Educational Media Reviews Online

For many years it was close to impossible to reliably find Jean Rouch’s work in North America. Many libraries would have to purchase the PAL European versions of the films, and these would be un-subtitled. The result was that accessibility to Rouch’s work was severely restricted. Rouch’s innovative filmic method of collaborative ethnographic work, termed “shared anthropology”, has influenced not only filmmakers from the West but also African filmmakers. In 2012 Icarus put together what I consider to be the most significant films in Rouch’s most important 14-year period, 1955 to 1969. The films are: The Mad Masters, Mammy Water, Moi, un noir, The Lion Hunters, Jaguar, and Little By Little. In 2005 Les Editions Montparnasse in France came out with a 4-DVD box set containing 10 Rouch films, and as extra features they added a 104-minute interview with Rouch as well as a separate interview with one of his collaborators and a short documentary on his last film premiere in 2004 following which, four days later, Rouch perished in a car accident. Aside from these special features, the additional titles on the French PAL region 2 box set amount to 3 shorts and a minor feature. The six films that Icarus is distributing are the most highly regarded of his career and thus an excellent choice for inclusion in a library collection. Another well-known Rouch film, Chronicle of a Summer, is already distributed by Criterion Collection. Hence, through this latest Icarus release, it is now relatively straightforward for non-francophones to finally properly study the work of Jean Rouch.

Jean Rouch carried out most of his cinematographic work in Niger and Mali from the start of his career in the late 1940s until his death in a car accident in Niger in 2004. Many of his short films depict religious possession ceremonies and rituals in remote rural areas in both these countries. His longer films have a tendency to depict colonial and post-colonial urban environments and generally focus on how young African men negotiate their lives around work, technology and modernity.

Les Maitres fous (1955, 26 minutes, English voice-over) is the earliest film in this collection. The written warning about the film’s violence and cruelty is in French only at the start of the film. The text asserts that the aim of the film is to make the viewer participate in a ritual that serves as a solution to dealing with what we now call colonialism. The film won first prize at the Venice Film Festival in the Ethnographic / Geographic / Tourist / Folkloric category in 1957. This French text also introduces the Hauka religious sect which emerged in 1927. It goes on to say that the film was shot at the request of the priests who are proud of their traditions and “art” and that none of the scenes are secret or were clandestinely recorded, claiming that the violence is a reflection of civilization (in 1954, when the film was shot). The text is important to framing and contextualizing what is to come and perhaps should have subtitles. Icarus’s back-cover notes indicate that the film contains animal sacrifices but the graphic nature of the killing of a dog and the subsequent blood drinking and eating of its head can be difficult viewing for some people. These ethnographic visuals and the way in which they are edited are very powerful today as historical documents. The film is also significant in Rouch’s career because of the negative reviews it got from both the African intelligentsia and from his French peers. It made him rethink how to represent Africans on film.

Mammy Water (1956, 18 minutes, subtitled in English) is the most poetic of the box-set and in many ways the most traditional in terms of documentary practice of the period. It depicts the world of Sharma, a West African coastal village at the foot of the Pra River. It is a fishing town and sometimes the catch is rather discouraging. In order to change their luck, the villagers must honor the water spirits with a ceremony which includes a procession and offerings to the sea. The film shows the aftermath of a ritual bovine slaying and in the context of the thrust of the narrative, it is a necessary climactic point. Afterwards, the fishermen climb into their sea canoes and enjoy the luck that had been eluding them. The film is an illustration of an idyllic world where children play on the beaches and rituals are lyrical.

In his first feature film, Moi, un noir (1958, 72 minutes, subtitled in English) Rouch provides an early attempt at more dramatic and story-driven narratives. It was filmed in Abidjan, Ivory Coast just prior to its independence and functions as a “week-in the life-of” documentary focusing on how young male migrants from Niger adapt to city life, but more aptly to modern colonial African life. At the time this film was shot there were no sync-sound 16mm cameras. The solution was to have the footage improvised and shot silent. The footage was shown to the participants who then improvised a narrative and dialogue that meshed with the images on the screen. In this way, a semi-fictionalized lived experience was enacted with voices who spoke about their lives. This type of stylistic innovation, born of necessity, influenced the emerging French New Wave.

Rouch’s camera in Jaguar (1967, 89 minutes, subtitled in English) is less observational and more engaged than in Moi, un noir, although the concept is similar. The film was shot during several years starting in 1954, the same year as The Mad Masters, but it differs immeasurably from that film. It was shot silent as Moi, un noir was to be, and several years later Rouch recorded a narration track based on improvised commentary by the participants, responding to the action on the screen. This final version of the film was released in 1967 and attracted praise for its innovation and style. Jaguar is a road film, albeit on foot, where three men set off to find their fortunes far from home and return full of tales of their adventure and hard-earned money. What pushes this film further than Moi, un noir is that it is a complete collaboration from conception to release print between subjects and filmmaker. The idea had been proposed by Rouch’s friend and sound recordist on The Mad Masters as a way of consolidating footage.

The Lion Hunters (1965, 77 minutes, English voice-over) was shot during seven hunting expeditions between 1958 and 1965 on the border between Niger and Mali and depicts bow and arrow hunting traditions that, as the narrator says at the end of the film, would be dead by the time the children in the film would be old enough to hunt. The rituals and mythology surrounding traditions in hunting are presented in a reverential manner, celebrating the cycle of life.

In Little by Little (1969, 92 minutes subtitled in English), his comedy sequel to Jaguar, Rouch collaborators Damouré Zika and Lam Ibrahim Dia extend characters they had developed in the earlier film into a fully fictional story. The film thus has the look and feel of a more traditional scripted comedy by utilizing reverse anthropology as a device to advance plot points by which the African characters come to Paris and behave like anthropologists studying Parisians. It is a kind of character reversal. Having built a small but successful import-export business in Niger, called Petit-à-Petit (little by little), they establish their goals to build a taller building than a competitor’s and yearn to participate in the trappings of capitalistic status, which they indulge when they arrive in Paris by the purchase of a used old Bugatti convertible. But the narrative is also circular: after their picaresque adventure they return home and ponder the strangeness of the other “Other”, no longer them. Another review of this film is available in EMRO.

This box-set is important to the canon of ethnographic and documentary films and now that it is finally available for the Anglophone market it should make its way into academic library collections related to film studies, post-colonial studies as well as certain areas in anthropology. Highly Recommended.