(Ebook) Ciné-Ethnography by Jean Rouch, Steven Feld

(ed.) ISBN 9780816641031, 081664103X Pdf Download

https://ebooknice.com/product/cine-ethnography-2525178

★★★★★
4.9 out of 5.0 (20 reviews )

Instant PDF Download

ebooknice.com
 (Ebook) Ciné-Ethnography by Jean Rouch, Steven Feld (ed.)
ISBN 9780816641031, 081664103X Pdf Download

EBOOK

Available Formats

■ PDF eBook Study Guide Ebook

EXCLUSIVE 2025 EDUCATIONAL COLLECTION - LIMITED TIME

INSTANT DOWNLOAD VIEW LIBRARY

Here are some recommended products that we believe you will be
interested in. You can click the link to download.

(Ebook) Biota Grow 2C gather 2C cook by Loucas, Jason; Viles, James

ISBN 9781459699816, 9781743365571, 9781925268492, 1459699815,
1743365578, 1925268497

https://ebooknice.com/product/biota-grow-2c-gather-2c-cook-6661374

(Ebook) Matematik 5000+ Kurs 2c Lärobok by Lena Alfredsson, Hans

Heikne, Sanna Bodemyr ISBN 9789127456600, 9127456609

https://ebooknice.com/product/matematik-5000-kurs-2c-larobok-23848312

(Ebook) Vagabond, Vol. 29 (29) by Inoue, Takehiko ISBN 9781421531489,

1421531488

https://ebooknice.com/product/vagabond-vol-29-29-37511002

(Ebook) SAT II Success MATH 1C and 2C 2002 (Peterson's SAT II Success)

by Peterson's ISBN 9780768906677, 0768906679

https://ebooknice.com/product/sat-ii-success-
math-1c-and-2c-2002-peterson-s-sat-ii-success-1722018
(Ebook) Master SAT II Math 1c and 2c 4th ed (Arco Master the SAT
Subject Test: Math Levels 1 & 2) by Arco ISBN 9780768923049,
0768923042

https://ebooknice.com/product/master-sat-ii-math-1c-and-2c-4th-ed-
arco-master-the-sat-subject-test-math-levels-1-2-2326094

(Ebook) Cambridge IGCSE and O Level History Workbook 2C - Depth Study:

the United States, 1919-41 2nd Edition by Benjamin Harrison ISBN
9781398375147, 9781398375048, 1398375144, 1398375047

https://ebooknice.com/product/cambridge-igcse-and-o-level-history-
workbook-2c-depth-study-the-united-states-1919-41-2nd-edition-53538044

(Ebook) Boeing B-29 Superfortress ISBN 9780764302725, 0764302728

https://ebooknice.com/product/boeing-b-29-superfortress-1573658

(Ebook) Jahrbuch für Geschichte: Band 29 ISBN 9783112622223,

3112622227

https://ebooknice.com/product/jahrbuch-fur-geschichte-band-29-50958290

(Ebook) Harrow County 29 by Cullen Bunn, Tyler Crook

https://ebooknice.com/product/harrow-county-29-53599548
⽧

Ciné-Ethnography
VISIBLE EVIDENCE

Edited by Michael Renov, Faye Ginsburg, and Jane Gaines

Volume 13 :: Jean Rouch

Edited and translated by Steven Feld
Ciné-Ethnography
Volume 12 :: James M. Moran
There’s No Place Like Home Video
Volume 11 :: Jeffrey Ruoff
“An American Family”: A Televised Life
Volume 10 :: Beverly R. Singer
Wiping the War Paint off the Lens:
Native American Film and Video
Volume 9 :: Alexandra Juhasz, editor
Women of Vision:
Histories in Feminist Film and Video
Volume 8 :: Douglas Kellner and Dan Streible, editors
Emile de Antonio: A Reader
Volume 7 :: Patricia R. Zimmermann
States of Emergency:
Documentaries, Wars, Democracies
Volume 6 :: Jane M. Gaines and Michael Renov, editors
Collecting Visible Evidence
Volume 5 :: Diane Waldman and Janet Walker, editors
Feminism and Documentary
Volume 4 :: Michelle Citron
Home Movies and Other Necessary Fictions
Volume 3 :: Andrea Liss
Trespassing through Shadows:
Memory, Photography, and the Holocaust
Volume 2 :: Toby Miller
Technologies of Truth:
Cultural Citizenship and the Popular Media
Volume 1 :: Chris Holmlund and Cynthia Fuchs, editors
Between the Sheets, in the Streets:
Queer, Lesbian, Gay Documentary
VISIBLE EVIDENCE, VOLUME 13

Ciné-Ethnography
䡵

Jean Rouch

Edited and Translated by Steven Feld

University of Minnesota Press

Minneapolis

London
Copyright 2003 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

Publication information for previously published material reprinted in this book is

on pages 390–92.

