Jean Rouch was a French filmmaker and anthropologist considered one of the founders of cinéma-vérité. Over 60 years, he filmed in Africa and developed a style blurring fiction and documentary, creating ethnofiction. His seminal film Moi, un noir pioneered the jump cut technique popularized by Jean-Luc Godard. Throughout his career, Rouch filmed over 70 ethnographic films in West Africa exploring rituals, improvisations, and folk tales. He had a visionary influence on the study and filmmaking of African cultures while training African filmmakers. Rouch died in 2004 in Niger at age 86 while continuing his film work focused on respecting people.
Jean Rouch was a French filmmaker and anthropologist considered one of the founders of cinéma-vérité. Over 60 years, he filmed in Africa and developed a style blurring fiction and documentary, creating ethnofiction. His seminal film Moi, un noir pioneered the jump cut technique popularized by Jean-Luc Godard. Throughout his career, Rouch filmed over 70 ethnographic films in West Africa exploring rituals, improvisations, and folk tales. He had a visionary influence on the study and filmmaking of African cultures while training African filmmakers. Rouch died in 2004 in Niger at age 86 while continuing his film work focused on respecting people.
Jean Rouch was a French filmmaker and anthropologist considered one of the founders of cinéma-vérité. Over 60 years, he filmed in Africa and developed a style blurring fiction and documentary, creating ethnofiction. His seminal film Moi, un noir pioneered the jump cut technique popularized by Jean-Luc Godard. Throughout his career, Rouch filmed over 70 ethnographic films in West Africa exploring rituals, improvisations, and folk tales. He had a visionary influence on the study and filmmaking of African cultures while training African filmmakers. Rouch died in 2004 in Niger at age 86 while continuing his film work focused on respecting people.
Jean Rouch (French: [u]; 31 May 1917, Paris 18 February 2004, Niger) was a French
filmmaker and anthropologist.
He is considered to be one of the founders of cinma-vrit in France, which shared the aesthetics of the direct cinema spearheaded by Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker and Albert and David Maysles. Rouch's practice as a filmmaker for over sixty years in Africa, was characterized by the idea of shared anthropology. Influenced by his discovery of surrealism in his early twenties, many of his films blur the line between fiction and documentary, creating a new style of ethnofiction. He was also hailed by the French New Wave as one of theirs. His seminal film Me a Black (Moi, un noir) pioneered the technique of jump cut popularized by Jean-Luc Godard. Godard said of Rouch in the Cahiers du Cinma (Notebooks on Cinema) n94 April 1959, "In charge of research for the Muse de l'Homme (French, "Museum of Man") Is there a better definition for a filmmaker?" Along his career, Rouch was no stranger to controversy. He would often repeat, "Glory to he who brings dispute." The Films Of Jean Rouch: Background Jean Rouch's prolific film career began in French West Africa, where he worked as a civil engineer during World War II, supervising road and bridge construction. Previously, in Paris, he had attended the lectures of Marcel Mauss and Marcel Griaule. In 1946, traveling down the Niger River, Rouch shot his first film with a 16mm Bell and Howell camera, developing an original style after the tripod fell in the water. Later, he enlisted the help of Damoure, a Sorka friend, to film a hippopotamus hunt, and thus began a productive collaboration that has lasted almost four decades. Damoure took sound for Les Maitres Fous, was a central character inJaguar, and worked with Rouch on many other films, as did several of Rouch's long-standing African friends and co-workers. Rouch's innovative approaches effected more than anthropological film. In the summer of 1960, Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morin shot Chronique d'Un Ete' (Chronicle of a Summer), a film dealing with Parisians' thoughts and feelings at the end of the Algerian war. In Chronique, now considered a pioneering "cinema-verite" film, the formerly invisible barrier between the "objective" filmmaker and his subject dissolved. The viewers see the filmmaker approach his subjects on the boulevards of Paris, inquiring, "Are you happy?" Technically, Chronique also furthered the development of a more efficient, portable, synchronous sound system that permitted the filming of longer, unbroken sequences. Although Rouch is best known for Chronique, and for the inspiration that it offered to New Wave filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Goddard and Francois Truffaut, his most striking contributions to film remain more than seventy ethnographic films made in West Africa. From the 1940s until the present, Rouch has produced films in Ghana, Niger, Mali, and Upper Volta, ranging from straightforward portrayals of extraordinary ritual events, such as Les Maitres Fous, to "collective improvisations" such as jaguar, or, more recently, Cocorico! Monsieur Poulet, based on a Niger folk tale. In the West, Rouch's distinctive vision of the cultures of West Africa has influenced students of anthropology, of ritual, and of Africa. But his influence has been significant on the African continent as well, where he consistently attempted to introduce film technology and to train technicians as he worked. Moustapha Alassane and Oumarou Ganda of Niger, Safi Faye of Senegal, and Desire Ecare of Ivory Coast are among the contemporary filmmakers who once worked with Rouch. Sadly, Jean Rouch died in a car accident in Niger, on February 18th, 2004, at the age of 86. We at DER are among the many who remember him with great affection. As the primary North American distributors for Jean's films, we were privileged to work with him over many years. Jean's exceptional and long-term engagement with his subjects, and the intimacy and authenticity of his filmmaking, exemplify the qualities we look for in all of the work we represent. Above all, in Jean's films there is a sense of adventure and humor, and a respect for people. As John Marshall, DER's founder, said of Jean, "Underneath it all, he was always about persons."