Headlines, North America

/REPEAT/ARTS WEEKLY/CULTURE: French Filmmaker Leaves African Legacy

Daniel Porras

NEW YORK, Feb 24 2004 (IPS) - Jean Rouch, the French filmmaker, ethnologist and explorer whose movies introduced the cultural richness of Africa to the West and beyond, died last week in a car crash in the African nation of Niger, aged 86.

Rouch is widely considered the father of "visual anthropology", a medium that pulls together film, anthropology, photography, art and archives.

He worked in Africa for more than 50 years, and leaves behind an unparalleled, vivid account of Africa’s journey through colonialism, independence and modernity. The people, rituals, myths and social practices of long-ago Africa are preserved through Rouch’s extensive body of work.

"Rouch was the single most important anthropological filmmaker," said Manthia Diawara, professor of comparative literature and Africana studies at New York University. "His way of hand holding the camera and using natural lighting revolutionised film."

Rouch believed the camera’s intervention stimulated people to greater spontaneity, expression and truth, without asking them – as in the American Direct Cinema style – to act as though the camera was not there.

"The camera eye is more perspicacious and more accurate than the human eye," he said. "The camera eye has an infallible memory, and the filmmaker’s eye is divided."

First working in West Africa as a civil engineer during World War II, Rouch became enchanted by the continent and would spend a large part of every year there for the rest of his life. At a time when most Europeans looked at Africa through the lens of colonialism, Rouch uncritically embraced Africans, and dedicated himself to portraying their culture through his honest documentary style.

Whether filming displaced migrants, refugees or ceremonial practices, Rouch blurred the traditional lines that separate producer and subject, and inspired a generation of anthropologists and filmmakers to do the same.

After graduation, Rouch specialised in film, beginning with ‘Au Pays des Mages’ (1947). Five of his shorts were bracketed as ‘Les Fils de l’Eau’ (1955), and 1957 saw the release of his controversial film ‘Les Maitres Fous’, about the Hauka cult in Upper Niger.

It includes disturbing scenes of the killing and eating of dogs and passages in which devotees, in a trance, speak pidgin English in mockery of their colonial administrators. The film was banned in British Africa as inflammatory.

Rouch’s later African films included ‘Jaguar’ (1955), a release print of which was paid for by the actor Gerard Philipe, a friend of Rouch.

‘Moi, un Noir’ (1958), his first feature-length film, was a partly fictionalised account of the lives of migrants of the Ivory Coast who adopt the names of their film heroes – Edward G Robinson, Eddie Constantine and Tarzan – while ‘La Pyramide Humaine’ (1959), also partly dramatised, told the tale of a white girl seeking to befriend her black classmates.

In ‘Moi, un Noir’, Rouch let the actors dictate the content of the movie, which followed three men and a woman through the every-day events of work and family, but also the acting out of their fantasies, in which there are signs of the corrupting influence of western commerce.

Among his other films, of which there are 120 in all, the most notable was the feature ‘La Chasse au Lion a l’Arc’ (1965), which spotlighted lion hunters on the Mali-Niger border.

Rouch’s films were much admired by the French new wave of the 1960s. Jacques Rivette, a veteran of those years, claimed, "Rouch is the force behind all French cinema of the past 10 years, although few people realise it".

Still, his cinematography faced serious criticism in Africa by some of its venerated practitioners. Burkina Faso director Gaston Kaboré once explained, "I think that he is, somehow, a drama for Africans".

"When I say it is a drama, it is because there is a lot of confusion in some minds whether to treat Rouch as an African filmmaker. I disagree, not because I am ostracising him. No. Only because, even if I stay in France for four decades making films, I never become French."

"In my culture, it is said that the piece of wood does not become a crocodile because it has stayed long in the water," added Kaboré.

Rouch’s documentary style, sometimes called "shared anthropology", later morphed into a type of "ethno-fiction" as he engaged more in plot making and directing his subjects.

He was instrumental in launching African cinema, and his work inspired the direct cinema movement in the United States. Rouch won the Berlin International Film Festival Peace Prize in 1993, and the International Documentary Association’s Career Achievement Award in 2001.

Diawara, a long-time admirer of Rouch, made a film emulating the distinct ethnographic style of the French filmmaker. In ‘Rouch in Reverse’, Diawara, an African, turns his lens on Rouch’s culture in Paris.

"It is a documentary of Rouch’s life and his relationship with Africa," he explained.

With his mentor Marcel Griaule, Rouch first documented the Dogon people of Africa, to whom he would remain a lifelong friend.

Their studies of the Dogon changed anthropology forever, according to Diawara, who added that no European embraced Africa as Rouch did. "In a way it was a calling," Diawara said, "he wanted to go and die there."

A kind, shy and softly spoken man, Rouch not only influenced western students of Africa, but introduced film technology and trained technicians wherever he worked in Africa.

According to the French Embassy in Niamey, Rouch was in Niger last week for a celebration of African cinema that included a retrospective of his West African works stretching back to the 1940s.