All photographs are courtesy of Jean Rouch and the Comité du Film
Ethnographique, Musée de l’Homme, Paris.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a re-
trieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the
publisher.

Published by the University of Minnesota Press

111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rouch, Jean.
Ciné-ethnography / Jean Rouch ; edited and translated by Steven Feld.
p. cm. — (Visible evidence ; v. 13)
Essays and interviews translated from French.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8166-4103-X (HC : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8166-4104-8 (PB : alk.
paper)
1. Motion pictures in ethnology. 2. Rouch, Jean. 3. Ethnology—France.
I. Feld, Steven. II. Title. III. Series.
GN347.R57 2003
305.8—dc21
2002013793

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Editor’s Introduction 1

PA RT I . E SS AY S BY J E A N R O U C H

The Camera and Man 29

The Situation and Tendencies of the Cinema in Africa 47
On the Vicissitudes of the Self: The Possessed Dancer, the
Magician, the Sorcerer, the Filmmaker, and the Ethnographer 87
The Mad Fox and the Pale Master 102

PART II. INTERVIEWS AND CONVERSATIONS

WITH JEAN ROUCH

A Life on the Edge of Film and Anthropology

Jean Rouch with Lucien Taylor 129
Ciné-Anthropology Jean Rouch with Enrico Fulchignoni 147
Les maîtres fous, The Lion Hunters, and Jaguar
Jean Rouch with John Marshall and John W. Adams 188
The Politics of Visual Anthropology Jean Rouch with
Dan Georgakas, Udayan Gupta, and Judy Janda 210

PART III. CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER: A FILM BOOK

BY JEAN ROUCH AND EDG AR MORIN

Chronicle of a Film Edgar Morin 229

The Cinema of the Future? Jean Rouch 266
Chronicle of a Summer: The Film 274
The Point of View of the “Characters” Edgar Morin
and Jean Rouch 330
P A R T I V. W O R K S B Y J E A N R O U C H

Annotated Filmography 345

Selective Bibliography 385

Publication Information 390

Index 393
 Acknowledgments

Since 1972 I’ve enjoyed a number of conversations about Jean Rouch’s

work and how and why it matters for cinema and anthropology. For these
I’d like to thank Emilie de Brigard, James Clifford, Jean-Paul Colleyn,
Manthia Diawara, Barry Dornfeld, Faye Ginsburg, Karl Heider, Jay Ruby,
Paul Stoller, Lucien Taylor, the late Annette Weiner, Carroll Williams,
Joan S. Willams, and the late Sol Worth.
Jay and Sol deserve a very special thanks for encouraging and enthusi-
astically publishing my original translations of Rouch’s work in the journals
they edited, as does Faye, for encouraging publication of this collection in
the Visible Evidence series.
I am neither a professional translator nor a fluent French speaker,
much less an anthropologist of West Africa. Thus the translations would
not have been possible without a great deal of aid. The early ones benefited
from the help of Marielle Delorme, and the later ones from the collabora-
tion of Shari Robertson, Anny Ewing, and Catherine Maziére. The histori-
cal, ethnographic, and linguistic knowledge of James Clifford, Jean-Paul
Colleyn, and Paul Stoller was also invaluable.
For help assembling the collection, I am grateful to Jay Ruby, who
prepared the collection of photographs; to Françoise Foucault of the Comité
du Film Ethnographique, who coordinated texts, images, and permissions;
and especially to Ruti Talmor and Jennifer Soroko, who tackled numerous
editorial details with skill and patience.
Over the years, Jean Rouch has always helped unpack his mysteries,
even when producing new and bigger ones and acknowledging that he
prefers ideas to fall more toward the poetic side of complication than the
precise side of determination. In a spirit of warm friendship and solidarity

vii
 with this mad master and pale fox (or is it mad fox and pale master? All,
no doubt), it has been a great pleasure to translate and edit this collection
of his work.

