Educational Media Reviews Online

Jean Rouch, one of the foundational filmmakers of Cinéma Vérité, is a prolific documentarian who spent over sixty years shooting documentary films in and about the people of Africa. The Goumbé of the Young Revelers is a short documentary about a group of youths in Abidjan in the Ivory Coast during a time of growth in the 1960s. The group comes together for a meeting in which bylaws are announced, each having to do with aspects of their daily lives. Intercut with these bylaws is corresponding footage of members of the group working on the docks, playing soccer, landscaping, dancing, singing, and holding parades in their communities. The spirit of the film is to show the youthful exuberance of the Goumbé during a time of prosperity. However, through today’s lens it’s hard to see these images along with those of a Nescafé factory billowing smoke, the logging trucks carrying massive loads of trees, and the background presence of an affluent colonizing population that lives outside of the communities depicted in the film. There is a disconnect that is only in future perfect tense because of the knowledge now available of Nestle’s ethics, the effects of climate change and the exploitation of economies around the world. Although those feelings are prevalent, the joy of the music and dancing is palpable through the screen. The film itself has been wonderfully restored and digitized allowing the vibrancy of the colors to be fully expressive.

This film is a perfect example of Rouch’s approach to ethnographic filmmaking, albeit a problematic approach that hasn’t aged as well as the physical film itself. The Goumbé of the Young Revelers would be great for courses about African Studies, Documentary Filmmaking, and Anthropology.

Published and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. Anyone can use these reviews, so long as they comply with the terms of the license.