideologist. I can’t just love and refuse to love”. 2002, 131) As Diawara points out, there are African filmmakers who by virtue of his being white, French, and an ethnographer who works with the French Ministère des Relations Extérieures, the Musée de l’Homme and the Université de Paris X, Nanterre, see Rouch as an imperialist and neo-colonialist (174). Ukadike’s Black African Cinema is worth reading in its entirety for its contradictions on Rouch and a full appreciation of its author’s approach to African films. Rouch’s filming is seen to represent “a stage in the evolution of colonial cinema” (49) and his films about Africa are judged “menacingly degrading” (340). On the other hand, “his use of African collaborators has contributed to the development of African cinema … As a result of this collaboration, some Africans who worked with him as actors became important filmmakers”. With both Moi, un noir and Petit à petit ou les lettres persanes 1968 jointly produced by Rouch and the actors, he “transcends other Western filmmakers concerned with exotic travelogues” (50).
[19] Translations of Morin’s “Chronicle of a film”, Rouch’s “The cinema of the future”, and “Chronicle of a Summer: The Film”, by Anny Ewing and Steven Feld, originally appeared in Studies in Visual Communication 11, no. 1, in 1985.
[20] The now well known term, cinéma-vérité, appears throughout Ciné-Ethnography, since it was associated with Chronicle from the beginning. After the Ethnographic Film Festival in Florence, Morin wrote an article, “Pour un nouveau cinéma-vérité” (For a new cinéma-vérité), for France observateur, which paid homage, of course, to Dziga Vertov and his kino pravda. Rouch, however, came to dislike the term’s potentially misleading positivist or absolutist connotations and preferred to use “cinéma-direct“, “direct cinema”, to denote a set of mutually interdependent attitudes and techniques. Understanding of the term, cinéma-vérité is not helped when the opening English subtitles of Chronicle translate “une expérience nouvelle de cinéma-vérité”as “an experiment in filming the truth”.
[21] Unlike Rouch, Morin, by his own description, had been a “war Communist”, but had broken with the party four years before the filming. In Chronicle at one stage, twenty-year old Jean-Pierre speaks of his political impotence, of having seen the way Morin’s generation has been scarred by political involvement, their “powerlessness in the face of barriers …”.
[22] One acknowledgement of indebtedness, from “The camera and the man”, must suffice: “[O]ur discipline was invented by two geniuses. One, Robert Flaherty, was a geographer-explorer who was doing ethnography without knowing it. The other, Dziga Vertov, was a futurist poet who was doing sociology, equally without knowing it. The two never met, but both craved cinema ‘reality.’ And ethnographers and sociologists who were inventing their new disciplines in the very midst of these two incredible observers had no contact with either of them. Yet it is to these two men that we owe everything that we are trying to do today” (31).
[23]  Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer Français.
[24] See “More of the world viewed”, in The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1979), 245.

Created on: Tuesday, 14 December 2004 | Last Updated: 9-Dec-06