Disruptive forms: the cinema of Jean Rouch

Abstract

2017 marked the centenary of the birth of the French ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch. For many, the anniversary seemed an auspicious moment to revisit his expansive archive. In January, ambassadors, filmmakers, anthropologists and artists gathered at the Hôtel de Ville in Paris to announce an impressive programme of screenings and events – a yearlong celebration of the filmmaker’s singular vision, exuberant spirit and passion for cinema. Just as these centenary festivities began to unfold, Studies in French Cinema published a special issue on the French New Wave (2017). In the introduction, Douglas Morrey argued for the need to return to the New Wave by appealing, quite convincingly, to all that still ‘remains to be said’ about the films and figures associated with this era in French film history (109). This dossier aims to speak to and about both the interest piqued by the Rouch centenary events and the enduring resonance of French film culture of the 1950s and 1960s. Although Jacques Rivette referred to Rouch in 1968 as ‘le moteur de tout le cinéma français depuis dix ans’1(Aumont et al. 1968, 20), he continues to be positioned as a peripheral figure in most narratives about the New Wave, when and if he is mentioned at all. In many ways, the reticence around Rouch and his film work is understandable. A filmmaker, of course, Rouch was also an ethnographer employed by the Centre national de la recherche scientifique; since most of his research took place in West Africa (particularly in Niger), his films often focused on issues and individuals that felt distant to the concerns and day-to-day lives of those in metropolitan France. Furthermore, as experiments in what he came to call ‘shared anthropology’, even as early as the 1950s, Rouch’s film work illustrated a profound re-thinking of both anthropological and cinematic practice. Collaborating with his subjects and combining fiction and non-fiction techniques, Rouch developed an approach that blurred traditional distinctions between subject and observer, as well as those between documentary and fiction film. And though a handful of his films have circulated widely and received significant critical attention – Les Maîtres fous/Mad Masters (1955), Moi, un Noir/Me, A Black Man (1958), Chronique d’un été/Chronicle of a Summer (Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin, 1961) – his archive consists of over one hundred films, some still unfinished and others in various states of disrepair, shot over the course of a career that spanned six decades and several continents. Adding to this complexity is the fact that Rouch’s relationship to cinematic form was anything but faithful. Perhaps Jean-André Fieschi (1978) said it best when he wrote that the novelty of Rouch’s approach resided ‘surtout dans l’inconfort dont elle joue (et se joue), faisant flèche de tout bois, usant de techniques diverses, arpentant des espaces jusqu’à elle non-quadrillés, mêlant des procédés jusqu’à elle antinomiques, et ne se laissant enfermer dans aucune donnée acquise’2 (255). While the singularity of his professional path and his aesthetic eclecticism made for highly original film work, it has rendered analysis and summary challenging, to say the least. Fieschi’s description of the filmmaker’s practice is exceptionally articulate; most scholars, critics and viewers have struggled to find language and labels capacious enough to offer insight into what, exactly, Rouch was attempting to do with and through cinematic form. And the filmmaker did little to clear up any ambiguity. Robert Gardner once had Rouch as a guest on his series, Screening Room (1980), asking him: ‘Do you think of yourself as a filmmaker or as an anthropologist, or does that matter...?’ To which he responded: ‘Yes, [anthropologists] consider me as a filmmaker, [and] when