ABSTRACT
Motivated by his determination to depict life in the villages of sub-Saharan Africa with optimum independence and spontaneity, Jean Rouch played a key role in the implementation of new cinematographic techniques. His extraordinary empathy with human complexity and his initial lack of interest in the so-called ‘grammar’ of film stemmed from his ethnological background. His aim was to record the truth of a ritual, a gesture, a situation, an attitude, an exchange, and he was not particularly bothered by stability of frame, consistency of focus or seamless match cuts. Rouch was first and foremost an ethnologist and it was only in the late 1950s that he fulfilled his writing ambition and became an ‘ethnocineast’, as René Prédal so aptly put it. Around a dozen films preceded LES MAîTRES FOUS, which was shot in 1954 but only screened in Venice in 1957, and this was followed a year later by MOI, UN NOIR (1958), and then by CHRONIQUE D’UN éTé (1960) and LA PYRAMIDE HUMAINE (1961). Throughout this period, he used lightweight cameras to experiment with a form of improvisation, which was to reach its apotheosis, but no doubt also its limits, a decade later, with PETIT à PETIT (1970) and above all COCORICO, MONSIEUR POUIET (1974).
