Dans le bain avec Rouch: A Reminiscence

This issue's Visual Anthropology Section is a tribute to anthropologist and ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch (1917–2004). In nine brief articles, authors discuss the impact of Rouch's pathbreaking career on ethnographic and documentary filmmaking and his contributions to our knowledge of postcolonial Africa. The authors demonstrate the significance of his work for the larger discipline of anthropology, and commemorate Rouch with personal reflections of their time working with and learning from him.     

The Texture of Events and the Stuff of Dreams: Jean Rouch at the Heart of Film and Anthropology

Too little known in the English‐speaking world, Jean Rouch died in 2004, leaving a prolific body of work. Influenced by the surrealists, by dance, cinema and music, his ‘shared anthropology’ and filmmaking began when he was an engineer in colonial West Africa during World War II—through friendship with African public works employees and revolt over the working and living conditions of the people forced to labour. Rouch saw his engineering, anthropology and filmmaking as creating with the concrete, ‘building bridges’. He did not renounce the ‘rational’, but wanted to supplement and broaden it with other ways of searching and knowing, always concerned with the relationship of the concrete material to the spiritual, dream and fantasy—working in the imaginative place where art meets science. This article discusses Rouch's ciné‐ethnography, focusing on a few of the many films he made.     

The “ethnographic surrealism” of Jean Rouch

Using James Clifford's notion of “ethnographic surrealism,” this paper focuses on the “surrealist” features of the film work of Jean Rouch. First, drawing extensively from an interview held with Rouch in May 1988, I outline the influence that the “ethnographic surrealism” of the 1930s had on Rouch. I then go on to discuss “surrealism” in Rouch's use of the camera, choice of subject matter, techniques of narration, and relationship to his subject. I conclude by demonstrating that Rouch's current work at the Cinémathèque Française and the Comité du Film Ethnographique offer excellent examples of his ability to cross disciplinary boundaries and thus extend the original spirit of “ethnographic surrealism” into the present.     

Conversation between Jean Rouch and Professor Enrico Fulchignoni

The text of an interview recorded on video in August 1980 to serve as an introduction and commentary to a retrospective presentation of films by Jean Rouch. The published text appears in: Jean Rouch: une rétrospective. Paris: Ministère des Affaires Etrangères— Animation audio‐visuelle/SERDDAV‐CNRS, 1981, pp. 7–29. Translation by Anny Ewing and Steven Feld. The editor and the translators wish to thank the Comité du Film Ethnographique, Enrico Fulchignoni, and Jean Rouch for their kind permission to publish this interview in English.     

Jean Rouch's ethnographic path

This article considers the multiple influences that have shaped Jean Rouch's ethnographic gaze upon the Songhay people of Niger. Marcel Griaule, Rouch's mentor, undoubtedly influenced his student's ethnographic approach to Songhay. But Rouch was equally influenced, I am convinced, by his direct and unforgettable confrontation with the mysteries of the Songhay world. After a discussion of the methodological and theoretical orientations of the Griaule school, I analyze Rouch's major ethnographic work, La Religion et la magie Songhay, focusing upon how Griaulian epistemology and Songhay realities molded the textual presentation. I then discuss several of Rouch's major films—Les Magiciens de Wanzerbé, The Lion Hunters, Les Maîtres Fous, and Tourou et Bitti, placing them within an ethnographic and epistemological context. This analysis leads to a consideration of Rouch's unrecognized contribution to anthropology.     

No Story Is Ever Just a Story

The 41 films at the 2004 Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival showcased a multiplicity of styles and approaches, thus widening the perspective of "what counts" as ethnographic film. The two main events—A Tribute to Jean Rouch and Native Voices—epitomized the festival's commitment to diversity and creative talent. Despite the festival's awkward location in the American Museum of Natural History, the films tackled challenging political subjects and directly addressed questions of representation. Postscreening musical performances, informational panels, and audience–director discussion sessions shaped the festival itself as an ethnographic experience, as well as being a venue for the year's best documentary films. Festival highlights were Raven Tales: How Raven Stole the Sun (2004), Mr. Patterns (2004), and Beauty Academy of Kabul (2004).     

