The Ethnographic Magician: Jean Rouch’s African Films (Preview)

by Eric Kohn

Jean Rouch (seated, center)

For many cinephiles, the career of French ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch starts and ends with Chronicle of a Summer (Chronique d’un été, 1961), the seminal overview of Parisian lower-class strife set during a tense moment on the brink of social change. Rouch directed it with sociologist Edgar Morin, and together they delivered a masterful nonfiction essay that deserves its lasting role in the documentary canon. While Morin’s directorial credits start and end with Chronicle of a Summer, Rouch’s career contains a longer string of brilliant films that pushed the language of cinema in new directions still shimmering with ingenuity today.

The prominent attention that Chronicle of a Summer has received over the years from the international film community—most recently with a slot in the Cannes Classics sidebar—has the unfortunate side effect of eclipsing the truly startling hybrid of narrative and nonfiction storytelling that Rouch produced before and after his one widely appreciated achievement. Working closely with African tribesmen, Rouch blended existing documentary traditions with a subjective framework and even acerbic social commentary that anticipated the output of filmmakers ranging from Jean-Luc Godard to Sacha Baron Cohen. Rouch’s influence on hybrid narratives has been severely underestimated for years; a new DVD box set released by Icarus Films may help rectify the oversight.

This is not to say that Chronicle of a Summer lacks Rouch’s distinctive talent. A progenitor of the cinéma-vérité movement, it has in common with Rouch’s other work an extraordinary capacity to explain culture through collective behavior, but the setting is an anomaly. The majority of Rouch’s career took place not in his native France but on the Ivory Coast, where, for over fifty years until his death in 2004, he produced with the same team of locals countless inventive films about the lives of indigenous tribes. Dividing time between the French anthropological research center in Niger and the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, his methodology originated in scientific investigation but blossomed in cinema.

From his initial shorts produced in the late Forties, Rouch developed a self-made genre with roots in both Robert Flaherty and Dziga Vertov. Flaherty’s Nanook of the North inspired Rouch to implicate his subjects in the production process, encouraging them to perform for the camera and construct stories based on their lives. Vertov’s theories about observing the proletariat, applied in his 1920s-era newsreel series Kino-Pravda, inspired Rouch’s interest in rendering the perspective of tribesmen exclusively from their point of view—but the French director despised putting this idea into practice without letting his subjects take charge. As he says in the behind-the-scenes documentary Jean Rouch and His Camera in the Heart of Africa (1986), “‘Candid Camera’ is disgusting,” a reflection of his inherently collaborative approach.

Nevertheless, narrow-minded scholarship has assailed Rouch’s African portraits for assuming a colonialist perspective when in fact several key works included in the Icarus box set deconstruct the impact of colonialism on African life with remarkable savvy. By exploring African cultures and tribal rituals, Rouch engages with the ultimate Other in the eyes of Western society, wrestling it down to earth and emerging on revelatory ground. Rouch denies us the capacity to view his subjects with the cold removal of conventional ethnography. Watching a Rouch film, it’s impossible not to feel one with its protagonists.

The six films contained in the new DVD release and accompanying screening series1 span some fifteen years of his career. Collectively, they showcase a stunning capacity to use the language of cinema in innovative ways that owe debts to surrealism as much as scholarly conceits. Unearthing creative pathways that transcend cultural boundaries, Rouch grew more ambitious each time out, but always adhered to the same mentality: From the playfully observational Moi, un noir (Me, a Black, 1957), a portrait of Nigerian migrant workers exclusively told through their voice-over narration, through the reverse ethnography of Petit à petit (Little by Little, 1969), which empowered its black African subjects by allowing them to toss the colonialist mindset back at French society, these films stand out for admittedly rickety techniques held together by unique conceptual brilliance. Rouch dubbed his homegrown methodology ethnofiction, an entirely new genre of filmmaking populated only by his work but groundbreaking in its anticipation of the emerging definitions of documentary practice.

Les Maîtres fous

By design, ethnofiction combines several modes of address: the superficial layer of ethnographic observation, the interior experience of its subjects projected outward so that any given viewer can understand it, and the various themes that emerge from the fusion of those two levels. Such a busy network of expression is readily obvious in Rouch’s first bona fide ethnofiction achievement, Les Maîtres fous (1955), aka The Mad Masters, which compensates for its concise half-hour running time with a lively, haunting rebuke by the West African religious sect against their oppressive British administrators. Known as the Hauka, this collection of migrant workers moved from Nigeria to Accra, the capital of Ghana, where Rouch captured them in the throes of an annual ceremony rife with social commentary.

1. In November, the French Institute/Alliance Française in New York held screenings entitled “Here and Elsewhere: The Films of Jean Rouch, Part I,” a retrospective of his films, while the same month Anthology Film Archives hosted “Here and Elsewhere: The Films of Jean Rouch, Part II.” The Jean Rouch films reviewed in this article are distributed by Icarus Films, www.icarusfilms.com.

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Cineaste,Vol.XXXVIII No.1 2012