IVAC 2019: Jean Rouch's Participatory Ethnography

Performing Reality

Jean Rouch’s Participatory Ethnography

curated by

Christopher Zimmerman

Constantly expanding the boundaries of cinema, Jean Rouch remains a major figure in 20^th cinema and a boundless source of inspiration for generations of filmmakers. A self-made director, cameraman, and anthropologist, he devised new techniques and story-telling approaches transgressing the rules and genres sedimented in the traditions of non-fiction filmmaking. With his ‘performative ethnography,’ Rouch’s films did not record events; rather, the director became an active participant in the event he was filming.  Performing Reality presents three films in which Rouch cinematically explores his formal ethnographical research thus creating a new mode of filmmaking:  Ciné-trance and possession ritual, Ethno-fiction and West African migration, and Cinéma Vérité and participatory and self-reflexive sociological experimentation.

Film Synopses*

Program One—Tuesday, February 19, 2019

Jean Rouch Les maîtres fous [The Mad Masters] (1956) 29:00

Produced by Films de la Pléiade. 

Sound by Damouré Zika. 

Edited by Suzanne Baron.

Prize for best short film, Venice, 1957.

                 

Jean Rouch Les maîtres fous (1956)

In the city of Accra in 1954, emigrants from Niger are plunged into the frantic life of western civilization.  To cope with this uprooting, they meet in a town on the outskirts of the city to practice the cult of Hauka, like modern genies.  The most controversial and most widely celebrated work by Jean Rouch, The Mad Masters depicts a possession ritual using the delirious techniques of “cine-trance,” doubling as a theatrical protest against Ghana’s colonial rulers.

Jean Rouch Moi, un Noir [Me, a Black] (1959) 74:00

Produced by Films de la Pléiade. 

Sound by André Lubin. 

Edited by Marie-Joséphe Yoyotte and Catherine Dourgnon. 

Orchestra music by Yopi Joseph Degré. 

Songs by Miryam Touré, N’Daye Yéro, Amadou Demba. 

French commentary by Oumarou Ganda. 

Adviser:  Lam Ibrahim Dia. 

Director of production:  Roger Felytoux.

Jean Rouch Moi, un Noir (1959)

Cast:  Oumarou Ganda (E.G. Robinson), Petit Touré, Alassane Meiga, Amadou Demba, Seydou Guede, Karidyo Faoudou, Mlle Gambi

Two young Nigerians have left the interior of Niger to find work in the Ivory Coast.  They’ve ended up in Treichville, a crowded district of Abidjian, uprooted into modern civilization.  Winner of the prestigious Prix Louis Delluc in 1958, Moi, un Noir, a complex portrait Nigerian migrants, marks Rouch’s break with traditional ethnography and his embrace of the collaborative and improvisatory strategies he called ‘shared ethnography’ and ‘ethnofiction’.

Program Two—Wednesday, February 20, 2019

Jean Rouch & Edgar Morin Chronique d’un été [Chronicle of a Summer] (1961) 90:00

In collaboration with Edgar Morin. 

Produced by Argos Films/A. Dauman. 

Cinematography by Roger Morillère, Raoul Coutard, Jean-Jacques Tarbès, Michel Brault.

Edited by Jean Ravel, Nina Baratier, Françoise Colin. 

Director of production:  André Heinrich. 

Cast:  Marceline Loridan, Marilou Parolini, Angélo, Jean-Pierre; the workers, Jacques and Jean; the students, Régis, Céline, Jean-Marie, Nadine Ballot, Modeste Landry, and Raymond; the employees, Jacques and Simone; the artists, Henry, Madi, and Catherine; the cover girl, Sophie. 

Festival Prizes:  Cannes, Venice, Mannheim, 1961

A film experiment in Parisian sociology, or a sociological inquiry into Paris.  Shot during the summer of 1960 with the prototype for the Coutant-Mathot KMT 16mm camera, utilizing for the first time the Pilotone system to film synchronously with a Nagra neopilot perfectone magnetic recorder.  This film, produced in collaboration with Edgar Morin, is an attempt at cinematographic investigation using an entirely new technique of synchronous sound (direct cinema) on young French people in the summer of 1960.  This was the moment when it was thought that the war in Algeria was going to end.  It was prolonged, and the incidents in the Congo added the problems of independence in the African states to the problems of the Maghreb states.

