Of Mimicry and White Man: A Psychoanalysis of Jean Rouch's Les Maîtres Fous

Of all the recent findings on Jean Rouch's Les maîtres fous (1956), ¹ an ethnological cause célèbre in film, the mimicry talk seems to gain more and more momentum, all spawning from Michael Taussig's celebrated Mimesis and Alterity (1993). ² Les maîtres fous is a documentary on the possession rite of the Hauka movement practiced by the Songhay migrant workers from Niger, who resided in Accra, Ghana, during the colonial fifties. ³ Rouch was invited by them to make the film (Rouch 1978, 1006; 1995, 224), with a glaring surrealist ciné-transe as its result (Young 1995, 198-99, 203-5), but what becomes even more glaring is the trance of the subjects in the film as possessed by the British colonial authority, bearing weird demeanor and "abundant salivation" that makes their "faces look very ferocious" (Muller 1971, 1472). Driven by the white men's spirits, they go on to kill a dog and eat it. Taussig writes: "they so clearly are and are not Europeans" in their "mimetic faculty," unwittingly carrying a critique of modern Europe (1993, 241-42). Leaving aside more questions this claim may beg, we know that one thing is certain: the film brings a positive message. The visual crisis stirred up by the film may now find a good cause to make peace with itself.

This does not fit the big picture of how the film has been received. At its first screening at the Musée de l'Homme in 1954, Marcel Griaule, along with most other anthropological luminaries in the disturbed audience, called the film "a travesty" and urged Rouch to destroy it (Rouch 1996b, 83; Stoller 1997a, 119). If we could not pluck out our eyes, Griaule seemed to suggest, we could at least burn the film. And yet among those in the same room who judged the film racist were African students (Rouch [1981] 1989, 279). Later in the midsixties, Ousmane Sembene, in what has become a famous quip, accused Rouch in person of observing the Africans like insects (Cervoni 1982, 78). Soon, observes Martin Roberts, "African directors since Sembene have to a greater or lesser degree defined their film practices in opposition to Rouch" (1996, 87). The general hostility toward Rouch, in Paris and elsewhere, lingered, as detected by Pierre Haffner when conducting his interview with six black African cineasts in 1980 (Haffner 1982, 63). Around the same time, Teshome H. Gabriel called Les maîtres fous a racist film that had taken the Afri- cans as "scientific specimens, laboratory subjects and insects" (quoted in Russell 1999, 222). By 1995, Manthia Diawara arrived at his concluding remark in his pensive voice-over to accompany the clips of Les maîtres fous in Rouch in Reverse, his documentary on Rouch: "These have remained," he said, "some of the most disturbing images in modern cinema." To someone like Michael M. J. Fischer, how- ever, this judgment does not seem good enough. He tasks Rouch in Reverse by "Raising Questions about Rouch" (his review's title) and considers Diawara to be speaking only "superficial clichés" (1997, 142). Instead, he wryly suggests, "Diawara must turn to his fellow diasporics" for advice (142), not Rouch, whose "slightly obtuse, but mainly just romantic, idea of doing 'shared anthropology' and 'giving voice' to Africans" (140) is, like Rouch's Chronique d'un été (1960), ⁴ "campy and silly" (141), no less pretentious, passé, and better forgotten.

Surprisingly, Fischer spares one film, Les maîtres fous, his strident rhetoric. This is a film, he claims, in which we witness "one of those emotionally powerful cults that mimic, mock, and make the colonial and bureaucratic forms alien" (141). Rather than following Rouch, who has "lamely" (Fischer's word) defended the film as depicting the colonial white lords as the true "mad masters," ⁵ Fischer, considering the film an "exorcism," relishes the...