IVAC 2019
Jean Rouch’s Art of
the Double
by
Christopher
Zimmerman
 |
| Jean Rouch & Edgar Morin Chronique d'un été (1961) |
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.[1]
Jean Rouch
Constantly expanding the frontiers of cinema,
Jean Rouch undeniably remains a major figure in 20th century moving
images 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 that
transgressed the rules and genres sedimented into the traditions of non-fiction
filmmaking. With his ‘performative ethnology,’
Rouch’s films did not record events; rather, the director became an active participant
in the event he was filming. The
presence of the camera served as a catalyst for a participatory process in
which the subjects of the films, through their performances, open the
possibility of the viewer arriving at ‘film-truth’—an awareness with important
philosophical and cinematic implications.
The three films in the screening
program Performing Reality represent
three different, yet overlapping, filmmaking modes developed by Rouch in what
he refers to as his ‘shared anthropology’.
Each of these films cinematically explores themes running though Rouch’s
formal ethnological research: from his study
of possession ritual, ‘Ciné-trance’ vibrates in Les Maîtres fous; from his research into West African migration,
his ‘Ethno-fiction’ mode is established in Moi,
Un Noir; and Cinéma Vérité emerges out of the participatory and
self-reflexive sociological experimentation of Chronicle of a Summer.
Rouch’s body of films is woven into a
complex tapestry of influences: science
and surrealism, Dziga Vertov and Robert Flaherty, the dialectic of
technological development and actual filmmaking practice, and ethnographic
research and post-colonial politics. By
first teasing out his seemingly incompatible influences, we can see how Rouch
develops, in both theory and practice, the self-reflexive and participatory
praxis that has made Cinéma vérité a
revolutionary force in the history of cinema.
Fieldwork
Primarily known as an ethnographic filmmaker, Rouch’s
films dealing with the African experience of colonialism emerged out of his passion for the ethnology of Africa and decades of
experience exploring West Africa, studying its histories, cultures, and
rituals, and living with its peoples. Rouch’s
anthropological practice in the field was shaped by his mentor, Marcel Griaule,
who was fully committed to fieldwork, the principles of which he laid out,
after his years of experience with the Dogon in present-day Mali, in his Méthode de l’ethnographie.
Graiule’s method stood in direct
opposition to the unobtrusive ‘participant-observer’ approach advocated in the
Anglo-Saxon world of anthropology, most notably by Bronsislaw Malinowski. Griaule’s method, in contrast, entailed
forming organized units of multi-disciplinary fieldworkers with the view of
systematically collecting as much data as possible and triangulating the
results. Rather than discreetly
observing their subjects with minimal interference, Griaule’s pro-active
process involved intensive interviews.
As a particular form of social encounter, the interview will become an
important ‘meeting place’ between filmmaker and subject in the participatory
documentary.
Film was a valuable tool in Griaule’s
multi-disciplinary practice, and he advocated the use of film to complement
written ethnographies. The films that Griaule made in the 1930s when
living with the Dogon remain pioneering works in the history of ethnographic
film, particularly with respect to Griaule’s use of voice-over ethnographic
commentary.
Dziga Vertov
Yes, Cinéma-vérité
is the French translation of Dziga Vertov’s title for his Soviet
newsreels: Kino-Pravda—‘film truth’.
But, Rouch and Edgar Morin’s particular approach to filmmaking, as
developed in Chronicle of a Summer,
took more than simply the name from Vertov.
For the remainder of his career after Chronicle, Rouch associated his filmmaking practice with that of
Vertov’s.
 |
| Dziga Vertov Man with a Movie Camera (1929) |
In the end, however, Rouch’s practice, rooted in
realism, differed considerably from Vertov’s practice of kaleidoscopically assembling
slices of reality, through a process of intervallic editing, into film
rhythm. Nevertheless, Rouch took some
keys lessons from Vertov’s camera-eye and his theory of film-truth. Rouch writes in the opening of his essay ‘On
the Vicissitudes of the Self…’, ‘it [the essay] is based on experimentation
with direct cinema, deriving from the theories, under the name cinema vérité, prophesied in 1927 by the
Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov. I have
used direct cinema as a special research tool in doing ethnography among these
West African groups.’[2]
What he shares with Vertov are a
philosophical view of cinematographic reality and the essential notion of
reflexivity.
