Deleuze on cinema vérité and
ethnographic film
From Cinema
2
The cinema(s) of reality sometimes claimed
objectivity, and sometimes subjectivity [via
points of view of characters]. This
represents a documentary or ethnographic version,
and the investigative or reportage version
respectively. Sometimes they were
intermingled. However, truth was claimed,
even though it ‘was dependent on cinematographic
fiction itself’ (149), in other words on the
resolution of the camera and the character.
There was also the character of the ethnologist as
reporter. That the true itself is a fiction
had yet to be realised, in [these] early notions
of cinematic truth. (150).
The new mode of story telling affected both
fiction and reality in the break in cinema in the
1960s [and various forms are mentioned including
direct cinema, the cinema of the lived, cinema
vérité]. The notion of truth itself was
being challenged in favour of an unapologetic
'pure and simple storytelling function
‘(150). [Perrault in particular is cited
here, and what he seems to be doing is letting the
oppressed in Quebec, tell their story, instead of
claiming it is as the truth – that concept is
inextricable from colonialism]. People
become real characters when they start to make
their own fiction, becoming another, and
filmmakers also need to let the characters tell
their stories, not just pursue his own
fictions. This is ‘free indirect discourse’
of the people of Quebec (151) The same intentions
are found in cinema vérité, not a cinema
that gets to the truth, but one that shows the
truth of cinema (151).
A similar evolution is detectable in the work of
Rouch, who began as an ethnographer. He
realised as did everyone else that the camera
always has an active effect on the characters, and
saw this in a positive sense, for example showing
characters becoming quite different before and
after particular events like an African religious
ritual Les Mâitres Fous (see below)
(151). In Moi un Noir characters can
be seen inventing themselves as real characters,
the more real the better they are at reinvention.
In Jaguar [I have only seen clips]
the characters share roles [sound a bit like the
interchanging labourers in Godard’s Weekend –a
black immigrant tells the story of his workmate
etc].[The reinvention seems to occur afterwards
when immigrants return to their homes ‘full of
exploits and lies where the least incident
becomes power’ (151)]
Dionysos by Rouch is the one to see, it
seems [I haven't been able to see it] – ‘The image
of industrial society which brings together a
Hungarian mechanic an Ivory Coast riveter, a West
Indian metalworker, a Turkish carpenter, a German
woman mechanic [it] plunges into a before that is
Dionysian...but this before is also an after, like
the post industrial horizon where one worker has
become a flautist, another a tambourine player...’
(152) ]. Again, the time-image seem to be
involved here, as the camera 'constantly
reattaches the character to the before and after'
(152). Overall 'The character is continually
becoming another, and is no longer separable from
this becoming which merges with a people' (152).
‘The character must first of all be real is he to
affirm fiction as a power...he has to tell stories
in order to affirm himself all the more as real
and not fictional’]
The same goes for the filmmaker, who also becomes
another, as real characters replace his
fiction. ‘Rouch makes his own indirect free
discourse at the same time as his characters make
that of Africa’ ( 152). Both Rouch and Perrault
clearly wanted to break with their own dominant
conceptions, by rediscovering lost identities and
breaking of the dominant civilization. Both
merged with the characters and became other,
breaking with the conventions between film maker
and characters. Both show that process
whereby 'I is another'. A new collectivity
between filmmaker and characters emerges
(153). This 'indirect' cinema breaks with
conventional prose as much as does Pasolini’s
poetry.
Try some actual Rouch fims now? These are my
notes:
Cimitières
dans la falaise (1951) This is about
the burial practices among the Dogon. We start
with the mourning rituals including the sacrifice
of a chick, then see the corpse swaddled, carried
ceremonially through the village and finally
hoisted up the cliff and buried in one of the
niches in the heavily striated [!] cliff face over
the village. Lots of human bones are there.
Everyone is in poor people’s versions of everyday
westernised dress. This film also dwells on the
amazing natural beauty of the area, and the
picturesque houses of the Dogon – so there is the
danger of a bit of exoticism as well, and, of
course, the easy identification with the Dogon who
share our emotions etc.
Les
Mâitres Fous (1955)
About a religious sect in Accra -- in
Nigeria I think. The new religion is a very odd
mix of cargo-cult type imitations of European
goodies – Union Jacks, solar topees, rifles etc,
and a kind of voodoo-like series of trances and
excesses. We see the sect leaders deciding
an issue of marital rights (I think – my French is
basic). Then we see the bizarre religious
behaviour of the sect members as the ritual
develops – foaming at the mouth, in convulsions on
the ground, savagely eating sacrificed animals etc
– in heavy contrast to their appearance before and
afterwards as normal (impoverished Europeanised),
pleasant people, soldiers and labourers. The
French commentary urges us not to judge by the
standards of our civilisation – the animal
sacrifices are tough to watch – and ends by saying
more or less that this is what it is like to
really be an African man. For me, the point was to
challenge the picture of Africans as either just
European like us but a bit child-like, or as
primitive savages – the time dimension showed that
it was both and neither pretty effectively.
Moi un Noir [sorry -- I have lost the You
Tube link. A short trailer remains
accessible here]
gives us a picture of the lives of black African
migrants in Nigeria. They have a tough time living
on precarious work, but enjoy themselves clubbing
and chasing girls in a very recognisable way
They fantasise about being Hollywood
characters and are very knowledgeable about them.
They also feel nostalgic about home. Rouch
collaborated with his characters fully, letting
them share the scripting,narration,selection of
shots and editing. You can see the technique
illustrated in a documentary on Rouch here
Here is the UBUweb obit of Rouch:
Obituary: Jean Rouch
James Kirkup
THE CREATOR of at least 120 documentary films, all
remarkable, the great French cineaste Jean Rouch
and his works are known and appreciated by a
select few among all the "fans" swarming to wallow
in the latest trilogies of this and that. Though
since my film-club youth I had always been
enthusiastic about documentaries, it was not until
June 1996 that I experienced the revelation of
Rouch's incomparable cinematographic art at the
Galerie du Jeu de Paume in Paris.
