MARCH 2004

French film director Jean Rouch, a pioneer of the "cinema verite" style of documentaries, has been killed in a car crash in Niger at the age of 86.

Rouch's wife and two colleagues were injured in the road accident 600km (375 miles) north of the capital, Niamey, on Wednesday night.

Rouch helped inspire US and French film-makers and was a long-time supporter of African cinema.

He made more than 100 films, including Moi, Un Noir and Jaguar.

Rouch had travelled to the former French colony last week to open a film festival.

"We don't yet know the exact circumstances of the accident," Laurent Clavel, the director of the France-Niger Cultural Centre, told Reuters.

The French ambassador to Niger is travelling to the scene of the crash to escort the director's body back to France.

Blurring boundaries

Born in Paris in 1917, Rouch started making films as an amateur while working as an engineer in Africa during World War II.

From 1941, he travelled throughout West Africa, notably to Senegal, Niger, Mali and Ghana, filming scenes of daily life.

He is said to have started the trend for hand-held camera work early on in his career, after his tripod fell into the Niger River.

Inspired by the anthropologist Marcel Griaule, Rouch developed an ethnographic approach to documentary film-making in the which the subjects are seen to act freely, without any directorial control.

This blurring of the traditional boundaries between director and subject became known as "cinema verite".

It was said to have inspired the 'nouvelle vague', or new wave, style of film-making in France, popularised by directors Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Goddard.

Rouch's experiences also led him to play an active role in helping to develop African cinema.

He continued to travel throughout the continent for much of his professional life.

Among the best known of his 120 films were La Pyramide Humaine, Cocorico Monsieur Poulet, Petit a Petit and Madame L'Eau.


TECHNIQUES:One of my favourite short films is Jean Rouch's Gare du Nord, part of a well-known nouvelle vague compilation of the early 1960s, Paris vu par ... (1964). Rouch's contribution appears to be one continuous shot or long take running for around fifteen minutes, although it is in fact two shots joined with a cleverly disguised cut. In it, a man and woman argue. They start indoors in a high-rise apartment. The camera follows them into an elevator going way, way down – and then out into the streets. The exchange gradually becomes more tense, frantic and violent. The scene spills into the streets of Paris around a large train station (the Gare du Nord), and hurtles along. The live, direct sound recording strikes the viewer as forcefully and palpably as the long take technique. Finally, these two people reach a bridge, and encounter a disturbed stranger. One of these three, in despair and frustration, jumps off. The camera concludes its movement by tipping over the edge of the bridge to see a crumpled body below. Adrian Martin
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Jean Rouch, a veteran of a decade of ethnographic filmmaking in Africa, shoots the pioneering cinéma vérité work Chronique d'Un Eté (Chronicle of a Summer) (released 1962) with sociologist Edgar Morin. The film deals with Parisians' thoughts and feelings at the end of the Algerian war. In the film, Rouch attempts to provoke a "psychodrama" in the people interviewed. His approach to documentary is to place his characters in a situation with dramatic possibilities, let them improvise, and then film them. Rouch states that Chronique is an attempt to combine Vertov's theory and Flaherty's method. He describes this film as "cinéma vérité" in tribute to Vertov—a direct translation of Vertov’s term "Kino Pravda."
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Dans vos films, il n'y a jamais de jazz, mais le rapport au jazz est peut-être à chercher ailleurs, dans l'improvisation, dans le rapport à l'instant, au hasard ?
Oui, dans la manière de faire du cinéma comme Armstrong jouait de la trompette. Mais je ne peux pas me mettre à un tel niveau de créativité ! J'ai filmé en essayant de me rapprocher le plus possible de la spontanéité des jazzmen. Entre ma passion pour l'ethnologie africaine et ma passion pour les films, il y a peut-être ce lien ténu, la musique de jazz.
Toutes les voix que l'on entend dans Moi, un noir ont-elles été improvisées ?
Tout a été fait de la même façon. Nous travaillions sur une copie que nous visionnions à la radio d'Abidjan. J'enregistrais les commentaires sur cette copie. Tous les commentaires et les dialogues sont improvisés de cette manière. Il n'y a pas de dialogues écrits. Les deux acteurs principaux, non-professionnels, réinterprétaient leurs scènes en direct, ils improvisaient comme un musicien sur un thème de jazz. Ils connaissaient le thème pour l'avoir joué devant la caméra, et ils en donnaient devant le montage une autre interprétation. Ici, nous sommes vraiment proches de la posture des jazzmen. INTERVIEW WITH Gilles Mouëllic
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LES MAITRES FOUS (MAD MASTERS)

By Jean Rouch
color, 35 minutes

Les Maitres Fous is about the ceremony of a religious sect, the Hauka, which was widespread in West Africa from the 1920s to the 1950s. Hauka participants were usually rural migrants from Niger who came to cities such as Accra in Ghana (then Gold Coast), where they found work as laborers in the city's lumber yards, as stevedores at the docks, or in the mines. There were at least 30,000 practicing Hauka in Accra in 1954 when Jean Rouch was asked by a small group to film their annual ceremony During this ritual, which took place on a farm a few hours from the city, the Hauka entered trance and were possessed by various spirits associated with the Western colonial powers: the governorgeneral, the engineer, the doctor's wife, the wicked major, the corporal of the guard.