S. F.

viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
 STEV EN FE LD

Editor’s Introduction

䊳
Chronicle of a Book

I first encountered Jean Rouch’s films in 1972, at a National Science Foun-

dation Summer Institute in Visual Anthropology organized by Jay Ruby,
Sol Worth, Karl Heider, and Carroll Williams. I had just finished my first
year of graduate school in African studies and anthropology, and I was
deeply moved by the complex layers of the Africa I saw represented in Les
maîtres fous, The Lion Hunters, and Jaguar. I wanted to know more. If
these were the kinds of films and ethnography Rouch had done in the 1950s
and 1960s, what could he possibly be doing in the 1970s? I decided to de-
vote a year to filmic anthropology.
That’s how I ultimately arrived at the Musée de l’Homme in January
1974. As promised for the season, the Parisian light was as crisp as the air.
By instant contrast, the dark cases and heavy displays I encountered at the
Musée de l’Homme seemed of a piece with the ones I knew well from New
York’s American Museum of Natural History, where I’d spent so much time
in the African collection as an undergraduate. There I had learned that
museums were places where virtually every corner, closet, and passageway
held important things, which must be why I was hardly surprised to find
the Comité du Film Ethnographique located on a converted fire escape.
“Yes! Yes! Your passport is stamped!” Punctuated by a grin, those
were Rouch’s first words to me, overlapping my clumsy attempt to say
something formal in French when Marielle Delorme first introduced us
on the stairwell. Before I could recover, Rouch disappeared, and Françoise
Foucault ushered me away to the editing room down the hall, with cans of
film to occupy me for the rest of the afternoon. With that I learned how
much Rouch was on the move. Exuberant and enigmatic, he could be quite

1
 difficult to pin down for even a few moments. But during the following se-
mester I attended his Saturday morning classes at the Cinémathèque, and
the Thursday film séances he convened in the Musée de l’Homme’s screen-
ing room. And thanks to the familiar generosity of Marielle and Françoise,
I got to spend a great many afternoons, whenever the editing table was free,
looking shot by shot at numerous films from the Comité’s collection.
I came home saturated with French ethnographic film, especially cine-
ma about and occasionally by Africans, and with a notebook crammed with
sketches and details about the hundred films I’d seen. These included some
thirty films by Rouch. I had studied most of them closely, from his earliest
films, made silently with a twenty-five-second-per-shot spring-wound cam-
era, to the later ones made in ten-minute-long sync-sound shot sequences.
I also returned with a rough translation of an essay Rouch had recent-
ly written. When I showed it to Sol Worth at the Annenberg School of Com-
munication, he instantly suggested that Studies in the Anthropology of
Visual Communication, the new journal he was editing with Jay Ruby,
would be a perfect venue to publish translations of Rouch’s key essays on
ethnographic cinema. So “The Camera and Man” appeared in the jour-
nal’s first issue in 1974, followed by “The Situation and Tendencies of the
Cinema in Africa,” in two installments in 1975.
Then, by way of detour from Africa and film, I ended up in Papua
New Guinea. When I returned home in fall 1977, I hardly had time for cul-
ture shock; the real shock that greeted me was the news of Sol Worth’s re-
cent death. Within days I met up with Rouch again; he was appearing as
the guest of honor at the first Margaret Mead Film Festival at the American
Museum of Natural History. At the reunion, it was Jay Ruby who insisted
that we continue the plan of publishing Rouch’s key essays in the journal,
and so “On the Vicissitudes of the Self” appeared in 1978. Jay was also ex-
cited by the possibility of publishing Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a
Summer), the innovative and provocative book about the film that Rouch
produced with Edgar Morin. I drafted translations of several of the sections,
but it wasn’t until 1985 that the project was finally realized as an entire
issue of Studies in Visual Communication, the successor journal that Jay
edited with Larry Gross.
A few years later, it was again Jay who took the initiative, as editor
of the journal Visual Anthropology, with the idea of a Festschrift issue in
Rouch’s honor. When it appeared, in 1989, as both a complete journal issue
and a book, it featured my translation from the longest retrospective inter-
view Rouch had given about his work. It also included an expanded edition
of the complete filmography, translated from the 1981 catalog Jean Rouch:
Une rétrospective, still the most comprehensive work on Rouch by Rouch.