Jean Rouch & Edgar Morin Chronique d’un été (1961)

Over several months the film follows both the investigation itself and the evolution of the principal characters.  These are Marceline (former deportee), doing socioeconomic research; her friend Jean-Pierre, a student of philosophy; Marilou, of Italian origin, a secretary at Cahiers du Cinéma; Angelo and his friend Jacques, workers at Renault; an SNCF employee; a discouraged former militant, and his wife; and Landry, a student from the Ivory Coast, coming from high school in Villeneuve-sur-Lot.

Around this group we discover other Parisians, unknown people met in the streets:  Nadine, a high school friend of Landry, Raymond, a student from Ivory Coast at a commercial school, a happy artist-painter couple, a cover girl, a saleswoman in a fashion shop, the daughters of Edgar Morin, and the two authors of the film.

At the beginning, the question is “How do you live?” but other, more essential questions quickly appear:  political despair, solitude, the battle against boredom.  Vacation arrives, the factories empty, the beaches fill up.  Algeria will be for some other year. 

All of the protagonists attend the first screening of the film.  They discuss, accept, or reject it.  In the end, the two authors find themselves alone in the face of this cruel but fascinating experiment in cinema-vérité.

* Synopses and production information for program one is from the booklet for Eight Films by Jean Rouch; DVD box set released by Icarus Films in 2017.  Synopses and production information for Chronique d’un été was taken from the ‘Annotated Filmography’ compiled by Steven Feld published in Jean Rouch’s Ciné-Ethnography; edited and translated by Steven Feld; Visible Evidence, Volume 13; University of Minnesota Press; 2003.

Jean Rouch Biography

Jean Rouch was born on May 31, 1917 in Paris. In his early years, the family moved often within Europe and Africa.  His father was a naval officer who had been an Antarctic explorer on a ship called the Pourquoi Pas? (the "Why not?"); his mother was from a family of poets and painters.  As he wrote later, this early exposure to the worlds of both art and science would influence the course of his life.

After high school in Paris, Rouch was convinced by his father that a career in Engineering would give him a measure of financial stability throughout his life.  He began his studies at l'École des Ponts et Chaussées ('the school of bridges and roads') in 1937.  During this time Rouch discovered the Cinémathèque Française and began watching films there.  He went often to the Musée de l'Homme, which had a growing collection of artifacts from Africa, and took a course with the anthropologist Marcel Griaule.  At the same time, he was inspired by the Surrealist painters and writers and also discovered jazz.

Jean Rouch & Edgar Morin Chronique d’un été (1961)

Rouch's education would be interrupted by the onset of World War II, when the Germans invaded France.  Rouch, who once dreamed of building bridges, was now directed to blow up bridges to keep back the German army.  When the Occupation began, Rouch remained in Paris to finish his studies.  Later, he and two friends decided to leave France and work as civil engineers in the French colonies in West Africa.  Rouch was sent to Niger in 1941.

In Niger, Rouch met Damouré Zika, who would become a lifelong friend and collaborator.  Through Damouré, he was introduced to the world of Songhay religion.  Rouch attended several possession ceremonies which were led by Damouré's grandmother, Kalia.  He was fascinated by these encounters between man and gods, and by the possibility, as he wrote, of "living, with our body, the adventure of another..."  He took notes and photos, which he sent back to Griaule, and this was the beginning of his ethnographic research.

After a conflict with his boss, Rouch was sent to Dakar, where he met Théodore Monod, the director of the Institut Français d'Afrique Noir (IFAN).  Monod encouraged Rouch's research and allowed him the use of the IFAN library to continue his studies.  Rouch went back into the army.  Returning to Paris at the end of 1944, he resumed his studies with Marcel Griaule, who agreed to be his doctoral director.

In 1946, Rouch and his friends Jean Sauvy and Pierre Ponty returned to Africa for an adventure— the descent of the Niger River in a dugout canoe.  During the trip they sent articles back to France under the name Jean Pierjean, a combination of each of their names.  With a used 16mm Bell & Howell camera, they filmed a hippopotamus hunt.  When Rouch lost his tripod in some rapids, he continued to film with a hand-held camera.  The footage from the hippo hunt would become Rouch's first film, Au pays des mages noirs.

With the support of Théodore Monod, Rouch became a researcher for the CNRS, the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique.  He traveled throughout Niger and Mali with his friends Damouré Zika and Lam Ibrahima Dia, studying Songhay religion and sorcery and continuing to make films, which, for him, were an integral part of ethnographic research.  Back in Paris, he worked on his thesis and showed his films at the Musée de l'Homme, where they were well received by anthropologists and members of the French avant-garde.

