Documentary Resources: Jean Rouch

Adieu Jean Rouch – Tributes from friends around the world

Jean Rouch, a French ethnographic film director who helped forge cinema-verite filmmaking, died on February 20th, 2004 at night in a car crash in the west central African nation of Niger. He was 86. The following are tributes from friends of his from around the world.

Jean Rouch’s greatest contribution was to have created a body of work in which the limits of the ethnographic are the limits of the imagination. In Jean Rouch’s universe, ethnographers participated fully in the lives of their others. Dreams became films; films became dreams. Feeling was fused with thought and action. Fusing poetry and science, Jean Rouch showed us the wise path of the ancestors and guided us into a wondrous world where we not only encountered others, but also encountered ourselves. Adieu Jean. The work will go on.

— Paul Stoller, author of The Cinematic Griot: The Ethnography of Jean Rouch

See you soon, Jean!

On February 18th 2004, Jean Rouch decided to remain in Africa, in Niger. All of us – his friends, and those close to him – are in a state of shock, saddened and abandoned. We feel like orphans, utterly alone.

But I believe we should respond, and refuse to be demoralized (he would not have wanted that). We must continue to put into practice and to enhance the status of the many things he taught us and, above all, keep his initiatives going. This means developing his beloved Ethnographic Film Committee, which he founded in 1953, and carrying on the “Ethnographic Film Wednesdays” he and Germaine Dieterlen started up ten years ago as a quest for the “other” and the “sacred”. We must also perpetuate the “Ethnographic Film Panorama” (Bilan du film ethnographique), of which he remained the moving spirit for twenty-two years, and “Regards Comparés”, a festival comparing and contrasting different visions of a single people, mindful of the old African saying, “the eye of the stranger sees only what it knows”.

And so, as the years go by, we will continue to perpetuate his work by making it better known and by distributing his films, some of which have become key references not only within the field of visual anthropology but within the history of cinema itself.

And this we will do in a playful, utopian, poetic and scientific spirit, all qualities he liked to combine in ways that were sometimes provocative, sometimes shocking, but always extremely intelligent. In 1995, in his introduction to the Fourteenth Ethnographic Film Panorama, Jean Rouch wrote: “ ...If, from year to year, we have paid tribute to our absent friends in this way, we have always done so while thinking of of that magical phrase of Henri Langlois, “ A filmmaker never dies, for his images continue to move and live on the screen.”

And so, under the benevolent influence of our “Mad Master”, who has bequeathed us his unshakeable optimism and his marvelous dreams, we will continue to stage our annual festivals, to think up new seminars and to devise new film courses.. And in order to carry out all these undertakings successfully, without betraying the “poetic evidence” which was so precious to Jean and to all the Surrealists, we will invoke his infallible miraculous formula:

“Make as if....” (“Faire comme si...”) Then anything is possible and “the dream becomes stronger than death.”

So see you very soon, Jean! and “Thank you for yesterday, thank you for tomorrow”.

— Françoise Foucault
Ethnographic Film Committee
Director of Bilan du Flm Ethnographique et
Regards Comparés

Jean Rouch and I first got to know each other at a wonderful conference in Lyon, France, 1961 (I think). It had been organized by Pierre Schaeffer, head of research for French TV and was a gathering of those of us who were involved in changing the way we made Documentary Films, together with some of the leading designers and manufacturers of camera and sound equipment such as Nagra, Eclair, Bolex and others. We, including Bob Drew, Pennebaker, Al Maysles, a whole group from the Canadian National Film Board, some of whom had been working with Jean Rouch and others. It was an extraordinary week for me. Every day we saw films that were part of the great breakthrough, call it what you will, Cinéma Verité, Direct Cinema, Living Camera... it was there, a breakthrough, Primary, On The Pole, Le Chronique D’ Un Ete and many more, seen by an audience that was involved and cared; “filmmakers”, in a country where, partly as a result of the influence of Henri Langlois, creator and director of the Cinematheque, there was a ferment. Huge debates were going on. Jean-Luc Godard claimed that we were “mindless” and just shot anything we saw, without any “political” view. But others were with us and chief among them was Jean Rouch. He and I became fast friends. The kind of friendship that grows when we differ, and differ we did, about lots of things, especially in this age of digital equipment, which I love and he did not. Our friendship was rooted in our lives as well as our films. He loved making films and so do I and I miss him sorely. What more can I say?

— Ricky Leacock & Valerie Lalonde, Filmmakers

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