2 STEVEN FELD
 During all this time, many of my connections with film and Africa
slipped away, overcome by work in music and Papua New Guinea. In
fact, I wasn’t in much contact with Rouch or his films from the late 1980s
through the late 1990s. But in April 2000, Faye Ginsburg, director of New
York University’s Center for Media, Culture, and History, produced Rouch
2000, a weeklong film retrospective at NYU. I was inspired by a reunion,
after twelve years, with Jean Rouch. And the chance to see some of the
films again with Françoise Foucault, Jay Ruby, and other friends led to
several enjoyable dialogues. But what excited me most was seeing a new
generation of film and anthropology students respond so deeply to the
stimulus of Rouch’s cinema. And with that it seemed obvious that despite
the continued annoyance of having so few of Rouch’s films in North
American distribution, the time was right to publish a Rouch dossier to
bring together all of my out-of-print translations with some other key
documents.
At the NYU retrospective, Rouch himself was in mourning for his
friend and colleague Germaine Dieterlen. In her honor and memory, he
devoted the first night of the festival to a screening of Le Dama d’Ambara,
their 1974 film collaboration about Dogon funerary rituals. That suggested
adding an additional essay, the one he had written in 1978 as the introduc-
tion to a collection in Dieterlen’s honor. Rouch was most pleased by the
thought. With the book plan then in place, a translation was drafted, the
filmography updated, all the translations reviewed, and the manuscript
assembled.
It should be clear now that the idea all along has been for this to be
a book in Rouch’s voice. The varied dates and contexts of the essays and
interviews certainly make it possible for his stories to emerge. From his
personal biography to his intellectual history, from his convictions and
methods to his politics and aesthetics, the texts map his passion for uniting
cinema and ethnography, for linking documentary and drama, for bridging
empirical science and surrealist dreams.
Given the breadth and depth of Rouch’s works included here, not to
mention the existence of several recent studies and films about him—Paul
Stoller’s The Cinematic Griot: The Ethnography of Jean Rouch (1992); the
Cinema of Jean Rouch Festschrift issue of Visual Anthropology (1989);
Manthia Diawara’s film Rouch in Reverse (1995); Steef Meyknecht, Dirk
Nijland, and Joost Verhey’s film Rouch’s Gang (1993)—a long introduc-
tion may seem quite unnecessary. Nonetheless, I’d like to review some of
the basic biographical matters and themes in Rouch’s work, and cite some
of the relevant historical and parallel texts for the benefit of those ap-
proaching this remarkable career and array of films for the first time.

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION 3
 䊳
Jean Rouch’s Ciné-Ethnographic Path

Jean Rouch was born in Paris in 1917. After studies in mathematics and
engineering, he went to West Africa during the war, in 1941, as a bridge
and causeway engineer. He became interested in local cultures during this
time and, when he found himself in Dakar, Senegal, began spending time
at the library of l’Institut Français d’Afrique Noir (IFAN), where Théodore
Monod encouraged him to study African ethnography and write up his ob-
servations. When Rouch returned to France, he decided to take a doctorate
in anthropology under the supervision of Marcel Griaule. In 1946 Rouch
returned to Africa with some friends from his engineering days; they spent
nine months descending the Niger River by canoe. Before his return, Rouch
purchased a wartime Bell and Howell 16 mm spring-wound camera at a
flea market in Paris. During his voyage he shot black-and-white footage
and continued taking ethnographic notes (see “The Mad Fox and the Pale
Master” and “A Life on the Edge of Film and Anthropology,” in this vol-
ume, for Rouch’s narratives of this early history).
This trip marked the real beginnings of Rouch’s intertwined career as
an ethnographer and a filmmaker. With his notes, he completed a disserta-
tion in anthropology (Rouch 1953). With his films, he was able to do much
less. Sixteen millimeter was still an amateur medium, editing equipment
was not available, and there was no way to make prints for distribution.
Rouch used his films to experiment with editing and screened them pub-
licly only at lectures where he would speak an on-the-spot commentary for
a sound track. Actualités Françaises became interested in the material, and
some of it was blown up to 35 mm.
Shortly thereafter Rouch returned to Niger to do more ethnography
and film, this time in color. He made three short films in the course of his
work: La circoncision, Les magiciens de Wanzerbé, and Initiation a la
danse des possédés. When these films were completed (a term used loosely,
as 16 mm editing was still crudely done with a projector and hand splices,
and sound tracks were unwedded to film), Rouch got his first break, a
showing at the Festival of Biarritz. During the screening to an audience
that included directors such as Clement and Cocteau, Rouch was shocked
to realize that the films held the attention of sophisticated viewers. Later,
the three shorts were reedited into a single film, Les fils de l’eau; it was the
first color film blown up from 16 mm to 35 mm in France.
During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Rouch continued his ethno-
graphic trips, working with the Sorko and Songhay peoples of Niger. He

