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  • Building Bridges: The Cinema of Jean Rouch
  • Sarah Cooper
Building Bridges: The Cinema of Jean Rouch. Edited by Joram ten Brink. Preface by Michael Renov. London, Wallflower, 2007. xv + 324 pp. Hb £50.00. Pb £18.99.

Jean Rouch’s death in a road accident in Niger in 2004 brought his remarkable career to an unexpectedly abrupt end. Prompted by this tragic event, Joram ten Brink’s edited volume is a fitting tribute to the filmmaker’s life, work and legacy. The collection has a distinctly personal tone, as several contributors, ten Brink included, give anecdotal evidence of Rouch’s inspirational impact on their own careers. Certain of the pieces will already be familiar to Rouch scholars, since the book contains some revised and translated work by key figures (Reda Bensmaïa, Hamid Naficy and Christopher Thompson stand out in this regard). In addition to Thompson’s piece, David Bate and Elizabeth Cowie give highly nuanced explorations of the important relationship between surrealism and ethnography in Rouch’s work. Anthropologists Paul Henley, Brice Ahounou and Bernard Surugue bring their expertise to bear on his ethnographic projects. More broadly, his groundbreaking film techniques in the early 1950s made him a signal influence on the French nouvelle vague — a point recalled in Ivone Margulies’s interesting article on the limits of realism in La Pyramide humaine (1959). Indeed, Rouch’s intermediary presence between Africa and France leads some contributors to posit the origins of the nouvelle vague in the African, rather than European, continent. Anna Grimshaw suggests this explicitly but fleetingly in a footnote to her chapter on Italian neo-realism, and Philo Bregstein more implicitly but at greater length, in his article on Rouch’s fictions, which he argues are inspired by the non-linear structure of African tales and legends. Reciprocally, Rouch’s influence on African culture and film is also explored, most notably by Steven Ungar in his rich piece on Moi, un noir (1958). Particularly informative are the commissioned interviews with filmmakers Marceline Loridan-Ivens and Safi Faye, and with actress Nadine Ballot. Equally illuminating is the translation and transcription of the dialogue to the film Cinémafia (1980) in which Rouch is in conversation with Henri Storck and Joris Ivens, founding figures in Belgian and Dutch documentary film. Other highlights include the contributions by Michael Chanan on music and trance, ten Brink’s piece on Alexandre Astruc, Michael Uwemedimo’s discussion of the manipulation of the interview form and the final chapters that consider Rouch’s legacy. With characteristic precision and incisiveness, Ian Christie explores connections with Chris Marker and Raul Ruiz, and chapters by Charles Warren and Brian Winston provide stimulating links to the work of Abbas Kiarostami and reality television, respectively. Overall, this is a fine book. The quality of the copy is not quite as uniform as the scholarly standard of the contributions: there are typographical errors on some French terms throughout the text, and while the English translations are excellent on the whole, they are slightly uneven at times. These issues aside, however, the book is highly engaging and an invaluable resource. As Michael Renov hopes in his preface, it should help greatly to spread the word about Rouch and widen his appeal beyond French-speaking admirers. [End Page 361]

Sarah Cooper
King’s College London
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