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Jean Rouch, 1917 - 2004
By Ronald Bergan

The term cinema verité is used so frequently that it is sometimes forgotten that the main instigator of both the label and the style was the ethnological film-maker Jean Rouch, who has been killed in a car crash in Niger aged 86, a country that was his second home.

Cinéma verité ("cinema truth", a translation of Soviet documentary director Dziga Vertov's Kino Pravda) was first used to publicize the film Chronicle of a Summer (Chronique D'un Eté, 1959), which Rouch co-directed with the sociologist Edgar Morin. It was the development of the lightweight synchronous sound system and portable ciné equipment, permitting the filming of longer, unbroken sequences that helped create the variously defined genre. Rouch later said that he preferred to call it "cinéma sincerité".

Rejecting both the idealism of Robert Flaherty and the didacticism of Joris Ivens and John Grierson, Rouch aimed for the immediacy of television without its superficiality. He believed that the camera's intervention stimulated people to greater spontaneity, expression and truth without asking them, as in the American Direct Cinema, to act as though the camera was not there: "The camera eye is more perspicacious and more accurate than the human eye. The camera eye has an infallible memory, and the film-maker's eye is divided."

Born in Paris, the son of the director of the Oceanographic Museum in Monaco, Rouch studied both literature and civil engineering, though he was especially interested in anthropology. As a student in Paris, he attended films at the Cinémathèque, and began to feel that a camera would be a necessary tool for research into the tribes of Africa. His life-long interest in the latter came about when, during the Second World War, he went to French West Africa as a civil engineer supervising road and bridge construction.

It was in 1946, while traveling down the Niger River, shooting his first film with a 16mm Bell and Howell camera, that his tripod fell into the water, thus forcing him to work without it, which gave rise to the then rare use of a hand-held camera. For the following decade, Rouch made a series of short films on African customs and rites, and in 1952 set up the International Ethnographic Film Committee. The Mad Masters (Les Maitres Fous, 1953), one of his most remarkable shorts, centers on a ceremony performed in the suburbs of Accra, Ghana (still the Gold Coast, a British colony), by members of the Hauka possession cult. Those who became possessed change into symbolic caricatures of the British and other people of power who maintained colonial rule. "The cult is an African expression of our culture. The title of the film is a pun. The British colonial masters are the ones who are mad!" explained Rouch.

Rouch's first feature-length film, Me, A Black (Moi Un Noir, 1958) allowed a group of people from a suburb of Abidjan on the Ivory Coast to dictate the content of a film on their lives. It followed three men — nicknamed Edward G. Robinson, Eddie Constantine and Tarzan — and a woman through the everyday events of work and family but also the acting out of their fantasies, in which there are indications of the corrupting influence of Western commerce. The film was made in answer to African criticism of his films, something that dogged him all his life.

The Burkina Faso director Gaston Kaboré once explained, "I think that Rouch is, somehow, a drama for Africans. When I say it is a drama, it is because there is a lot of confusion in some minds whether to treat Rouch as an African filmmaker. I disagree; not because I am ostracizing him. No! Only because even if I stay in France for four decades making films, I never become French. In my culture, it is said that the piece of wood does not become a crocodile because it has stayed long in the water. I think that we have to pass this Jean Rouch trauma."

In a way, it could be argued that Rouch did become a crocodile, mainly because of his many African friends and co-workers, especially Damouré, a Niger friend, with whom he had a creative collaboration that lasted almost four decades.

Outside of Africa, in Chronicle Of A Summer, Rouch applied the same ethnological approach to the French. He and Morin asked a cross-section of Parisians to respond to the question "Are You Happy?". Edited down from 25 hours of interviews, this fascinating document ends with the interviewees reacting to themselves on screen. The film's influence can be seen in the work of the New Wave directors, particularly Jean-Luc Godard.

Most of Rouch's other documentary features were shot in West Africa, notably La Chasse Au Lion A L'arc (1965) dealt with the hunting traditions of Niger and Mali. One of the few exceptions, Petit Petit (1970), about a Niger businessman's perplexity in Paris, contains Rouch's main thematic interests, the fusion of reality with fiction and the confrontation of Africans with Europeans.

Into his 80s, Rouch was still mesmerized by African folk tales, as in I'm Tired Of Standing, I Lie Down (Moi Fatigué Debout, Moi Couché, 1997), the title being a heartfelt utterance by a talking tree. A kind, shy and softly-spoken man, Rouch not only influenced western students of Africa, but he introduced film technology and trained technicians whenever and wherever he worked in Africa. A great legacy, indeed. He is survived by his wife, who was seriously injured in the accident that killed him.

Ronald Bergan

Jean Rouch, documentary film-maker; born May 31 1917; died February 19 2004

(Published with permission from The Guardian, London.)

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