Jean Rouch

The story follows three poultry sellers on a trip across the bush, attempting to deliver a load of chickens to a market in Niamey. When a third person joins the group, the organization of the trip begins to look even more precarious.Read More »

An aimless young woman is sent home from school with nothing to do. Drifting through the streets of Paris, she comes across a variety of people.Read More »

Jean Rouch’s Nigerien collaborators travel to France to perform a reverse ethnography of late-1960’s Parisian life.

Icarus Films wrote:
By 1969, Jean Rouch had spent more than two decades documenting West Africa as an ethnographer, and in 1961 had co-directed Chronicle of a Summer, an anthropological investigation of Parisian life. In Little by Little, Rouch’s Nigerien collaborators Damoure Zika and Lam Ibrahim travel to Paris and end up performing a reverse ethnography of French culture.Read More »

Quote:
A man possessed by a Hauka spirit stoops and breaks an egg over the sculpted figure of the governor . . . that presides over the day’s event of Hauka possession. Cracked on the governor’s head, the egg cascades in white and yellow rivulets. Then the film is abruptly cut. We are transported to a big military parade in the colonial city two hours away. The film hurls us at the cascading yellow and white plumes of the white governor’s gorgeous hat as he reviews the black troops passing. . . .Read More »

Quote:
À Abidjan, dans le quartier de Treichville, la Goumbé des jeunes noceurs se réunit dans la rue pour de spectaculaires exhibitions de chants et de danses modernes. Les goumbés regroupent de jeunes villageois venus du Sahel tenter leur chance en ville et qui, grâce à ces associations, s’assurent entraide et solidarité… tout en s’amusant follement !Read More »

Funeral rituals for the traditional leader Moro Naba of the Mossi at Ougadougou, Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso). Election ceremonies for his successor. Preparing the feast for the end of mourning. Ceremony in the palace, the people of Ougadougou, the warriors in traditional dress. Presentation of the new leader.Read More »

“Mammy Water” is mother sea, source of food. Jean Rouch filmed this short documentary in the Gulf of Guinea, in Ghana, where is held a colorful festival, the Chama, in which the participants offer cassava, gin and tobacco to the spirits of water and sacrifice a white ox to thank them and express their gratitude and respect.Read More »

Quote:
Beyond a film, Icebreaker is in 1987 the first media composition, construction of 3 original works made on the Swedish icebreaker Frej, and involving the main means of expression. “Bateau Givre” by Jean Rouch (35′), carries the principles of direct cinema. Rouch discovers in his camera, without the artifice of a commentary, without the help of a third language, the work and the days of the icebreaker and the men who serve it. “Hans Majestäts Statsisbrytaren Frej” by Titte Törnroth (20′), offers a second approach, where the characters, who have acquired a mysterious presence with Rouch, evoke their work, their emotions, in their activities as well as in their moments of relaxation. This film answers the questions left unanswered in the previous one. Raoul Ruiz’s “Tales of Ice” (34′); when the viewer thinks he has gone around a reality that has become familiar, makes it tip over into a profusion of fictions; three stories weave together in this fantastic film where ice plays the central role, where the icebreaker becomes a strange vessel wandering on the edge of the world.Read More »

Once upon a time, in the middle of the last century, a great warrior named Babatou. Nigerian jumper from the region Dounga Gurunsi invaded the country and settled there. The brave prisoners were integrated into the army, women espoused. For fifty years, the adventurous young people from Niger Babatou went to live in the epic.Read More »