Essentially a documentarian, Vertov developed the
concept of Kino-Pravda (‘film-truth’)
through his extensive work creating newsreels—a mode of filmmaking that
flourished owing to Lenin’s doctrine of ‘film-proportion’ that required all
film programs to strike a balance between fiction and actuality. For Vertov, truth must be the foundation for
a truly proletarian cinema, and his filmmaking practice consisted of using the
mechanical eye of the camera to register and capture fleeting fragments of
reality, spontaneous slices of indexical truth, and assembling them through the
editing process into documents of socialist reality that reveal what cannot be
perceived by the un-aided eye.
From its very beginnings, the cinematic lens
represents a mechanical extension of human vision. The camera-eye is a disembodied prosthetic
eye, an unfettered mobile eye that can travel and discover the world. The mechanical eye doubles the reality that
passes in front of it. Eschewing staged
action and the artifice of fiction film, Vertov stated in a 1929 lecture in
Paris:
The history of Cinema-Eye
has been a relentless struggle to modify the course of world cinema, to achieve
in cinema a new emphasis on the unplayed film over the played film, to
substitute the document for the mise-en-scene,
to break out of the proscenium of the theater and to enter the arena of life
itself.
His 1929 masterpiece Man with a Movie Camera constitutes an assemblage of shots (of
slices of filmed truth) organized like a symphony, rather than like a book,
that presents a kaleidoscope of daily life in the Soviet Union. An essay on film truth, Man with a Movie Camera exploits the unique capacity of the camera
to capture the momentary, to slice fragments of time and reality out of the
flux and flow of life. This film, as a catalogue
of avant-garde techniques, thematizes the camera, in which the camera itself
invades the shot. The mechanical, mobile
eye of the camera allows us to see what cannot be seen otherwise. Yet, at the same time this film constantly
reminds us that it is a film. We see the
making of a film at the same time as the film is being made. This deliberate ‘artificiality’ of film is
turned back on itself in order to destroy its own illusionism thus achieving a
heightened, self-reflexive awareness—a heightened awareness with revolutionary
potential.
For Vertov, ‘film-truth’ is not a matter of uncovering
absolute, universal truth, but is the truth of an encounter—an encounter
between the Cinema-Eye, reality, and our minds as viewers. With the revolutionary potential of this
encounter, Vertov transforms cinema into a reflexive exploration of the very dynamics
of consciousness. Through this encounter
between cinema and consciousness and by means of the constructed nature of
infusing still images with movement, the filmmaker, in making the film, and the
viewer, in experiencing it, ‘produce’ film-truth.
Robert Flaherty
Whereas Vertov can be seen as a philosophical
father, Robert Flaherty represents a source of inspiration and influence for
Rouch’s actual filmmaking practice. Rouch
was purported to have seen Flaherty’s Nanook
of the North (1922) hundreds of times and fully absorbed Flaherty’s
innovations in film form and his participatory practice. In Nanook
of the North, Flaherty was essentially creating, not only ethnographic
film, but what would emerge as the documentary.
Flaherty built his films out of a deep respect for his subjects,
cultivated out of long immersion in their culture and daily lives, just as
Rouch will do decades later in Africa.
 |
| Robert Flaherty Nanook of the North (1922) |
Rouch admired the way Flaherty found the means,
beyond the conventions of the plotted narrative, to re-present real people in
their own environments on screen. And,
as Rouch will push technological innovation—synchronous sound, for example—out
of artistic necessity, Flaherty shot in remote locations and was forced to
devise technical solutions for developing and printing film on-location and
experimented with lenses and film stocks in order to refine his aesthetic.
But, it is Flaherty’s participatory practice,
characterized by his wife and collaborator Frances Flaherty as
‘non-preconception,’ that most influenced Rouch. Instead of approaching a culture with a fixed
idea for a film, the Flahertys arrived at the story to be told out of living
with and observing its people. In the
case of Nanook, Flaherty lived with
Nanook and his family for an entire year, after having spent ten years exploring
the Canadian arctic. Without a fixed
intention, Flaherty would shoot an enormous amount of footage, develop and
print the film, and screen the rushes in the evening with, for example, Nanook
and his family. The in-depth discussions
around viewing this footage together shaped the editing process.