Jean Rouch and the Birth of Visual Anthropology: A Brief History of the Comité international du film ethnographique

The true scope of Jean Rouch's international activities for the advancement of visual anthropology is little known. Few in the field today are aware that he was for more than 10 years the driving force of the Comité international du film ethnographique, where he was secretary-general as of 1958. It is thanks to his initiative, backed by UNESCO, that the first anthropologist–filmmakers were able to present their films (and often see them hotly debated) in Paris, Brussels, Prague, Venice, Florence, and Locarno. He was, together with sociologist Edgar Morin (with whom he would produce the influential film Chronique d'un été), one of the collaborators of the Florence Festival dei Popoli, then entirely devoted to ethnographic and sociological films. Here Luc de Heusch, closely associated to Jean Rouch throughout those intrepid times, chronicles the seminal years of visual anthropology.     

Ecstasy,Choreography and Re-Enactment: Aesthetic and Political Dimensions of Filming States of Trance and Spirit Possession in Postwar Southern Italy

States of trance and spirit possession have inspired the modernist imagination perhaps more than anything else, as they typically exceed the limits of visual representation. This article investigates different approaches to coping with these challenges, focusing on the works of a group of Italian documentary filmmakers, including Luigi di Gianni, Cecilia Mangini, and Gianfranco Mingozzi, who used a novel set of audiovisual techniques to explore ecstatic religious expressions in southern Italy in the postwar years. I look into the processes through which trance and possession rituals (e.g. Apulian tarantism) themselves have inspired and initiated innovations in audiovisual documentation by means of combining—or blurring the boundaries between—ethnographic and experimental modes of cinematic practice. Through highly stylized image/sound compositions including high-contrast lighting, wood-cut like silhouettes, montage, abstract sound effects and poetic, partly fictionalized commentary, as well as by consciously making use of re-enactments and staged encounters, these films contest both the realist-observational narrative and the focus on individuals otherwise prevalent in ethnographic filmmaking. Reading the Italian films against the backdrop of the earlier and contemporaneous, yet much better-known trance films of Maya Deren and Jean Rouch, the article argues that their antirealist audiovisual aesthetic fabricates a social aesthetic that raises sensitivity to human experience and fosters a radically humanist stance.     

Chronicle of a summer and the editing of cinema‐verite

Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin's Chronicle of a Summer is held up as an innovative, seminal “work in the formation of cinéma‐vérité, and has a central position in the development of documentary and ethnographic filmmaking. Although much has been written about fthis film, little attention has been paid to the film's construction. This paper examines ‘elements of the editing structure of Chronicle of a Summer both to consider how this “work was shaped given the constraints of its production and intended reception and to ¦ analyze a relatively neglected aspect of documentary film practice.     

The Last of the Great (Foot-Slogging) Explorers: Lewis Cotlow and the Ethnographic Imaginary in Popular Travel Film

This essay focuses on the popular travel films and books of Lewis Cotlow (1898-1987), an American explorer, author, filmmaker, insurance broker and amateur ethnographer who made photographic expeditions to Africa, South America, New Guinea, and the Arctic from the 1930s to the 1950s. This essay aims to uncover the shared historical practices and narratives in travel film and ethnographic film, examining scientific films in light of popular forms of anthropological cinema. In particular, the author examines the construction of an ethnographic imaginary and modes of ethnographic realism in the feature-length color film Jungle Headhunters [1950], shot during Cotlow's various expeditions to the Amazon during the 1940s.     

