Jean Rouch

"We wanted to make a film of love, but in the end it came out somewhat impersonal," sighs the sociologist Edgar Morin at the end of Chronique d’un ete (Chronicle of a Summer, 1960), his collaboration with the filmmaker and anthropologist Jean Rouch. Beginning with the question "How do you live?", the film documents a group of Morin’s friends in Paris, following them to jobs and dates and dinner parties, getting them to reveal their innermost thoughts. It is a sociological exercise, an experimental film, a passionate inquiry into the nature of reality, and like most of Rouch’s works, Chronique d’un ete defies simple categorization.

Trained as a Civil Engineer but inspired by Surrealism, Jean Rouch studied anthropology with Maurice Griaule at the Ecole de sociologie in Paris, before and after World War Two. Employed by the French government as an ethnographic researcher, he spent most of his career studying and filming the Songhay people in West Africa. But Rouch’s influence extends far beyond anthropology; he has been called the father of the "Nouvelle Vague" in France—he was a major influence on Jean-Luc Godard—and the founder of "cinema verite." He continues to influence contemporary artists and filmmakers today. His films are poetic documents that cross genres, shatter preconceptions, and invite philosophical inquiry. Rouch is currently experiencing one of his periodic mini-revivals.

There was an academic conference at New York University last spring, a few retrospectives of his films, and this month, the Musee de l’homme in Paris hosts an exhibition of his photographs—many of them taken in the Songhay region in the 1940s. It is still a sublime shock to catch a rare screening of Les Maitres Fous (The Crazy Masters, 1954), Rouch’s most famous and controversial work. The film depicts the yearly spirit possession ritual among the Hauka, a Nigerian religion that emerged in the 1920s. For Western viewers, the film’s power depends on the startling revelation that the gods violently possessing the members of the cult—causing them to foam at the mouth, stagger like madmen, and eat pieces of dog snatched from a boiling pot—are not ancient spirits, but the supernatural shades of their colonial oppressors.

One cult member is possessed by the Governor, others by the General and his staff, and the movements of the Hauka mimic the rigid gestures of these Colonial masters, as Rouch shows them in a parade-ground march. This thirty-minute short opens up endless questions about the nature of colonial power, as well as the relationship between modern cinema and archaic ritual.

The film implicitly makes a comparison between the ability of modern technology to reproduce and replay tribal spectacle, and the sacred reenactment of colonial spectacle that takes place within the possession rituals. "What’s being mimicked is mimickry itself—within its colonial shell," notes the anthropologist Michael Taussig in his book Mimesis and Alterity. "The primitivism within modernism is allowed to flower. In this colonial world where the camera meets those possessed by gods, we can truly point to the Western rebirth of the mimetic faculty by means of modernity’s mimetic machinery." Rouch himself spoke of his process of filmmaking as entering a "cine-trance," where he was possessed by the electric eye and ear of the camera. Les Maitres Fous has been called the "greatest anti-colonialist movie ever made," yet when Rouch first showed a silent version of it in Paris, Griaule, among others, asked that he destroy it. They feared the film would confirm every stereotype held by Westerners about "savages." In response to their criticisms, Rouch recorded a voice-over narration that adds humor and humanity to the spectacle.

To this day, fearing misunderstandings, he does not allow the film to be shown unless he is in attendance—at a recent festival of his films held at the Anthology Film Archives in New York, the 83-year-old maitre was a modest presence among the sparse audience. Perhaps because of such fears, none of his works are available on videotape. Rouch promotes the idea of a "shared anthropology." He describes it as "a new method of research which consists of ‘sharing’ with the people who, before, were only the objects of study." Rouch’s efforts to make anthropological objects into participating subjects is evident in his films Moi, un noir (1957), and Jaguar (1967), two experiments in "ethnofiction." The films chronicle the phenomenon of Songhay migration to the Gold Coast by allowing the young male protagonists to create, and then narrate, their own travel adventures.

The works that result are filled with a spirit of play and improvisation, while the voice-overs disrupt the Western audience’s ability to distance themselves from the characters. The protagonists teach lessons in the impossibility of constructing a primitive "other." At one point in Jaguar, the young wanderers meet the Somba, a remote and utterly naked mountain tribe. "These are gentle people," notes one of the men. "We shouldn’t mock the Somba just because they are nude. God wanted them this way." Rouch’s collaborative, "open form" approach to his work is a source of inspiration for some contemporary artists, most notably Chris Williams and Sharon Lockhart. Lockhart’s recent film, "Teatro Amazonas," offered a kind of collaboration with an exoticized "other." She filmed an audience of locals watching a concert at the European-style opera house in Manaus, Brazil. Their actions and reactions provide the film’s content. But it would be difficult for any contemporary artist to achieve the depth of involvement reflected in Rouch’s life-long commitment to the Songhay culture. Rouch, in fact, is considered a griot in the part of Africa where he works. Griots are bards who preserve the life of the past through stories and songs of praise to the ancestors.

Among the Songhay, Rouch’s films are seen as cinematic ballads recalling the men of the past, in many cases documenting rituals, such as lion hunts and Hauka possessions, that have since vanished or changed completely. Rouch is a perfect example of Levi Strauss’s bricoleur—someone who builds as best he can with the material at hand. For instance, he developed his voice-over narrations because synchronized sound was unavailable to him, and then turned it into a stylistic signature. He let himself be influenced by the people he studied, absorbing some of their cosmology, openness, and joyful style, and these elements infuse his more than-100 films—works of high art, anthropological documents, and also films of love.