Rouch
with the Songhay
In 1954, Rouch returned to Ayoru, Niger to screen La bataille sur la grande flueve (1951-2)
for the Songhay people (among whom Rouch lived in 1947-48) in the very place
where he filmed the hippopotamus hunt.
At first the Songhay were interested in the projector itself, but once
they started to absorb the images on the white sheet hung on a mud-brick wall,
‘they learned the language of cinema,’ remarked Rouch, ‘in less than ten
minutes.’[3] The Songhay audience that night demanded that
the film be shown five times, at the end of which, they engaged in a discussion
and critique of the film that lasted into the night. Rouch had added traditional hunting music to
heighten the suspense of the hippopotamus hunt, but the Songhay criticized this
for being unrealistic: a hippo hunt
requires silence. Rouch subsequently
altered the soundtrack to reflect these criticisms.
In the audience was a Songhay hunter who suggested
making a film about men hunting lions with bows and arrows, which led to Rouch
making The Lion Hunters. As Rouch explained, ‘one film gave birth to
another’.[4]
His participatory cinema was born that night in 1954 in Ayoru. After this experience, Rouch will build
screenings for the film’s subjects/participants into his regular practice and,
at times, into the very film itself, just as Flaherty would discuss the day’s
rushes with Nanook and his family, which would help shape the editing process.
Flaherty
with the Inuit
Through Flaherty’s participatory process, Nanook
became the subject of the film but also an essential participant in its
making. Once Nanook understood what
Flaherty was doing and learned about the techniques and technology of filmmaking,
he became involved in suggesting locations and scenes. Flaherty was developing his practice of
‘staging reality’ to reveal the essential truth and beauty of another culture,
and Nanook’s input, from the inside of the culture to be studied, proved
indispensable. For example, the seal and
walrus hunts were Nanook’s ideas. The
film documents an actual seal being harpooned and dragged through a hole in the
ice, but this was a method that Nanook’s ancestors utilized. At the time of filming, Nanook actually
hunted seal with a gun. But, Flaherty
avoids nostalgia for ‘primitive man’ by setting up the filming in such a way
that the essential truth of life under these harsh conditions could be
expressed to the viewer.
Rouch
with the Songhay
 |
| Jean Rouch Moi, un Noir (1959) |
Also in the audience that night in Ayoru were
Damoré Zika and Illo Goudel’ize, who appreared in La bataille…, and who, upon seeing themselves on screen, convinced
Rouch to make a film about young Nigerians who migrate to the Gold Coast to
find work. The seeds of Rouch’s
ethno-fictions Jaguar, Moi, un Noir, and La Pyramide humaine were also sown from this participatory
cinematic experience. Along with Lam Ibrahim Dia, Zika and Goudel’ize became Rouch’s close friends and collaborators, and
together they conceived and realized his major African films. Rouch trained his collaborators, who were
also often the films’ protagonists, in the techniques and technologies of
filmmaking, and, together, they developed the ‘ethno-fiction’ that opened a
space for Africans to create perspectives on themselves, representing their
culture on their own terms. In addition,
Rouch established networks for film production, distribution, and screenings
connecting the film cultures sprouting in West Africa. In these ways, Rouch is regarded as the ‘father’
of African cinema.
The
Spontaneities and Surrealism
John Grierson wrote of Flaherty that: ‘He
was the initiator of the naturalist tradition in cinema, and is still the
high-priest of the spontaneities.’[5] Flaherty’s method of approaching a distant
culture without any fixed intentions, provides a practice sufficiently flexible
and responsive to capture moments revealing in their spontaneity. Improvisatory contexts allowed film to emerge
out of the experience of living with others and out of the inter-subjective process
of understanding otherness, rooted in mutual trust.
For Rouch, the truth revealed by the spontaneous,
the unplanned, the improvised—elements of the oral and musical cultures he
studied—was one of the powers of his filmmaking practice. He explains:
‘In making films, I have tried to get as close as possible to the
spontaneity of the jazz players. Between
my passion for the ethnology of Africa and my passion for films, there is
perhaps that subtle connection, the music of jazz.’[6]
By the early 1940s, a strong affinity between
anthropology and surrealism had developed in Paris around the Musée de
l’Homme. French ethnology, under the
influence of Marcel Mauss and Griaule, was particularly concerned with
collecting, interpreting, and displaying material objects from other
cultures. Not only did a number of
surrealist artists attend Mauss’s lectures, but Georges Bataille’s Documents regularly published images of
non-Western cultural experience juxtaposed with works by Surrealist painters. The Surrealists and French anthropologists
shared an interest in the idea of ‘exotic otherness’. And, it was Rouch’s early interest in
Surrealism that brought him to Marcel Griaule.