From Documentation to Representation: Recovering the Films of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson

Although the seven films made by Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, based on footage shot in Bali and New Guinea during 1936–39, are identified as a landmark in various histories of ethnographic film, these films have been the subject of remarkably little analysis in the anthropological literature. In contrast, their photographic work has received much more extended commentary. Making a close reading of the films in their final edited form, this article aims to recover this aspect of Mead and Bateson's work from its relative neglect. We consider the circumstances under which the films were made, the theoretical ideas that informed them, and the methods employed in shooting and editing. Notwithstanding recent skepticism about both the theoretical ideas and the quality of the research on which Mead and Bateson's work in Bali was based, as well as the naiveté of some of the filmmaking ideas found in the films themselves, when considered as a group, they continue to be interesting examples of a particular transitional phase in the history of ethnographic film.     

Anthropology and Cinema: Visual Representations of Human Rights,Displacement and Resistance in Come Back Africa,by Lionel Rogosin

This article is devoted to reevaluating the anthropological importance of the work of Lionel Rogosin, whose films, like those of Jean Rouch and Robert Flaherty before him, reflect a symbiosis between cinema and visual research. Focused on apartheid, civil rights, and displacement, his filmmaking activity includes such important titles as Come Back Africa [2004 2004 Come Back Africa. A Man Possessed . Johannesburg : STE Publishers . [Google Scholar]], on the apartheid in South Africa during the 1950s, and On the Bowery [], located in inner-city New York in the 1960s. I believe his work should be positioned within anthropology and cinema, and analyzed for use of an approach of the “participant camera.”     

From Representation to Evocation: Tracing a Progression in Jean Rouch's Les magiciens de Wanzerbé, Les maîtres fous,and Jaguar

In this article, I describe and analyze the ways in which the Other is represented in three of Jean Rouch's earlier films. After briefly outlining Rouch's relationship to the cinema of Robert Flaherty, I look closely at Les magiciens de Wanzerbé [1948], Les maîtres fous [], and Jaguar [], and argue that these films exhibit a progression from a conventional, colonialist mode of documentary practice to a more open, polyvocal, collaborative form. I conclude by suggesting that this transition constitutes a shift from the attempt to represent that which can never be adequately represented to the evocation of it.     

Potlatch and the articulation of modes of production: revisiting French Marxist Anthropology and the history of central Africa

This essay seeks to understand the potlatch as indicative of a wider category of exchange. Looking at the similarity in wild exchange rituals between northwestern America and central Africa the article argues that potlatch ritual is not as an archaic remnant but a product of the interaction between capitalist and ‘human’ modes of production. In this dynamic ‘human modes of production’ (see anon) did not become capitalist, but rather there was a ritual escalation related to a series of non-capitalist imperatives based in rights in people and theatrical displays of authority. In constructing the theoretical structure used to make this case I draw on and seek to rehabilitate the work of French Marxist Anthropologists working in central Africa, above all Georges Dupré and Pierre-Philippe Rey.     

Making secular ‘French’ medical ethics: transcendent morality and patient subjectivities in southern French hospitals

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with physicians and nurses working in two state-funded southern French hospitals, this article explores why and how medical care providers connected their everyday deliberations about patient care to what they considered to be distinctively French forms of medical responsibility. Many healthcare professionals saw French medical morality in opposition to ‘Anglo-Saxon’ discourses of individual autonomy and transactional choice. In contrast to such ‘transactionalism’, they insisted that ‘French’ ethics required limits that transcended particular circumstances. And yet it was difficult for doctors and nurses working in secular and increasingly neoliberal hospitals to argue against individual transactionalism in an overtly moral register, one that might appear religious and paternalist. Through a close look at two different cases – one in assisted reproduction and one in palliative care – I show how the language of folk psychoanalysis provided some health professionals with a way out of this impasse. Care providers used pseudo-psychoanalytic accounts of patient subjectivities to depict individuals as incapable of knowing, let alone ‘owning’ or rationally mastering, themselves. This, in turn, suggests that some aspects of French secularity may be far less Protestant and liberal than contemporary anthropological work tends to assume.     