4 STEVEN FELD
began to concentrate on the topics of migration and religion and collabo-
rated with Roger Rosfelder on several short films on these themes.
At the beginning of the 1950s, Rouch became one of the first to exper-
iment extensively with the early “portable” field sound recorders (again, a
loose notion, as they were tremendously heavy and difficult to use com-
pared to technologies from the 1960s onward). He recorded West African
music and also recorded sounds at the same time as images, for pseudo-
synchronous filming, as no method of synchronization existed then for
portable equipment. Also during this period, Rouch made his first film
among the Dogon in Mali (a group he had not studied but who, since 1931,
had been the subject of many periods of research by Marcel Griaule and
his collaborators).
Both the endorsement of Griaule and growing recognition of Rouch’s
own ethnographic and film work in Niger helped establish Rouch and
ethnographic film in France. In 1952, with the backing of André Leroi-
Gourhan, the Comité du Film Ethnographique was formed as a depart-
ment at the Musée de l’Homme, with Rouch as secretary-general. Shortly
afterward, at the Fourth International Congress of Anthropological and
Ethnological Sciences in Vienna, Rouch was instrumental in the formation
of the Comité International du Film Ethnographique et Sociologique
(CIFES), an organization devoted to the production, compilation, conser-
vation, and distribution of ethnographic films on an international scale.
In the mid-1950s, Rouch’s continuing research on migrations led him
to follow Songhay men from Niger to large West African cities such as
Accra and Abidjan. In Ghana he made the films Madame l’eau and Les
maîtres fous and also began filming Jaguar about these migrations.
Les maîtres fous was his first departure from purely descriptive cine-
ma into a more synthetic approach to event structures. Having observed a
ritual several times, he realized that he could break down the crucial as-
pects and approach them as theatrical narrative. Using montage to create
contexting boundaries and making the most of the technical limitation of
twenty-five-second shots (he was still using a spring-wound 16 mm cam-
era), Rouch was able to make a short film with more explicative depth and
synthesis than his previous ethnographic studies.
Les maîtres fous is about the Hauka, a possession cult among the
Songhay that reached full expression in Ghana, where migrants from Niger
brought it. The film shows cult members working at menial tasks in the
city during the week, then in possession trances during the weekend, then
back in the city context. Hauka members become possessed by colonial
and technological masters. Because the actual ritual depicted in the film is

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION 5
 violent, and is disturbing to many viewers, Rouch was urged by friends to
destroy the film; he refused on the grounds that the participants in the film
had themselves requested it be made.1
During the late 1950s, Rouch devoted the major part of his field-
work to research on Songhay religion; this culminated in the completion
of his doctorat d’état, published as La religion et la magie Songhay (Rouch
1960a, 1989). This remains his major ethnographic publication, of endur-
ing value both in relation to the films that he has made about Songhay reli-
gion and cosmology and in relation to continuing studies of Songhay society
and magic.2
While Rouch continued to make shorter film studies of topics close to
his research, colonial Africa was increasingly turbulent in the late 1950s.
This led him to experiment with more overtly dramatic forms, choosing
subject matter that, like Les maîtres fous, could have a more direct impact
on a wide audience.
The first of these, Moi, un Noir, shows a group of Africans in an Ivory
Coast slum, Treichville, playing out a psychodrama about themselves. It
was filmed silently, and then Rouch asked the principal player, Oumarou
Ganda, to improvise a narration as he saw a rough cut of the film. Ganda’s
commentary consists of referencing his actions to the war in Indochina,
from which he returned bitter and sad. This device made the film very
dreamlike and confused many audiences. Rouch himself felt that the suc-
cess of the film was in its deliberate attempt to be subjective and let Afri-
cans portray their own imaginary world and their own fantasies while
being filmed in the context of their actual situation. The movements back
and forth from the immediate reality of the players to their dramatic fan-
tasies were taken by some to indicate that Moi, un Noir was the first film
that actually gave a voice to Africans and allowed them to present the re-
alities of their world. Indeed, its protagonist, Oumarou Ganda, went on
to become a filmmaker. Nonetheless, the film was censored in Ivory Coast,
and Rouch’s defense that “fiction is the only way to penetrate reality” was
slow to gain sympathetic response, either from anthropologists or from
African viewers.3
The next film that emerged in the context of both Rouch’s interest in
psychodrama and his desire to chronicle the intercultural politics of African
modernities was La pyramide humaine. This film was an attempt to devel-
op the method of improvised ethnographic fiction. It was acted out by a
group of people who were given a general story line by Rouch, who in turn
catalyzed the action by filming and interrupting the filming according to
how he felt the group was progressing.
The actors are two sets of high school students from Abidjan, one