Rouch explored Andre Breton’s idea of the urban
encounter (Baudelaire’s flaneur) in
the three Nouvelle Vague-period ‘fiction’ films he made in the 1960s. But the influence of Surrealism on Rouch’s
work extends beyond the thematic to the very process of filmmaking itself. Rouch writes:
‘For me, cinema, making a film, is like Surrealist painting: the use of the most real processes of
reproduction, the most photographic, but at the service of the unreal, of the
bringing into being elements of the irrational (as in Magritte, Dali). The postcard at the service of the
imaginary.’[7] And,
surrealist resonances abound in Rouch’s Ciné-trance mode of filmmaking.
Possession
Ritual and Ciné-trance
Songhay possession ritual was of particular
interest to Rouch. He had attended
hundreds of them in his field research, filmed dozens more, and wrote scholarly
ethnographies about the religious belief systems in West Africa. Rouch describes an experience that he and his
sound recordist Moussa Hamidou had after a take shooting Les Tambours d’avant. As
they were putting down their equipment, they realized that they were trembling,
not out of fatigue, but, as Rouch claims, because the rhythms of the drums had
sent the two filmmakers into a trance, just as it had done to possess the two
mediums into trance.[8]
 |
| Jean Rouch Les Maîtres fous (1956) |
It was from this experience that Rouch developed
his ideas about ciné-trance. According
to the Songhay cosmology, each individual has a ‘double’, a sort of immortal
shadow soul. In possession, the medium’s
double is displaced or ‘submerged’ by the spirit’s double that is possessing
him or her. Mediums become like the
spirits possessing them. With the
concept of ciné-trance, Rouch ‘suggests that there is an analogy here between
the condition, on the one hand, of mediums submerged by the double of the
possessing spirit and, on the other, of filmmakers who become completely
immersed in the reality that they are filming, thereby entering there own
trance of cinematic creativity.’[9]
Ciné-trance is a state or frame of mind akin to
the kind of poetic inspiration the Surrealists sought. But here, Rouch runs his ideas of this trance
state through Vertov’s lens. Ciné-trance
is a condition that determines the filmmaking.
Rather than revealing subterranean truths of the unconscious, Rouch
argues that the filmmaker registers the reality and truth that can only be
produced by the Cinema-eye:
film-truth. The camera acts as
the filmmaker’s double, who is already doubled by the trance, simultaneously as
it doubles reality in its indexicality.
Just as the mediums merge with a rhythm in a trance-state, the filmmaker
enters this rhythm that is then mediated by the camera.
Still controversial today, Les Maîtres fous is about the hauka possession cult in Accra,
which, at the time, was part of the British colonial empire, and represents
Rouch’s most powerful ciné-trance film.
Emigrants from Niger, who travel to Accra to find work, are thrown into
the frenetic and harsh urban environment under the influence of Western
civilization. In order to cope with the
vertigo of this displacement, the migrants meet outside of the city to practice
the cult of Hauka, in which members are transformed into ‘characters’ of the
various spirits (their doubles) through possession and, through re-enactment,
present a counter-hegemonic theatrical protest against Ghana’s colonial rulers. At the same time, the Hauka possession ritual
provides a therapeutic means to deal with the frenzy of their displaced lives.
 |
| Jean Rouch Les Maîtres fous (1956) |
From its first screening at the Musée de l’homme
in 1954, Les Maîtres fous polarized
its audience, with its images of men in trance foaming at the mouth and
sacrificing a dog and eating it. Both
African and European intellectuals denounced it as exploitation of the exotic
other and as depicting Africans in a way that reinforces racist stereotypes. Marcel Griaule, Rouch’s mentor, demanded that
Rouch destroy the footage. Others in the
audience, admired the film’s formal and technical audacity and understood the
film as a critique of western civilization.
