Cine-Ethnography (review)

In a chapter on Jean Rouch in her book The Ethnographer's Eye, Anna Grimshaw notes that "there is always a problem with Rouch's own explanations and a temptation to take him at his word. This involves following his refusal to operate through conventional intellectual categories, celebrating his originality rather than subjecting it to scrutiny."¹ Indeed, if we take Rouch at his word (a temptation that I would argue should be resisted even more emphatically since the news of his recent death at the age of eighty-six in a car crash in Niger), there would be no need for Ciné-Ethnography, a first-of-a-kind collection of writings by and interviews with one of the most influential ethnologists and filmmakers of the past half-century. For on the subject of "his word[s]," Rouch has stated that "the film is a means of total expression for me, and I do not see the necessity for me to write before, during, or after filming" (273). In a sense then, this long overdue and now timely reader has the potential to deliver—to borrow the title of Manthia Diawara's film—not only Rouch in Reverse, but Rouch by himself and against himself. The collection will also, no doubt, enable the work of critical scrutiny to develop further around the semisacred figure of Rouch. But before it does that, it will hopefully, more urgently, increase the demand for access to Rouch's films, which aside from Chronique d'un été (1960), Jaguar (1967), and Les maîtres fous (1955) are virtually impossible to find in North America. Grimshaw even comments on the mythical aura that has arisen around screenings of certain Rouch films due to the fact that they are often so difficult to find (195). This would be a problem for any major filmmaker let alone one whose oeuvre contains close to one hundred finished films and twenty-five in "various stages of completion" (11), as the up-to-date annotated filmography informs us.

Most of the essays in Ciné-Ethnography have been published elsewhere, with the exception of the extensive filmography, bibliography, and parts of the introduction, in addition to the essay "The Mad Fox and the Pale Master" (1978) (which has been translated into English for the first time in this volume by the editor and Catherine Maziére). Nonetheless, Steven Feld, the editor and translator of the collection, has provided an essential service to the fields of visual anthropology, film studies, and postcolonial studies by bringing together and rescuing these key essays and interviews with Rouch from the fate of out-of-print obscurity. Furthermore, in his introduction, Feld, who was one of the first to translate Rouch's writings into English in the early seventies, provides a rich and informative overview and analysis of Rouch and a helpful contextualization of the articles.

The collection is divided into three sections: the first contains essays by Jean Rouch; the second interviews and conversations; and the third a series of texts on Chronique d'un été, one of Rouch's most well-known and accessible films. In addition to "The Mad Fox" essay, the first section also contains "The Ca era and Man" (1973), in which the core of Rouch's cross-cultural praxis is elaborated; "On the Vicissitudes of the Self" (1973), which highlights the interrelationship between filmmaking and Songhay ritual practices; and "The Situation and Tendencies of the Cinema in Africa," which gives a detailed filmographical account of African cinema (or more correctly, as Rouch himself stresses, films made in Africa mostly by Europeans) up until 1961, when it was written. For all of the positivist classificatory thrust of the latter article, not to mention the limitations of its presentism, the essay provides an interesting history, for both film archivists and scholars, of the diverse film practices that European colonization left in Africa, from the British Colonial Film Unit films to Belgian...