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The Cinema of Jean Rouch

Building Bridges: The Cinema of Jean Rouch, edited by Joram ten Brink (Wallflower Press, November 2007), 288 pages, ISBN: 978-1-905674-47-3 (paperback), £18.99; ISBN: 978-1-905674-48-0 (hardback), £50.00

Rouch: Friend of Men and Gods Alike

Based on an international conference convened by Joram ten Brink, Reader in Film at the University of Westminster, at the Institut Français in 2004, this collection of essays and interviews explores the various aspects of the films and legacy of the French documentary-maker Jean Rouch. Written by close collaborators in the field and international scholars, this collection explores Rouch’s innovative and celebrated oeuvre as precursor of the French nouvelle vague and as an originator of cinéma veriteé in such works as Les Maîtres Fous (1955), Moi Un Noir (1958), La Pyramide Humaine (1959) and Chronique D’un Été (1960). It also discusses in great detail the large number of Rouch’s films (over 120) – ‘an unclassifiable, hence controversial oeuvre’ (Réda Bensmaïa) – across the whole spectrum of it’s output.

Paul Henley explores Rouch’s more conventional long-term ethnographic films, most of them concerning the ritual practices of the Songhay and the Dogon along the middle reaches of the River Niger. The religious practice that most intrigued Rouch, both as anthropologist and filmmaker, was spirit possession. During 1967-73 he filmed the Sigui, the re-enactment of the various stages of the Dogon myth of origin. Michael Chanan provides an analysis on the role of music, especially in the films on possession cults. Philo Bregstein, a collaborator on several of Rouch’s fiction films pays tribute to his role as fiction pioneer, for example in Madame L’eau (1992) where Rouch plays himself.

The insightful chapters by Elizabeth Cowie and David Bate look at Rouch’s early encounter with Surrealism and the profound effect it had on his subsequent scientific, intellectual and creative work. Cowie characterises Rouch’s role as scientist and artist. He adopted the idea of the ‘participatory camera’ from Robert Flaherty, involving the people he filmed closely in the process itself, to produce, in his own words, a ‘ciné-dialogue’, where there is no longer object and subject and ‘knowledge is no longer a stolen secret, later to be consumed in another place, at another time, by another culture’. This collaboration is as well a work of transference and counter-transference. Rouch sees himself no longer an observer/camera but as a participant who is in a form of trance… ‘The camera becomes a magic object […] because it leads the filmmaker onto paths he would otherwise never dare to take taking him to something that we scarcely understand: cinematographic creativity’. In his concept of ciné-transe Rouch draws on the Songhay theory of the person as split, founded on the notion of a ‘double’ or bia, who represents shadow, reflection and the soul, all at the same time, and which exists in a parallel world of doubles that is the place of imaginary.

But perhaps most importantly, Rouch’s personality comes to life in the various essays: his humour, his ethos, his continuous drive for new ideas and how he could enthuse and engage with many people through his work – sometimes behaving as a monstre sacrée, but at the same time being a diplomatic networker, extremely active and efficient in various organisations. And the reader will meet many of Rouch’s gang in front as well as behind of the camera.

The twenty-three lively contributions, often enriched with interviews and moving personal memories, are a wonderful homage to Jean Rouch and to allow positioning his pioneering contributions to the history of visual anthropology, documentary and fiction cinema as well as to francophone African culture. This reader opens Rouch’s oeuvre to the English-speaking research community and will be most welcome across the disciplines of anthropology, film studies, art history and African studies.

Susanne Hammacher

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