Nevertheless, Rouch was convinced of the ethnographic, political, and
cinematic importance of this film, perhaps because he experienced directly the
ciné-trance in making it?
Influenced by the use of voice-over narration for
ethnographic commentary developed by Griaule in his Dogon films, Rouch recorded
his own voice-over narration to give context and suggest connections and
possible interpretations. After that
traumatic first screening, Rouch modified the narration and developed the
ending in which the therapeutic aspects of the Hauka cult are brought forth. Here, we have another example of Rouch’s
films being shaped by the discussions around initial screenings, i.e. by the participatory,
inter-subjective context the film creates in both its making and reception.
Migration
and Ethno-Fiction
Rouch’s ‘ethno-fictions’ mark a break from the
more traditional ethnographic films he made within the context of his research
and fieldwork. Unlike these ‘pure’
films, which required deep research and fieldwork, Rouch’s ethno-fictions were
concerned with creating dramatic contexts in which the protagonists’
improvisational performances serve as a kind of mirror of interlocking gazes. Not only does Moi, un Noir, for example, balance between the ethnographic
documentary and narrative fiction film, but the participatory method of making
the film resonated politically.
 |
| Jean Rouch Moi, un Noir (1959) |
It was Damoré Zika and Illo Goudel’ize who
suggested that night in Ayoru making a film about Nigerian labor migrants in
cities on the Gold Coast. The film’s
contexts were devised, set-up, acted out, and recorded by the protagonists
themselves in collaboration with Rouch and Lam Ibrahim Dia. With important implications, Rouch’s
ethno-fictions open a space for Africans to tell their own stories, to project
their ideal selves on screen, to explore the cinematic imaginary themselves on
their terms, rather than being the object of analysis by the ‘objective’
European gaze.
Moi, un
Noir follows the adventures of
two young Nigerians, ostensibly over an extended weekend (it was actually shot
over a six-month period), who have migrated to the Ivory Coast in pursuit of
work. The film presents a portrait of
Treichville, the crowded migrant district of Abidjan, and, through the ‘staged’
contexts devised by the protagonists themselves, it also reveals the harsh
realities of being outsiders struggling to sustain a basic living in this
‘foreign’ land. The ‘actor-participants’
essentially play themselves, however they have also taken on pseudonyms from
Hollywood movies, e.g. Edward G. Robinson, Eddie Constatine (Lemmy Caution),
Tarzan. This doubling of personas, much
like in possession ritual, suggests that our real selves emerge out of the very
‘performance’ of ourselves. Truth
resides in the process of projecting ourselves into the world in the way that
we want to be perceived by others.
The final segment of the film highlights this
important aspect of the ethno-fiction.
The film ends with a performance by Petit Tourè as Eddie Constantine in
which he is ruminating about his life, re-enacting his experience in combat faced
with death (he was a soldier), and lamenting the fact that he lives in
poverty. At a certain moment, Eddie imagines
himself as Billy Joe, a fantasized character out of an imagined Hollywood
western. Petit Touré as Eddie projects
his fragile self into this mythic figure and ‘heroically’ comes to terms with
his condition. Through self-reflexive
performance, both in the images as well as the improvised narration, he arrives
at a deeper truth or realization. His
outlook shifts as he takes up this heroic persona.
 |
| Jean Rouch Moi, un Noir (1959) |
Moi, un
Noir is a beautiful example of
‘reverse anthropology’ in which the film acts as a mirror in which the ‘other’
of the European imaginary confronts its own other. Both Eddie Constatine and Edward G. Robinson,
as poor migrant ‘foreigners’, are thrust into the position of otherness, and
yet the film process infuses them with agency, and we see that they also have
ideas of the ‘other’. Moi, un Noir allows European audiences
to see that African culture is far from monolithic and that Africans themselves
have distinct notions of otherness against which they define themselves
negatively.
In a brilliant participatory strategy, Rouch
presented both protagonists with a cut version of the film and audio recorded
their improvised commentary to be used, in addition to Rouch’s ‘contextual’
voice-over, in counterpoint to the images.
It is through this commentary that we understand that Africans also
harbor prejudices and define themselves in relation to what they perceive they
are not. Film-truth develops out of seeing
images of their own culture reflected back at them in the screen-mirror. The
ethno-fiction literally gives voice to those who were previously voice-less.
