Unraveling the ethnographic encounter: Institutionalization and scientific tourism in the œuvre of Jean Rouch

Jean Rouch's films and the countless interviews with him were an early point of departure for my own work related to the complexities of French colonial cinema and its broader context.¹ Rouch was a significant figure in fashioning the ethnographic signature of late-twentieth century France thanks to a genealogical and cinematic purchase on institutional reform in the immediate postwar period. His work reflects the contradictory context for colonial modernism in France and West Africa, shaped in part by colleagues and those who were featured in his films and assisted with their production. From this collective standpoint of authorship, lying beyond the promotional myth of the auteur, Rouch was aided by a cadre of highly skilled editors, cameramen, associates, and advocates. The structure for ethnographic film production, its exhibition, and claim to authority associated with Rouch's work, became an emergent set of codified practices under the aegis of the Comité du Film Ethnographique (CFE). Although Rouch's remarkable interpersonal qualities of permeability were fundamental to the emergence of ethnographic film as institutional project, an abiding coterie of prestigious French Dogonologist elders assisted Rouch in mounting the secular institutional deities of postwar French cultural and research funding with surrealist-inspired flair.

Anna Grimshaw has pointed to Rouch as a figure who should be understood as very much within a context, but whose work always retained a subversive quality not to be underestimated, but rather released.² In order to better understand the intermittently poetic and disruptive potential present in his work, and the broader context for ethnographic cinema that he came to represent, I examine Rouch's role in repositioning the exotic encounter as part of a scientifically authenticated spectacle. The threshold of cinema as the spectacularization of "ritual" always implied a series of methodological problems, including the vexed nature of the pro-filmic act, and the unresolved imbalance of power represented by access to modernity as symbolized by the camera. That is, cinema as a means of representation has tended to overwhelm the act of representation itself, particularly among those unable to represent themselves, and fundamental truth-making claims. Further, expanding access to the means of production only forestalls an entrenched economic and ideological rootedness witnessed in Rouch's own fragile relationship to Oumarou Ganda, whose ruse in the imagination of star power and Hollywood cinema was enacted as ethnofiction in Moi, un Noir (1957-1960). Moi, un Noir and Jaguar (1954-1967) have been referred to as one of the origins for cinéma verité, and Rouch has commented on the relationship of this movement to his own orientation towards truth and falsity.³ In these two films, the performance of reversal by the other has been celebrated as a watershed moment in representing African subjectivity. However, Ganda's masquerade in Moi, un Noir as Edward G. Robinson, long associated with the fictional character of Rico and his rise as mob boss in Little Cesar (dir. Mervyn LeRoy, prod. Warner Bros., 1930), may simply underscore Rouch's own sense of ambivalence about the invention of new roles during this transitional period of political change.

A complex grouping of institutional alliances was essential not only to funding Rouch's own filmmaking work, but supplemented its significance as part of an emerging consciousness of ethnographic film on the international film festival circuit. As is well known, cinema was not considered respectable in the scientific human sciences discourse of the 1940s in France, and considered subordinate to direct observation by ethnographers. Although a wave of interest in ethnographic film predates Rouch, especially among geographers like Georges Castelnau, and among those associated with the Groupe Liotard,⁴ fundamental issues such as funding for raw film stock could not be paid for with research funding. As Alice Gallois has explained, Marcel Griaule, Paul Rivet, and André Leroi-Gourhan combated this somewhat retrograde suspicion of filmmaking by making films themselves as a supplement to their own fieldwork. Further, a network of French and European institutional networks, particularly in Belgium and Italy, were essential to institutionalizing ethnographic cinema as stimulated...