Jean Rouch (Paris - 31 May 1917, Niger - 18 February 2004) was a French filmmaker and anthropologist.
He is considered to be one of the founders of the cinéma vérité in France, sharing the aesthetics of the direct cinema in the US pionered 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 surealism 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) pionered the technique of jump cut popularized by Jean-Luc Godard. Godard said of Rouch in the Cahiers du Cinéma (Notebooks on Cinema) n°94 April 1959 "In charge of research for the Musée 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".
Contents:
1. Biography
2. Main films
3. References
4. Bibliography
5. External links
1. Biography
He began his long association with African subjects in 1941 after working as civil engineer supervising a construction project in Niger. However, shortly afterwards he returned to France to participate in the Resistance. After the war, he did a brief stint as a journalist with Agence France-Presse before returning to Africa where he become an influential anthropologist and sometimes controversial filmmaker.
Jean Rouch is generally considered the father of Nigerien cinema. [1] Despite arriving as a colonialist in 1941, Rouch remained in Niger after independence, and mentored a generation of Nigerien filmmakers and actors, including Damouré Zika and Oumarou Ganda.
Arriving in Niamey as a French colonial hydrology engineer in 1941, Rouch became interested in Zarma and Songhai ethnology and began to film local people and their rituals. In the 1940s he met Damouré Zika the son of a Songhai/Sorko traditional healer and fisherman, near the town of Ayorou on the Niger River. After ten Sorko workers in a construction depot which Rouch supervised were killed by a lightning strike, Zika's grandmother, a famous possession medium and spiritual advisor, presided over a ritual for the men, which Rouch later claimed sparked his desire to make enthographic film. [2]
By 1950, Rouch had made the first films set in Niger with "au pays des mages noirs" (1947), in 1948 " l'initiation à la danse des possédés" and "Les magiciens de Wanzarbé" in 1949, all of which document the spirit possession rituals of the Songhai, Zarma, and Sorko peoples who live along the Niger river. [1]
Damouré Zika and Rouch became friends, and Rouch began in 1950 to use Zika as the focus of his films demonstration the traditions, culture, and ecology of the people of the Niger River valley. The first of 150 in which Zika appeared was "Bataille sur le grand fleuve" (1950-52), portraying the lives, ceremonies and hunting of Sorko fishermen. Rouch spent four months traveling with Sorko fishermen in a traditional Pirogue filming the piece. [3] [4]