The
Philosophical Implications of Cinema Vérité
In the late 1950s, a number of technological
innovations were being made that radically transformed the way films were made
and expanded the creative choices available.
The introduction of new lightweight cameras and synchronized sound
allowed filmmakers to get closer to their subjects both visually and
sonically. These new technologies
liberated filmmaking from the studio and thrust the filmmaker into the
world. This technological shift resulted
in the formulation of two distinct, yet closely related, documentary film
practices, both of which emerged out of Vertov’s desire to capture and
truthfully represent reality.
 |
| Jean Rouch & Edgar Morin Chronique d'un été (1961) |
In North America, a group of documentary
filmmakers (Ricky Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker, the Maysles Brothers) created
Direct Cinema, which utilized the new technology to show how things ‘really are’. Direct Cinema, in its attempt to capture
‘unmediated’ experience, represented a political critique of the ‘mediated’
nature of mainstream filmmaking and
its dependence on the artificiality of the studio. The camera was conceived of as a
‘fly-on-the-wall’ that registers reality in the most unobtrusive way possible,
as if the camera were invisible. The
intensions of the filmmaker could in no way be allowed to intrude into the
reality being filmed. A myth, of course…
Much like the differences between
Malinowski’s ‘observational’ approach and Griaule’s method of provoking his
subjects through interviews, Rouch’s cinéma
vérité stands in opposition to the ‘objectivity’ of Direct Cinema. Cinéma
vérité reveals the reality of what happens when people interact in the presence of a camera. In this sense, it is the opposite of Direct
Cinema’s assumption that what we see is what we would have seen had we been
that fly-on-the-wall. In Rouch’s
participatory cinema, what we see can only be seen because the filmmaker is
present and because those being ‘observed’ are aware of the presence of the
camera. This awareness results in people
acting out of the realm of their imaginary; they project how they want to be
perceived by others.
The camera functions as a catalyst for
film-truth. However, such film-truth
results from an encounter, which is always structured by dynamics of power and
control, and the negotiation of a relationship between filmmaker and
subject. The film-truth that emerges out
of Cinéma vérité is dialogical; it is
made possible and takes on meaning through the inter-subjective, interaction
between filmmaker and subject and their social and political realities. In yet another layer of this encounter, we,
as viewers, complete the circuit by witnessing this emotion-laden encounter and
drawing out generalizations about, for example, the attitudes, hopes, and
disillusions of Parisian youth in the summer of 1960.
In 1959, French sociologist Edgar
Morin and Jean Rouch served as jurors of the first international festival of
ethnographic film in Florence. Morin
suggested to Rouch that he turn his ethnographer’s eye reflexively back onto
contemporary France, which was in the midst of the Algerian war of
independence. From this encounter, Chronicle of a Summer, which set out to
explore the attitudes and mindsets of an assortment of young Parisians over the
summer of 1960, was born. In retrospect,
the ‘film-truth’ that emerges out of this experiment in cinema-vérité can be seen as anticipating the revolutionary events
of 1968. Or, rather, the seeds of ’68 are
reflected in Rouch and Morin’s film.
 |
| Jean Rouch & Edgar Morin Chronique d'un été (1961) |
Utilizing a number of technical
innovations, Chronicle of a Summer is
a sociological film experiment, in which Rouch and Morin set up various
contexts in which young Parisians are asked to comment about their lives and
conditions. The initial questions posed
are ‘how do you live?’ and ‘are you happy?’
The film ‘documents’ the
evolution of the main ‘characters’ over the course of one summer. The contexts that Morin and Rouch set up run
the gamut of participatory strategies:
interviews with the filmmakers, discussions over meals and wine, the
opening of a ‘character’s fantasy space, a rather strange vacation in St.
Tropez (Rouch the surrealist…). In these
contexts, the ‘characters’, who are ‘playing’ themselves, owing to the
awareness of the camera, enter into various encounters and dialogues around
which certain truths ‘coagulate’.