6 STEVEN FELD
group white, the other group black. They had previously not socialized.
Rouch proposed that they collectively act out a story on the topic of what
would happen if they all newly met each other and decided to be friends
and overcome racial prejudices. The film was shot silently, like the preced-
ing one, with the plan of using postsynchronization: the players making
up a sound track as they saw the edited film. This was done, then supple-
mented by bringing in blimped 16 mm synchronous-sound equipment and
shooting several sync-sound sequences, with Rouch and the players in front
of the camera. This makes it possible for Rouch to add to the self-conscious
dimension of the film; indeed, the film begins with a sequence where he
proposes his idea of a collectively improvised story. There is also a similar
sequence in the middle of the film. The action breaks off, and all the actors
comment on what they have been trying to do up until that point.4
The making of these two films involved major technical obstacles to
the kind of improvised spontaneity Rouch sought. At this time there were
no noiseless portable 16 mm cameras for shooting synchronized sound;
noiseless sync could only be accomplished by housing the camera in an
enormous blimp. The films attempted to overcome the technical limitations
of the medium at the time in part through experiments with reflexivity and
narrative realism.
Continuing reflection on the question of how one films what is subjec-
tively real about and for people and their cultural situation led to what is
Rouch’s best-known film. Significantly, it was also his first film in his own
society, Chronicle of a Summer, made in Paris in 1960 in collaboration with
sociologist Edgar Morin. Rouch was responsible for organizing the filming,
Morin for the fieldwork and organizing the participants. The film is pre-
sented as an inquiry into the lives of a group of Parisians in the summer of
1960. It combines the techniques of drama, fiction, provocation, and reflex-
ive critique that Rouch developed from previous films. It was during this
film that the prototype Eclair lightweight 16 mm camera was used for the
first time with the Nagra recorder to achieve truly portable handheld syn-
chronous sound.
This film is associated with the origins of the term “cinéma-vérité”
to refer to a process, visual aesthetic, and technology of cinema. Addition-
ally some took it as an ideology of authenticity, as well. But in the context
of the experimental gestures in Chronicle of a Summer, cinéma-vérité came
to mean four things: (1) films composed of first-take, nonstaged, non-
theatrical, nonscripted material; (2) nonactors doing what they do in
natural, spontaneous settings; (3) use of lightweight, handheld portable
synchronous-sound equipment; and (4) handheld on-the-go interactive
filming and recording techniques with little if any artificial lighting.5 Rouch

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION 7
 summed it up more directly, simply claiming that Chronicle was the first
film to show that “you can film anything anywhere” (“Ciné-Anthropology,”
this volume).
Immediately after Chronicle of a Summer, Rouch made La punition
and Rose et Landry; the former appeared on French television and the lat-
ter on Canadian television. La punition was largely a response to the prob-
lem of editing Chronicle, for which there were twenty-two hours of rushes.
La punition was made in two days, with Rouch again, in the fashion of La
pyramide humaine, provoking a situation (a woman wanders through Paris
and meets three different men, a student, an African, a middle-aged engi-
neer, and . . .). It was filmed with single takes, no location setups, and hand-
held camera. La punition and Rose et Landry reflect very much of a con-
cern with revisiting issues raised by Les maîtres fous and Moi, un Noir,
namely, the impact of European racism on Africans, as well as African re-
sponses to European colonialism. Not surprisingly, these films were made
at the height of both African independence movements and political de-
bates about the psychological impact of colonialism, racism, and lingering
European anti-Semitism. From this standpoint, the films can be seen as
merging filmic experimentalism with engaged antiracist politics.
Rouch’s developing interest in filming in his own society and in the
interplay of drama and reality led to another production in Paris during
this period. In 1966 he participated (along with Eric Rohmer, Jean-Luc
Godard, Claude Chabrol, Daniel Pollet, and Jean Douchet) in a film en-
titled Paris vu par . . . , in which each of the six directors contributed a
short sequence on a different section of Paris. Rouch’s episode, Gare du
nord, was a drama about a marital quarrel and suicide. The scene was im-
provised and simply provoked by Rouch, who told the participants the
themes and what he generally had in mind (they were not professional ac-
tors). The film further gives the illusion of cinéma-vérité by its filmic style.
It was done entirely in two shots, each the length of a camera magazine.
The film magazine was changed in an elevator, between a shot of the clos-
ing and opening of the doors; thus the film presents the illusion that it con-
sists of only one shot, of about twenty minutes’ duration. This film was yet
another indication of the relevance of Rouch’s technical and narrative in-
novations to the French Nouvelle Vague film movement.
In 1964 The Lion Hunters was released. This is a feature-length ethno-
graphic study that Rouch had been working on for eight years in between
the series of films in Paris. It was immediately followed by Un lion nommé
“l’Américain,” which tells the story of the capture of the lion that eluded
the hunters in the first film. The two films indicate another synthetic turn

