Jean Rouch (b. 1917) breakthrough work in cinema verite in the 1960s helped inspire the direct cinema movement in the U.S. and the nouvelle vague (new wave) in France where he was a key figure in the cinemateque francaise and the founding director of the Comite du Film Ethnographique at the Musee de I'Homme. His African work, characterized by innovations such as “shared anthropology”' and “ethno-fiction”, is noted for its embrace of both the daily life and imagination of a new generation of Africans. He also played an active role in helping to launch African cinema.
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…
In Jaguar, Damoure, Lam and Illo play the roles of young Africans who, at that time, migrated from the interior during the dry season to the Gold Coast in search of work. Their picuresque and rambling adventures along the way provide the antic story-line of the film. The different episodes of the film were worked out by the actors at…
Moi, Un Noir was Rouch’s first feature length film. Shot in Treichville, a slum/suburb of Abidjan in the Ivory Coast, the film continues many of the themes of earlier work (especially Jaguar and Les Maitres Fous): immigration to the coastal towns, contact of colonizers and colonized, the effects of colonialism and proletarianization. An attempt to “mix fiction with reality,” it…