Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video, New and Expanded Edition

11. The “Dialogic Imagination” of Jean Rouch: Covert Conversations in Les maîtres fous

Chapter 11 The “Dialogic Imagination” of Jean Rouch Covert Conversations in Les maîtres fous Diane Scheinman In recent decades much attention has been devoted to the issue of the production of ethnographic texts, both literary and filmic. Anthropologists have had to confront the ideological problems inherent in the ethnographic enterprise —namely, the power relations inscribed in their construction of “self” and “Other,” the representational frames and discourses utilized, and the locating of “authority” within Western academic traditions. The question has been raised by James Clifford (1986) and others as to how to open up the “closed authority” of such texts—so that monologic stylistics privileging the researcher’s point of view would give way to greater participation by Others, whose roles as authors of much of the text have often been unacknowledged. What follows is a Bakhtinian analysis of Jean Rouch’s most controversial film, Les maîtres fous (The Mad Masters, 1954), that seeks to reveal the complex chorus of voices embedded in the film, beneath the narration provided by Rouch himself. What appears to be a monologic representation— Rouch’s voice-over inquiry into the Hauka cult and the possibly therapeutic function of the rite of spirit possession performed by migrant workers in Accra in the 1950s—is shown to be a more complex, multicultural, and polyphonous text, one that allows the “dialogic imagination” of the culturally distinct conversants to be expressed in idioms not restricted to the verbal . I suggest that the film may be a useful model for future ethnographic Les maîtres fous 179 filmmaking endeavoring to present a more politically engaged cinema, containing more “open” spaces for the expression of ethnic dialogism, and political and cultural critique. Though the Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin never wrote about cinema, it is instructive to apply his theories of the analysis of literary forms to the study of film—particularly ethnographic film—as he emphasizes the complexly dialogic nature of human communication, which subverts the monologic authority of any text. Bakhtin’s concept of “dialogism” was developed via his study of literary theory, most notably his interest in the novels of Dostoyevsky. In contrast to literary forms such as poetry and the epic, which he characterized as “monologic”—reflecting the singular voice of the author—Bakhtin discovered in Dostoyevsky’s approach to his characters a “dialogic” world in which multiple voices and diverse speech types were to be found. “A plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses , a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices is in fact the chief characteristic of Dostoevsky’s novels,” Bakhtin avers (Problems 6). Dostoyevsky’s contribution to the genre of the novel, Bakhtin suggests, includes his innovative presentation of characters’ inner lives, or “inner speech,” in which they muse to themselves about events and personalities around them. This, Bakhtin claims, constituted a new style of writing, one that appeared to present a plurality of “voices” in the text not subordinated solely to the author’s (Bakhtin’s “polyphony”), voices that negotiate meaning in response to the “utterances” of others. According to Bakhtin, “A word, discourse, language or culture undergoes ‘dialogization’ when it becomes relativized, de-privileged, aware of competing definitions for the same things” (Dialogic 427, emphasis added). Dialogism thus refers to the relationship between a speaker and a listener, to all conversation—literary or verbal— that involves the negotiation of meaning via the personal, social, historical, and political context of its occurrence. “Everything means, is understood, as a part of a greater whole—there is a constant interaction between meanings , all of which have the potential of conditioning others” (Dialogic 426). For Bakhtin there really is never a monologue, or “neutral” speakers, as a “responsive listener” is always present, reacting to any given text. In Bakhtin’s view, the “word” is an arena of struggle, a site of ideological battle, a matrix for simultaneous and contending “voices” expressing their versions of events. Each speaker is multivocal, daily employing numerous intracultural “languages” of class, gender, occupation, religion. Further, this chorus of languages is not limited to the merely verbal, as verbal communication is “always accompanied by social acts of a nonverbal character (the performance of labor, the symbolic acts of a ritual, a ceremony , etc.),” and “is often only an accessory to these acts, merely carrying 180 D I A N E S C H E I N M A N out an auxiliary role” (Volosinov 95).1...