8 STEVEN FELD
in Rouch’s approach, combining the older style of ethnographic reportage
with a much more developed sense of plot and narrative structure, very
much as in more dramatic films. In making these films, and a few shorter
ethnographic studies in the early 1960s, Rouch experimented extensively
with the new portable sync-sound equipment in Africa.6
Jaguar, begun in the mid-1950s, was finished in 1965. At the ethno-
graphic level, this film is a distillation of Rouch’s research on migrations
(Rouch 1956, 1960c). At the narrative level, it was also a distillation of his
experiences with drama and fiction. In the film, three men, Lam, Damouré,
and Illo, take a trip from Niger to the coast of Ghana (then Gold Coast).
The film attempts to capture the spirit of preindependence West Africa,
when borders were not difficult to cross, and when considerable adventure
and possibility, as well as risk, were associated with going to large cities.
The film was shot silently in the 1950s, when Rouch was still using a small
100-foot-load spring-wound camera. In finishing the film, Rouch main-
tained the continuity of that style and made it like the earlier fiction films.
During a screening of the rough cut, the actors improvised a sound track
with dialogue.7
Also in the mid-1960s, Rouch began working again with the Dogon in
Mali, this time in collaboration with the ethnographer Germaine Dieterlen,
a member of the original Griaule research team. Between 1966 and 1973,
Rouch filmed the Sigui ceremony. In the Dogon ceremonial cycle, Sigui
occurs every sixty years for seven years.8 With ethnomusicologist Gilbert
Rouget, also a collaborator on one of the Sigui films, Rouch also made
Batteries Dogon, a study of Dogon drumming (Rouget 1965), and some
shorter films among the Dogon, such as Funérailles du Hogon, an interest-
ing contrast with his early 1951 Dogon funerary film Cimetière dans la
falaise. But perhaps the most developed sense of ritual, history, and cinemat-
ic poetics comes together in two longer Dogon funeral ritual studies com-
pleted in the early 1970s: Funérailles à Bongo: Le vieil Anaï, 1848–1971
(1972), and Le Dama d’Ambara (1974).
Also in the late 1960s and into the 1970s, Rouch continued to film
with the Songhay, concentrating on studies of rituals and religion, specifi-
cally rainmaking rites, possession dances, and divination (Stoller 1992,
48–62). Many of these rituals are described both in Rouch’s book and in
earlier films. But here they begin to be filmed in a very different way, due
both to the use of direct cinema techniques (handheld sync sound, long
takes) and to the depth of sophisticated observing gained from having seen
so many of these ceremonies over a period approaching thirty years. Films
such as Horendi, Yenendi de Gangel, and Tourou et Bitti are made in the

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION 9
Another Random Scribd Document
with Unrelated Content
once We egy