Rouch began screening his films in Africa, and incorporating comments from his films' subjects into his work.  He was developing the ideas about "shared anthropology" which he first encountered in the work of Robert Flaherty, and which would be central to his own work.  He continued to make films about Songhay possession, and with encouragement from Marcel Griaule, he also made films about the Dogon.

After receiving his doctorate, Rouch published two books on the Songhay, and a travelogue of his trip down the Niger River.  In 1955, Rouch presented what is now one of his best-known films, Les Maîtres Fous, at the Musée de l'Homme.  The film, which depicts a ceremony of the Hauka possession cult, is filled with disturbing images.  Reaction to the film was strong: it was banned in Britain and the Gold Coast, but received the Grand Prix at the Venice Biennale.

In the following years, Rouch made a series of feature films in the genre he called 'ethno-fiction,' in which ethnography is combined with the staging of reality.  These films, among them Jaguar, and Petit à Petit, explored the themes of colonialism and racism, and yet had a playful and poetic quality.  In Moi, Un Noir, the film was shot without sound, and the commentary was improvised afterward by the central character, Oumarou Ganda.  French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard called it "the best French film since the liberation."  Rouch's improvisation and inventiveness continued to influence the French New Wave.

Rouch collaborated with his African friends, in particular Damouré Zika, Lam Ibrahima Dia, and Tallou Mouzourane, in many of his films.  He founded the IRSH, l'Institut de recherche en sciences humaines (Institute for Research on Human Sciences), at the University of Niamey, and trained many Africans in film technology.  Filmmakers he influenced and worked with include:  Moustapha Alassane, Inoussa Ousseini, Safi Faye, and Oumarou Ganda.  In Europe and the United States as well, he encouraged young ethnographic filmmakers and championed their work.

In the summer of 1960, Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morin shot Chronique d'Un Eté (Chronicle of a Summer), in Paris.  In Chronique, the formerly invisible barrier between the "objective" filmmaker and his subject dissolved.  The filmmaker is seen approaching his subjects, inquiring, "Are you happy? How do you live?"  Technically, Chronique furthered the development of a more portable, synchronous sound system that permitted the filming of longer, unbroken sequences—a breakthrough that continues to have profound influence on documentary filmmaking today.  Morin and Rouch termed this new style of filmmaking "cinéma-vérité," a translation of Vertov's kino-pravda or film-truth.

From 1967 to 1974, Rouch made a series of films with Germaine Dieterlen that document the seven-year cycle of Dogon Sigui rituals that occur every 60 years.  These films are considered among his most important contributions to anthropology.

From 1986 to 1991, Rouch served as Director of the Cinémathèque Française.  He continued to make a vast and varied range of films throughout his life, and to support the work of other filmmakers.  With his ethnographic work—films and many books and published articles—he told the stories, and thus preserved the knowledge of rituals and customs that are in many cases no longer practiced.  He also served as Vice-President of UNESCO's International Council of Cinema, TV and Audio-Visual Communication, and taught a series of Summer Institutes in the United States along with Ricky Leacock, John Marshall, and others.

In 1998 Jean Rouch traveled to New York to attend Docfest, where he presented a screening of Chronique and participated in a discussion about vérité filmmaking with Al Maysles and D.A. Pennebaker.  Two years later, in April 2000, he was in New York again for Jean Rouch: Chronicles of African Modernities, a week-long retrospective of Rouch's ethnofiction films held at NYU's Center for Media, Culture, and History.  Screenings were followed by conversations between Rouch and Manthia Diawara, Jean Paul Colleyn, Steve Feld, Paul Stoller, and Faye Ginsburg, along with an exhibition of Rouch's African photographs.  That same year he attended Possessing Vision, a major Jean Rouch conference at the ICA in London.

Jean Rouch died in a car accident in Niger, on February 18th, 2004, at the age of 86.  He was on his way to a celebration of Nigerian cinema, which was to feature a retrospective of his own films.

— Brenda Baugh

Sources:

The Cinematic Griot by Paul Stoller

Ciné-Ethnography by Jean Rouch, edited and translated by Steven Feld

Visual Anthropology: The Cinema of Jean Rouch edited by Jay Ruby (1989)