The roots of the Hauka lie in traditional possession cults common among the Songhay and Djerma peoples of the Niger River basin. Gifted men and women may enter trance and become possessed by any of a number of strong gods, such as Dongo, god of thunder and the sky.Supplicants consult the god through the trancing medium and receive advice about their problems, cures for diseases, comfort and support, or reprimands for their wrongdoings. Like these traditional possession cults, the Hauka sect co-existed with Islam and incorporated many Islamic saints and heroes into its rituals. Most of its adherents were Muslims.

Hauka first appeared in Niger, it is thought, in the person of a former soldier who participated in the savage battles of the second German offensive of World War I in 1917 and 1918, in which West African troops were decimated despite their spectacular performance. This soldier made the pilgrimage to Mecca and returned to Niger in the 1920s. In his village, in Rouch's account, he found the people "doing a traditional dance and the soldier was possessed, very violently possessed, and while possessed he said 'I am the avant-garde of the new gods who are coming from Malia [the Red Sea]. My name is Governor Malia and I am the first of the new gods who are coming and they are the gods of strength'."

The Hauka were quickly suppressed by the French authorities in Niger, with the support of traditional chiefs and priests who feared the popularity of the new movement and its challenge to established authority. But the Hauka cult spread, even within the jail walls, and by 1935 the British administration in Ghana again attempted to suppress it and to jail the cultists. Fires broke out in response throughout Accra, and eventually there was an agreement that Hauka priests would limit their ceremonies to certain places and to Saturdays and Sundays. This was still the case in 1954 when Rouch filmed Les Maitres Fous, which was banned by the colonial government in 1955.

The Hauka movement was a phenomenon of the colonial era. After the independence of Ghana in 1957, migration was controlled and many Hauka who had settled in Accra returned to Niger. Niger itself gained independence three years later, and the Hauka began to subside and to be absorbed into the traditional religious system. Dongo, for example, the old god of thunder, is now considered the father of the Hauka. As Rouch has pointed out, "there was no more colonial power and there never was a Hauka called Kwame N'krumah." The events filmed represent the end of the Hauka development. Today the film is shown in the villages of Ghana and in the Niger Cultural Center.

The imagery in Les Maitres Fous is powerful and often disturbing: possessed men with rolling eyes and foaming at the mouth, eating a sacrificed dog (in violation of taboo), burning their bodies with naming torches. Beyond the imagery, the themes are also powerful, and have had an impact in our own culture:Jean Genet's The Blacks was modeled upon the Hauka inversion in which blacks assume the role of masters, and Peter Brook's Marat/Sade was influenced by the theatricality and invented language of Hauka possession. Yet, as Rouch reminds us in an interview in Cineaste, possession for the Hauka cultists was not theater but reality. The significance of this reality is left ambiguous in the film, although Rouch's commentary suggests that the ritual provides a psychological release which enables the Hauka to be good workers and to endure a degrading situation with dignity. The unexplored relation of the Hauka movement to their colonial experience is perhaps the most intriguing issue raised by this ceremony in which the oppressed become, for a day, the possessed and the powerful.

Interview with Jean Rouch, a veteran of a decade of ethnographic filmmaking in Africa, shoots the pioneering cinéma vérité work Chronique d'Un Eté (Chronicle of a Summer) (released 1962) with sociologist Edgar Morin. The film deals with Parisians' thoughts and feelings at the end of the Algerian war. In the film, Rouch attempts to provoke a "psychodrama" in the people interviewed. His approach to documentary is to place his characters in a situation with dramatic possibilities, let them improvise, and then film them. Rouch states that Chronique is an attempt to combine Vertov's theory and Flaherty's method. He describes this film as "cinéma vérité" in tribute to Vertov—a direct translation of Vertov’s term "Kino Pravda."

Interview with Gilles Mouëllic HIS PASSION FOR JAZZ

"Mon premier grand souvenir de jazz remonte à 1934. J'avais 17 ans. Louis Armstrong donnait son premier concert en France à la salle Pleyel. Avec le peu d'argent que j'avais, je me suis payé un billet de balcon. Mais la salle n'était pas pleine, loin de là, et à l'entracte, je suis venu dans les premiers rangs. C'est le début de ma passion, la découverte d'une musique trés singuliére. J'ai acheté immédiatement Tight Light This, et tous les enregistrements que je trouvais.

Autre moment important, beaucoup plus tardif : le premier Festival Panafricain de Dakar, où j'ai présenté un de mes premiers films tournés en Afrique. Duke Ellington donnait un concert dans le vieux théâtre romantique de Dakar. J'étais là avec mes copains nigériens, qui découvraient cette musique. Ellington s'est adressé à la salle pour nous demander, en anglais, si nous souhaitions qu'il joue un morceau en particulier. J'ai dit A Saddest Tale, et il m'a remercié d'un signe de la main. Je connaissais l'histoire de ce morceau. J'étais en larmes. C'était incroyable, ce retour du jazz sur la terre d'Afrique.