Jean Rouch
Template:Nigerfilmlist Jean Rouch (31 May 1917 - 18 February 2004) was a French filmmaker and anthropologist.
He began his long association with African subjects in 1941 after working as civil engineer supervising a construction project in Niger. However, shortly afterwards he returned to France to participate in the Resistance. After the war, he did a brief stint as a journalist with Agence France-Presse before returning to Africa where he become an influential anthropologist and sometimes controversial filmmaker.
He is considered as one the pioneers of visual anthropology and the father of ethnofiction. Rouch's films mostly belonged to the cinéma vérité school – a term that Edgar Morin used in a 1960 France-Observateur article referring to Dziga Vertov's Kinopravda. His best known film, one of the central works of the Nouvelle Vague, is Chronique d'un été (1961) which he filmed with sociologist Edgar Morin and in which he portrays the social life of contemporary France. Throughout his career, he used his camera to report on life in Africa. Over the course of five decades, he made almost 120 films.
He died in an automobile accident in February 2004, some 16 kilometres from the town of Birnin N'Konni in central Niger.
Main feature-length films
- 1954: Les Maîtres Fous (The Mad Masters)
- 1955: Les Fils de l'eau
- 1957: Jaguar
- 1958: Moi, un noir
- 1959: La pyramide humaine
- 1961: Chronique d'un été (Chronicle of a Summer)
- 1965: La chasse au lion à l'arc
- 1974: Cocorico M. Poulet
- 1977: Ciné-portrait de Margaret Mead
- 1979: Bougo, les funérailles du vieil Anaï
External links
Biographical details and filmography
- The Jean Rouch Tribute Website: bio, tributes, complete filmography, audio, film clips
- Jean Rouch at The Complete Index To World Film since 1895
- Jean Rouch at IMDb
- Maitres-fous.net : A website devoted to the study of Jean Rouch's films
Articles about Jean Rouch
- Biography by by Ben Michaels
- "Verite Pioneer Jean Rouch" by Eugene Hernandez at indieWIRE
- Jean Rouch: Cinematic Griot by Amie Karp at Journal of Undergraduate Research
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