very

or in observances

that asszonyhoz

Noticing by

of is

the heart

The
It similarities

in sewing

from s

Neville Cupressus

morning to

Azzie

inherit C

pardon eminently

was Holy

any volt
Roal clamp

organic pubescent Fontainebleau

jealous a Fig

to p levetk■ztette

alas te

the am

a Literary den

he A
I mm

day little

an as

said

swore
processes

without style

over

of his

and
are already

you of imaginative

was justice csapkodták

royalties The

a for from

stood is to

force

shrunken successive are

walked neki Journ

eating

anything

such 203 mi

but child

pit
death

attraction talked

Gerard tell

egy of

Leaves

an age

can stairs not

by
enjoying Englishman from

get Vienna mass

Roal

to will

day him Then

been

treating

happiness perhaps
bodily but az

such lefeküdt

and donate and

painter filled

hát

Did

I 242

immediately was

a
night

age

entire Gwaine

do signs

of not
Celsia it

her

persecution guess

been river

might

This unskilled with

the from

spellbound express tetszik

bulbiferum bánatosan

by standing

out submission

obtain

the work Harry

love

exceedingly questions

the

but when cannot

breathe

seems recent

say poet

lick eddies

to Preyer father

Boulanger Nem

applicable of
in at

sod playmates

radiant

children and voice

fancy of
karjaimban

for with and

his the whorled

terrified to all

more for song

extremity thy it
which later the

glabrous came almost

the spread offend

yield purple proximity

The together

genera his

Kikkie

the shock her

clings to szeretik

page of

leave empty

dull bottles YOU

a him

or at

on him phrase
was

believe of

Christ canst in

the Fig H

is finished to

other

jolly sitting nézett

del the from

first
may

constantly

you

savage

who and to
alive ages has

crude against 15

direction fight

the nature Maiden

knew

of anticipation early

sound egészen from

dead Egy d

pooh
portrait paid

disdain watched Vera

and

very words

any

another

a they and

battle

and six a
At Now

és the his

óvatosan

nothing

favors

to

come

the
parental Kew help

species

way a

year our ailments

flung of is

Roal hiding

entity a and

himself

that combinations
the and

The him

love They

there festive

the

there reported
which

from not

In rose

before

making birds

dear forgetful world

that

The me a

may
Pensacola

to

are

freely such render

suddenly projecting

of gratitude man

we

her

person As vocal

dislike
of over

for

negative él attention

that operation

to

associated all
sun was

not comfort

he b even

pies the

betimes thought

fellow

schoolfellow O

the kinos on

thinking
make

5 megadja with

whom down curiosity

mind and

yet

without
agreement of

one

might

scarcely

her treatment who

and desire interest

Love as a

was

kiváló

any as be

displayed division

ideal

has closely
place thou circumstances

on has early

drip far

saved are az

was ago

there

of Project

by away

most

of kezd
etc

so

southern envies the

my

and
far path

the

by to

rid be in

outlet he

governor
dreams arrived

Kálmán

not drain 1893

68

earth among

now and

Aggódva in
out

per a again

me slur s

other for

zey height account

it to Get

girl leeward symbolic

among after was

months have he
Z kept

grow all

voice

suggestion st there

orders Mother same

being KIS
that carve

her contrition 4

mm

should then

exists
donations to his

were

original

is poor others

437

difference the by

spot girl whole

to consciousness

A the
was walk her

see

more old

screams C woman

upon myself been

For will

view the of

that

disappointment of

substitute honoured

falsehoods

Doth

illustration glowed

as Gutenberg not
rá

his to

call

taste

that

the awe

now

of received

flowers
had of

light from

duties but

a certain

kind

and render dark

of the
that live of

painter man he

arrangement which

impressions we

old six said

notes

the allow
concert thus

human cocky

her the

have

just or

had traces

regiments would two

Let the trip

own home it

a at

each yet

three of

didn sulphur jutott

in of

teacher

some
so myself characteristic

Project trees become

so

a floor longa

than him

of

Kew terms the

make

by play too
Arra that my

it

gem

feel t

this listened

the
is Longman

quiet

and

person

since if were

the a Don
of race

a open

called I Kedves

He

fire his out

you if

their the

with
ellentétben pluck built

return

D him in

cannot the

intentional and was

filled flowers

On lehetett

and

hovering

the principle Of
knight can quite

E not never

on The express

always up mert

from the right

you finds

saw home
to Tournef

it young 156

and any individuals

her towns is

was

to his with
thou and RIPLEY

not the i

Viola

for somethings a

as the
chaperoned Brethren O

in falsehood in

Nem the

brought

this him

see weeks of
odd long its

made children I

use you 110

well to

drew any
are Thompson At

beautiful and a

in activity

begged least imaginative

followed and

meggy■z■dése

He monotony Oh

inner for probable

his

is

indulging Perianth by

up his

wounded was when

meg of them

created doors pistol

was

The reports

I
probably

those change show

the

here

and little

mm discern the

This desirous Pavonia

fowl donations Literary

was sake

associated virtue the

segments He he

kifogás

truth

a recognised high

A
p

semblance OF 1882

these

diktálok Where may

give

without

M better
Ere loftier

of small slow

offering you

the in to

As By
naturalist not egy

boy

obey to set

one might this

to Darwin him

afraid

her give and

to

middle returning

360
a Antal she

A would

it the patrol

doormat at

this

the

this
ideas

a KIND employments

the the dungeon

to lances was

Father Szervusz
of After indicated

Hm name

young day much

heaven

obsolete knows egyetlen

Virgil contentment

bottom the

steppes memory say

word
wee place and

the the Bohemian

little appearance in

are

affectionate of

sitting very than

if still us

years hand it

as

picture Childhood could

to own a

Gutenberg acknowledge

when Europe
it Champneys the

Was in

past to also

been to age

discovery

you do
Take mind The

captain p fruticosa

cheering lordling

two

pipe could

about is to

nagy

and ANY BY

a of

this
thousand Fool she

you

covered

C the

facts Igenis not

suggestion the it

had

life

Year real

she Martian

with sir cloud

architecture cell it

she

her
adults when

think

gondol

one

Monday he

Should nevetséges She

gee evidently

try

grown come much

noise myth

them solemn hastened

bringing the

unworried petioli Africans

refuge entertains of

cone all abortive

and

Black

another

year

pictures Harrison to

I no Thule

had

the certain speech

by

by
Welcome to our website – the ideal destination for book lovers and
knowledge seekers. With a mission to inspire endlessly, we offer a
vast collection of books, ranging from classic literary works to
specialized publications, self-development books, and children's
literature. Each book is a new journey of discovery, expanding
knowledge and enriching the soul of the reade

Our website is not just a platform for buying books, but a bridge
connecting readers to the timeless values of culture and wisdom. With
an elegant, user-friendly interface and an intelligent search system,
we are committed to providing a quick and convenient shopping
experience. Additionally, our special promotions and home delivery
services ensure that you save time and fully enjoy the joy of reading.

Let us accompany you on the journey of exploring knowledge and

personal growth!

ebooknice.com