Please join award-winning filmmaker Arthur Howes and protagonist William Deng of Benjamin And His Brother for a screening and discussion at MassMoCa on Thursday, April 8th at 8:00 PM at Images Cinema in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Please visit MassMoCa for more information.

Jean Rouch, a French ethnographic film director who helped forge the cinema-verite filmmaking, died on Wednesday night in a car crash in the west central African nation of Niger. He was 86.

Rouch closely collaborated with his friend John Marshall, Documentary Educational Resources’ President and Founder (A transcript of a conversation between John and Jean).

Jean Rouch’s prolific film career began in French West Africa, where he worked as a civil engineer during World War II, supervising road and bridge construction. Previously, in Paris, he had attended the lectures of Marcel Mauss and Marcel Griaule. In 1946, traveling down the Niger River, Rouch shot his first film with a 16mm Bell and Howell camera, developing an original style after the tripod fell in the water. Later, he enlisted the help of Damoure, a Sorka friend, to film a hippopotamus hunt, and thus began a productive collaboration that has lasted almost four decades. Damoure took sound for Les Maitres Fous, was a central character in Jaguar, and worked with Rouch on many other films, as did several of Rouch’s long-standing African friends and co-workers.
Read the rest of this entry »