A prime example is the scene in which
the European and African students are on the terrace of the Musée de
l’homme. Rouch is there, and the
discussion, light in tone, is initially about ‘racism of sexual desire’. Rouch then asks the two African students
whether they noticed the numbers tattooed on Marceline’s arm. Rouch was completely aware that Marceline’s
experience as a Jew and the concern about anti-semitism were outside of
Landry’s African experience. Rouch explains:
When I posed the question,
the isolation and assumptions of cultures emerged dramatically. It’s not
quite apparent in the film, but before that moment, people were jovial and laughing. Suddenly the Europeans began to cry, and the
Africans were totally perplexed. They had thought the tattoo was an
adornment of some kind. All of us were
deeply affected. The cameraman, one of the best documentary people around, was so
disturbed that the end of the
sequence is out of focus. I stopped
filming to give everyone a chance to recover.
Now, is this a “truthful” moment or a “staged”
moment? Does it matter?[10]
Film-truth emerges in this
inter-subjective moment, which was only made possible by Rouch’s presence and
its ‘staging’. Likewise, Angelo would never have met Landry
had it not been for the context created by the film, and, of course, their
initial encounter on the staircase is ‘staged’, set-up. Nevertheless, they both are changed by this
discussion, this encounter. They move
towards an understanding of each other and thus themselves. This staged scene has real
ramifications.
Those involved in the film experience
film-truth emerging out of these inter-communicative encounters. And, we, as viewers, experience the
accumulation of these encounters, and the shifts in attitudes that they produce
in the participants (again, playing themselves) are reflected back on to
us. Through our ‘participatory’
spectatorship, film-truth is itself ‘doubled’.
We complete the circuit initiated by the protagonists’ performances
initiated by Rouch and Morin’s provocations.
What we experience with Chronicle
of a Summer is a self-reflexive investigation into the lives of
others. What emerges out of this web of
individual realizations is a larger understanding—as we piece the film together
as spectators—of how particular individuals struggle to be ‘authentic’ faced
with the realities of existence within the prevailing structures of power of that
time. Out of the individual film-truths embedded
in each of the encounters in the film, we see the truth of reality, not as an
abstract absolute, but as an emergence, an emergence out of the tapestry of
individuals reflecting on their lives rooted in the social, economic, and
political contexts of a specific time and place. Film-truth is not being; it is becoming. Cinéma-vérité is ‘the authenticity of life as
it is lived.’[11]
Copyright © 2019 Christopher Zimmerman
For more information about the program 'Performing Reality: Jean Rouch's Participatory Ethnography screened at the 2019 edition of Images and Views of Alternative Cinema (Nicosia, Cyprus), visit: Performing Reality...
[1] Feld, Steven; ‘Editor’s
Introduction’; in Jean Rouch Ciné-Ethnography;
Steven Feld, ed. & trans.; University of Minnesota Press; Minneapolis;
2003; pp. 20-21.
[2] Rouch, Jean; ‘On the Vicissitudes
of the Self: The Possessed Dancer, the
Magician, the Sorcerer, the Filmmaker, and the Ethnographer’; in Jean Rouch Ciné-Ethnography; Steven Feld, ed. &
trans.; University of Minnesota Press; Minneapolis; 2003; p. 87.
[3] Quoted in Stoller, Paul; The Cinematic Griot: The Ethnography of Jean Rouch; University of Chicago Press; Chicago; 1992; p. 43.
[5] Grierson, John; ‘Flaherty
(1931-32)’; in Kahana, Jonathan (ed.); The
Documentary Film Reader—History, Theory, Criticism; Oxford University Press;
New York; 2016; p. 88
[6] Henley, Paul; The Adventure of the Real: Jean Rouch & the Craft of Ethnographic Cinema; The
University of Chicago Press; Chicago; 2009; p. 16.
[7] Henley, Paul; The Adventure of the Real: Jean Rouch & the Craft of Ethnographic Cinema; The
University of Chicago Press; Chicago; 2009; p. 16.
[8] Ibid.; p. 274
[10] Rouch, Jean with Dan Georgakas, Udayan Gupta, and Judy Janda; ‘The
Politics of Visual Anthropology’; in Jean Rouch Ciné-Ethnography; Steven Feld, ed. & trans.; University of
Minnesota Press; Minneapolis; 2003; p. 212.
[11] Morin, Edgar; ‘Chronicle of a
Film’; in Jean Rouch Ciné-Ethnography;
Steven Feld, ed. & trans.; University of Minnesota Press; Minneapolis;
2003; p. 229.
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