In the thick of things: Rouch and Morin's Chronique d'un été reconsidered

French Cultural Studies

Volumn 14, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 5-22

  Ungar, Steven ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF IOWA   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60950517633     PISSN: 09571558     EISSN: 17402352     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0097155803014001001     Document Type: Article

References (27)

1. Michel Marie, 'Direct', in Mick Eaton (ed.), Anthropology - Reality - Cinema - The Films of Jean Rouch (London: British Film Institute, 1979), 39. Shooting began with a 10kg (22 lb.) Arriflex movie camera, but Rouch shot some scenes with a borrowed prototype of the KMT Coutant-Mathot Éclair, 'the first light, silent portable 16mm camera with sync-sound' (Eaton, 14). Sound was recorded on a Nagra Neopilot tape recorder connected by cable to the movie camera
2. Fereydoun Hoveyda, '"Cinéma vérité", or Fantastic Realism', in Jim Hillier (ed.), Cahiers du Cinéma: 1960-1968: New Wave, New Cinema, Reevaluating Hollywood (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, [1961] 1986), 248
3. Cited in Jean Collet, 'An Audacious Experiment: The Sound Track of Vivre sa vie', in Royal S. Brown (ed.), Focus on Godard (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1972), 160-2
4. See Clifford Geertz, 'Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture', in The Interpretation of Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 3-30
5. I follow Jay Ruby by using the expression 'filmed ethnographies' rather than 'ethnographic film' to convey a sense of the visual as a mode of research distinct from written ethnographies. See Jay Ruby, Picturing Culture: Explorations of Film and Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000)
6. and David MacDougall, Transcultural Cinema (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998)
7. Cited in Paul Stoller, The Cinematic Griot: The Ethnography of Jean Rouch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 152
8. The exchange between Sembène and Rouch occurs in a 1965 discussion mediated by Albert Cervoni, reprinted in CinémAction, no. 81 (1996). A reading of the entire exchange suggests that Sembène's remarks are directed less ad hominem toward Rouch than toward Africanists in general and the disservice attributed by Sembène to ethnographic films with regard to Africans. Fifteen years earlier, Michel Leiris writes that because ethnographic inquiry involves observation of others like us (nos semblables), we are not in a position to adopt the indifference of the entomologist who watches with a curious eye as insects battle and devour each other
9. (see Leiris, 'L'Ethnographe devant le colonialisme', in Cinq Études d'ethnologie (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 85). Leiris tempers his sense of difference in light of a distinction between species proper to the primary meaning of the term 'entomology' and at a remove from Sembène's figurative usage. His remarks also convey his attentiveness to the status of ethnography as a human science alongside physical and natural sciences. Gilles Deleuze discusses the passage between states in Les Maîtres fous, as it affects the characters as well as Rouch himself. He writes that what opposes the fiction 'is not the real: it is not the truth which is always that of the masters or colonizers; it is the story-telling function of the poor, in so far as it gives the false the power which makes it into a memory, a legend, a monster
10. (Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. High Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 150). In a later passage, Deleuze notes that while Rouch can only with difficulty be called a Third World author, 'no one has done so much to put the West to flight, to flee himself, to break with a cinema of ethnography and say Moi un Noir at a time when blacks play roles in American series or those of hip Parisians' (Deleuze, 223). I thank Louis Schwartz for pointing me to these comments by Deleuze
11. Germaine Diéterlen credits Rouch with establishing the basis for an early video archive devoted to the collective memory of peoples living along the Niger river ('Portrait sous le signe de l'amitié', in Jean Rouch: Sous le regard du renard pâle (Turin: Cultural Centre of Turin, 1996), 83-5)
12. James Clifford, 'Power and Dialogue in Ethnography', in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 76. Peter Bloom has reminded me of the lineage connecting Rouch's practice of ethnography to the work of Diéterlen, Griaule, and Marcel Mauss
13. Michel Delahaye offers incisive comments on attitudes toward perceptions of racial difference and racism in Moi, Un Noir and La Pyramide humaine, the two films by Rouch directly before Chronique. He also relates these films to Michel Leiris and notes that Leiris had given him a copy of L'Afrique fantôme with the inscription, 'this book might have been called Moi, un Blanc' ('La Règle de Rouch', Cahiers du cinéma, no. 120, June 1961)
14. Morin and Rouch, Chronique d'un été (Paris: Inter Spectacles, 1962), 9. Future references in the main text will cite it as CE
15. Jean Rouch, 'The Camera and Man', in Paul Hockings (ed.), Principles of Visual Anthropology (1974), 2nd edn (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1995), 82
16. Charles Musser, 'Documentary', in Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (ed.), The Oxford History of World Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 90
17. Steven Feld, 'Themes in the Cinema of Jean Rouch', Visual Anthropology, 2 (1989), 226
18. See Louis Marcorelles, 'Nothing But the Truth', Sight and Sound, 32, no. 3 (1963), 114-15
19. David Bellos describes Marceline as 'a redhead of striking independence and vitality who had survived several years as a child deportee' and who declined the amorous advances of a young Georges Perec (Georges Perec: A Life in Words (Boston: Godine, 1993), 202). Bellos also mentions Jean-Pierre Sergent, Régis Debray and Edgar Morin in conjunction with the Arguments group, one of whose founders, Jean Duvignaud, had taught Perec in lycée
20. William Rothman. 'Chronicle of a Summer', in Documentary Film Classics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 92
21. Woody Allen's Annie Hall provides a comic variant of this slippage when Alvy Singer, distraught over his break-up with Annie, asks a fashionable young couple walking on a New York sidewalk if they are as happy as they appear. After the woman says yes and Alvy prods her to explain, she replies that she is very shallow and empty, has no ideas, and nothing interesting to say. Her companion adds that he's exactly the same way (Four Films of Woody Allen (New York: Random House, 1982), 64). Henri Lefebvre offers a third take on the matter in La Somme et le reste (1959) when he asserts that political revolution 'would not resolve all the problems of individual life, of love, of happiness'
22. (cited in Rob Shields, Lefebvre, Love and Struggle: Spatial Dialectics (New York: Routledge, 1999), 93; my emphasis)
23. Rothman, 84
24. Rothman, 87
25. Rothman, 109
26. See Réda Bensmaïa, 'Un Cinéma de la cruauté', CinémAction, no. 82 (1996), 59-68
27. Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995)