He was then in his 80th year, just one year older
than myself, and this encounter with an unknown
fellow spirit was one of the great events of my
old age. The prospect of soon becoming an
octogenarian filled me with excitement when I saw
Jean Rouch's tall, upright figure and handsome
face. It was the first of several sightings,
mainly in the streets of Montparnasse and at the
cafe known as Le Bal Bullier.
At the age of six, Jean was taken by his father,
director of the Musee Oceanographique in Monaco,
to a cinema in Brest showing Nanook of the North,
Robert Flaherty's 1922 film about life in an
Eskimo family. The next week, his mother took him
to see Douglas Fairbanks as Robin Hood. The future
film-maker was born under the twin stars of
discovery and adventure.
In his youthful student days, back in Paris, he
haunted cinemas and joined the circle of devotees
organised by the future director of the
Cinematheque Henri Langlois. However, in 1937 he
entered L'Ecole des Ponts et Chaussees to train as
a civil engineer. One year after the defeat of
France in 1940, he managed to make his way to the
West African state of Niger to construct roads and
bridges.
It was there that he first succumbed to the
fascination of traditional native rites. An
elderly Sorko woman set out to purify the souls of
10 workmen struck by lightning - "a truly
marvellous but horrifying ceremony", Rouch was
later to recall -
and from that day on I realised that such an event
could not be conveyed in writing or in
photographs; it could only be captured on film, in
colour and with sound.
In that great retrospective at the Jeu de Paume, I
was entranced by the early works of what he called
his "visual anthropology" from his first visionary
masterpiece, paid for out of his own pocket, Au
pays des mages noirs ("In the Land of the Black
Seers", 1947), in which with a few friends he
descends the Niger from its source to its
magnificent espousals with the ocean.
By a miraculous concatenation of circumstances -
through his fellow writer/ ethnologist Michel
Leiris (whose L'Afrique fantome, 1934, had been an
inspiration) and a joyous troupe of jazz fiends
fired by black African rhythms - the film was
brought to the bemused attention of the newsreel
director of Actualites Francaises, who decided to
schedule it, conditional upon the addition of
commentary, music and the insertion of a few
supernumerary indigenous animals, which gave what
he considered was a suitably "colonialist" stamp
of authority. The commentary was enthusiastically
declaimed by the regular racing-cyclist authority
on the Tour de France. Rouch rejected the result,
though he accepted it as "a lesson in how not to
approach the montage of a film".
His real entry upon the cinematic scene came one
year later when Henri Langlois organised "A
Festival of Forbidden Films" with the help of Jean
Cocteau at Biarritz, where in 1949 the film that
was awarded the Grand Prix du Documentaire was
Rouch's ultra-realistic La Circoncision ("The
Circumcision"), along with his Initiation a la
Danse des Possedes ("Initiation to the Dance of
the Possessed"). Rouch then composed a thesis on
rituals of possession to accompany his film Les
Maitres fous ("Masters of Madness", 1955), which
was severely criticised for its "lack of
objectivity" by certain academic ethnographers.
He was just as disrespectful of the current views
of what "quality French cinema" should be with his
preceding masterpieces Yenendi: les hommes qui
font la pluie (Rainmakers, 1951), Cimetiere dans
la falaise ("Cliff Cemetery", 1951), and Batailles
sur le grand fleuve ("Battles on the Big River",
1950) - all three of which were later combined
into a full-length feature entitled Les Fils de
l'eau (The Sons of Water, 1958).
Jean Rouch's fame was spreading among film
fanatics after he received the Venice Festival
Grand Prix in 1957 for Les Maitres fous. In 1958,
inspired partly by Jean Genet's 1958 play Les
Negres, he made Moi, un noir (I, a Negro, 1958),
which won the Louis Delluc Prize. His work had
already attracted the young intellectuals and
influenced the first films of the nouvelle vague
including some who were to achieve fame and
fortune - Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, who was
the first to welcome him to the select band of the
New Wave film-makers, and the philosopher Gilles
Deleuze.
"Cinema verite" was one of the terms used to
express the realism of "cinema truth", a term
invented by Rouch himself. It reached its full
expression in a film he made in collaboration with
the young sociologist Edgar Morin in 1960,
Chronique d'un ete (Chronicle of a Summer, 1961),
a work of radical originality set in the period of
Algerian decolonisation and created entirely in
the streets of Paris by means of a hand-held
camera with synchronised sound. New technology had
made cinema verite more than ever true to the
truth.
Jean Rouch at 86 had lost some of his youthful
energy but none of his wit and enthusiasm. With
another great film-maker still not subdued by the
constraints of old age, the veteran Portuguese
master Manoel de Oliveira (a Firbankian
nonagenarian), he made a film in Oporto centred on
that city's Pont Eiffel, based on a poem
d'Oliveira had written as a script.
En une poignee de mains amies ("In a Fistful of
Friendly Hands", 1997) was a symbolic return to
his first employment as a builder of bridges - he
who built bridges of the creative spirit between
blacks and whites all over the world. And whose
final bridge was crossed in a car crash in the
night in his preferred province, Niger.
Jean Pierre Rouch, ethnologist and film-maker:
born Paris 31 May 1917; Director of Research,
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique 1966-
86; General Secretary, Cinematheque Francaise
1985- 86, President 1987- 91; married 1952 Jane
George (deceased), 2002 Jocelyne Lamothe; died
Konni, Niger 18 February 2004.
Copyright 2004 Independent Newspapers UK Limited
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