Cine-Ethnography (review)

Ciné-Ethnography is a volume of writings by Jean Rouch, edited and translated by Steven Feld, with a long essay by Edgar Morin on Morin and Rouch's Chronicle of a Summer. The first part of the book consists of four essays by Rouch in which he clearly spells out his approach to filmmaking, and, most famously, to what has come to be known as cinéma vérité or direct cinema. These essays include his work on trance and the sohantye and tyarkaw, or sorcerers and magicians, from Niger ("On the Vicissitudes of the Self: The Possessed Dancer, the Magician, the Sorcerer, the Filmmakers, and the Ethnographer"), and on his collaboration and tutelage under Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen. These essays elaborate notions of "cinematic truth" as a way of conveying a vision of the world through the eye of the camera, translated into a ciné-reality, a ciné-truth, and a ciné-vision. For Rouch that vision is an extension of a poetic communication with those who can exceed the limitations of ordinary life and its experiences, whence his identification with the state of the trance, which he appropriates for himself as a filmmaker who enters into the ciné-trance when filming.

The essays are followed by four interviews in which the above ideas are regurgitated, at times with an annoying degree of adulation for Rouch by the interviewers. This is balanced by the final interview conducted in 1977 by three anthropologists, Dan Georgakas, Udayan Gupta, and Judy Janda, in which they level at Rouch some fairly strong criticisms of his work. He often responds at an angle to the questions posed to him, but in his answers a poesis eventually emerges, one that is not entirely visible from the individual, well-known films themselves, but which becomes a consistent personal vision when the oeuvre is seen as a whole.

Lastly, the volume includes Edgar Morin's long disquisition on Chronicle, with a brief introduction by Rouch to the ideas that were generated by film. A portion of the dialogue in the film, and of some of the outtakes, then follows, with a final set of answers to a questionnaire presented to the participants/actors in the film.

Before I discuss what is essential to Rouch's work as it is presented here, a brief comment on the final section on Chronicle. Rouch is best known as the founder of ethnographic filmmaking in Africa. Others had preceded him, as the essays clearly delineate and acknowledge. But their approaches led to highly conventionalized documentary, or newsreel, films, with no "cinema truth" that would permit them to go beyond the extreme banality of their certitudes about their subjects: Africans were objects for the camera to record; their culture equally objectified. Ultimately they, like the colonial literatures to whose period they belonged, wrote an "Africa" on a blank slate, exactly as Chris Miller has indicated in his works on colonial writings and expositions. Rouch succeeded in entering into a dialogic relation with Africans, a relationship I would hesitate to call a collaboration, but that was, nevertheless, one in which he problematized the dominant position of the documentary filmmakers over their subjects, and where he attempted to overcome the strictures of exoticism and alienation in the relationship between African subjects and a European filmmaker. The results have been, and remain, controversial—and worthy of a significant debate.

In Chronicle, however, the constituent factor of Africa or Africanity in relation to Europe, a relation inseparable from the history that shaped it, is absent. About one-third of Ciné-Ethnography is devoted to Chronicle. For me, and for those of us for whom the interest in Rouch's work is derived from his relationship to Africa, this was a long diversion from the central issues, and it reinforced for me the notion that Rouch's supposed impact on the development of the "art" of film, and specifically New Wave French film, has been vastly exaggerated. Rouch wants to believe that he generated something fundamentally new...