The Adventure of the Real: Jean Rouch and the Craft of Ethnographic Cinema PDF
Preview The Adventure of the Real: Jean Rouch and the Craft of Ethnographic Cinema
Jean Rouch services his Aaton in the offi ce of the Comité du fi lm ethnographique, Musée de l’Homme, March . Jean Rouch and the Craft of Ethnographic Cinema Chicago and London is director of the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, professor of visual anthropology at the University of Manchester, and a documentary fi lmmaker. Th e University of Chicago Press, Chicago Th e University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © by Th e University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published Printed in the United States of America - : ---- (cloth) - : ---- (paper) - : --- (cloth) - : --- (paper) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Henley, Paul. Th e adventure of the real : Jean Rouch and the craft of ethnographic cinema / Paul Henley. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. Includes fi lmography of Jean Rouch. - : ---- (cloth : alk. paper) - : --- (cloth : alk. paper) - : ---- (pbk. : alk. paper) - : --- (pbk. : alk. paper) . Rouch, Jean. . Cinematographers—France. . Ethnologists—France. . Ethnographic fi lms—Africa, West. . Motion pictures in ethnology— Africa, West. I. Title. .. .!—dc o Th e paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, .-. To Françoise Foucault and Laurent Pellé Preface ix Acknowledgments xxiii Initiation Th e Surrealist Encounter : Nothing but Cinema Encounters with Spirits Heroes of the Modern World Dreams of Black and White Images of Power : Introduction: New Technologies, New Methods Chronicle of a Violent Game New Wave Experiments Between Paris and the Land of Nowhere A Struggle Waged Against Corruption : Introduction: Totemic Ancestors Inspired Performance Th e Harsh Dialogue Th e Fixing of the Truth Shared Anthropology Th e Legacy of Jean Rouch . Th e Films of Jean Rouch . Jean Rouch’s Films by Year and Category, – . Films about Jean Rouch and His Nigerien Associates Notes Reference List Index Cinema is an Adventure, but the diffi culty is that it is an adventure that you have to strive continually to control. , A chronicle of the Rouchian adventure is certainly an exciting prospect, but it is one that I approach with caution. One never admires without reservation. Any tribute carries within it an element of denunciation. No eulogy deserves to be trusted unless it is combined with a certain degree of meanness. , Th e Adventure of the Real Th e very nature of ethnographic cinema—how it is practiced, how it is talked about, where its limits are deemed to lie—has been profoundly shaped by the work of the late Jean Rouch. When he died in a road ac- cident near Tahoua, Niger, in February , at the age of eighty- six, this genre of fi lmmaking was deprived of its most eminent fi gure, ar- guably its most original genius, and certainly its most prolifi c practitio- ner. In the course of a sixty-y ear career beginning with his fi rst tentative ethnographic report published in a French colonial journal in and ending with his last fi lm, poignantly entitled Le rêve plus fort que la mort (Th e Dream More Powerful Th an Death) and released in , Rouch pro- duced over one hundred completed fi lms and almost as many published texts. While a handful of these fi lms have been widely distributed, reach- ing far beyond the confi nes of academic anthropology, the great major- ity remain little known and diffi cult to see, particularly in the English- speaking world. Early on in his career, in , while still a doctoral student, Rouch was appointed to a post at the Centre National de la Recherche Scienti- fi que (CNRS), the most prestigious research institution in France. By this time, he was also already closely associated with the Musée de l’Homme. Forming part of the grand Palais de Chaillot, situated on a hill overlook- ing the Eiff el Tower and the Champs de Mars, the Musée de l’Homme was, until very recently, the premier anthropological museum in France. Th e Musée would become the seat of the Comité du fi lm ethnographique, which was established in by various luminaries of the worlds of cin- ema and anthropology. Rouch was appointed its general secretary and he remained so for the rest of his life. Th e Comité, which at the time of writ- ing still operates from a modest offi ce fashioned out of a sort of store- room at the head of the principal staircase, acted as the producer of most of his subsequent fi lms. Apart from a brief interlude in – , when he was temporarily expelled for failing to complete his doctoral thesis on time, largely due to the call of competing fi lmmaking activities, Rouch’s appointment to a position at the CNRS gave him the freedom for the rest of his life to pursue his anthropological and fi lmmaking interests more or less as he saw fi t. When he was in Paris, he would often preside at a celebrated se- ries of seminars. “Human Sciences and the Cinema,” that took place on Saturday mornings at the Cinémathèque française, then still located just across the small plaza beside the Musée, in the other wing of the Palais de Chaillot. He also played a leading role in the creation of the practice- based doctoral programs in cinema at both the Sorbonne and Nanterre campuses of the University of Paris, and he directed the fi lm theses of many of the students in these programs. Indeed, he was very generous with his time in encouraging young fi lmmakers generally, not only in France but elsewhere as well. Among many other initiatives, he was in- strumental in the establishment of the Ateliers Varan, which are based in Paris and are dedicated to the organization of documentary short courses there and in the Th ird World. But compared to most academics in what the French call the “Anglo-S axon” world, he was not heavily en- cumbered by teaching obligations. Th ese circumstances enabled him to spend part of almost every year of his career on a fi lmmaking expedition, mostly to West Africa. But for all his travels, Rouch remained deeply at- tached to his particular stamping grounds in Paris. Th e most immediately striking feature of Jean Rouch’s oeuvre is its sheer volume. Toward the end of his life, he would often assert that he had made or even fi lms. And indeed, if one compiles a list of all the fi lms that Rouch ever worked on, such as the one that is off ered in ap- pendix of this book, it is certainly the case that the total is of this order, perhaps even slightly more. But these fi gures should be treated with a certain degree of caution. Not all of these fi lms could be considered eth- nographic, even the in loosest sense of the term. Although Rouch may be best known as an ethnographic fi lmmaker, he also made a large number x •
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