L’apport de l’ethnographie au concept de « chasse magique par empathie » (ou compatissante) et de chamanisme dans l’art préhistorique d’Afrique australe

African rituals and beliefs have been recorded by various observers (travelers and anthropologists) in different areas in southern Africa within the last two centuries, and these are useful for interpreting prehistoric rock art (paintings and engravings). Notably, Lichtenstein (1812) recorded rituals among Nguni (who interacted with San) in South Africa, where a hunter took on the form of an animal which was symbolically wounded and which was symbolically killed in the belief that this would contribute to success in a forthcoming hunt. In Namibia, Lebzelter (1934) recorded another ritual in which a San hunter symbolically wounded and symbolically killed an animal represented in a drawing. Such rituals relate to the principle of sympathetic hunting magic. The ethnological evidence is discussed in relation to prehistoric rock art in different areas of southern Africa (Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa, Apollo 11 Cave in Namibia, and Melikane Shelter in Lesotho), and in relation to an important photograph of a ritual presumed to be associated with hunting, recorded at Logageng in the southern Kalahari, South Africa. When taken together with linguistic as well as ethnographic evidence, these sources of information support the view that the so-called trance hypothesis (relating to shamanism) and the principle of sympathetic hunting magic are not mutually exclusive, at least in southern Africa (if not elsewhere).     

Powering popular conceptions: The !Kung in the Marshall family expedition films of the 1950s

The paper develops a theoretical framework for the study of ethnographic film out‐takes in relation to material that is included in released ethnographic film, in this case, the films by John Marshall on the Kalahari San. The significance of what is included in relation to that which is excluded is called the theory of structured absences. This theory is then applied to the study of the 700,000 feet of 16 mm out‐takes not used by Marshall in his released films on the Ju/'hoansi.

The difficulties of analysing archival film are discussed, and issues of representation in relation to exposed footage, released films, and the director's own theory of documentary, are critically examined. The anthropological significance of Marshall's filmic contribution on the Kalahari San is assessed.     

Beyond Malinowski and After Writing Culture: On the Future of Cultural Anthropology and the Predicament of Ethnography

Following out certain implications of the 1980s Writing Culture critique, this paper envisions a future for anthropology that remains focused on innovations in the ethnographic research process. A sense of change in the world, conceived in the 1980s as postmodernity and now widely discussed as globalisation, suggests the need for an alternative paradigm of ethnographic practice, different in significant ways from that which shaped social‐cultural anthropology over the previous eighty years. Based on working through the implications for the norms and forms of both fieldwork and ethnographic writing of the multi‐sited design of many current research projects, this paper outlines such an alternative paradigm. Further, the paper argues that the explicit disciplinary dynamic driving such innovation in ethnography is, in contrast to the so‐called crisis of representation of the 1980s, a more urgent crisis of reception for anthropology.     

FILM REVIEWS

Ethnomusicology in the Alps The Wedding of Susanna and Josef, 16 mm, 27 mins., 1986 Glattalp, 16 mm, 30 mins., 1986 Yootzing and Yodelling, 16 mm, 50 mins., 1987 Head Voice, Chest Voice, 16 mm, 23 mins., 1987 All films by Hugo Zemp, produced by CNRS Audiovisuel and the Ateliers d'Ethnomusicologie, Geneva. Available in English, French and German; also in videotape formats.

The Song of Harmonics, 16 mm, 38 mins., 1990, by Hugo Zemp, produced by CNRS Audiovisuel and the Société Française d'Ethnomusicologie. Available in French and English; also in videotape.

The Way of the Dead Indians A film by Michel Perrin and Jean Arlaud; camera: Jean Arlaud; sound: Philippe Sénéchal; editor: Charlotte Boigeol; consultant anthropologist: Michel Perrin; distributor: CNRS Audio‐Visuel, 1 Place Artistide Briand, 92195 Meudon Principal Cedex, Paris, France, (1)45.34.75.50 (1982?), 90 minutes, color. Original: 16 mm, also available for distribution on PAL and SECAM video. Language: Goajiro, narration: French, subtitles: English.