About Jean Rouch

This article opened my eyes to the contributions Jean Rouch has made.  He is important for inventing a new style of documentary and he wittingly challenged the traditional thought in his time.  Rouch was called a radical empiricist by Stoller and his style merged opposing ideas.  His work began a new strand of Modernism which was a twist on the Positivist and static views of culture and film. 

Rouch was spoken about for his amount of depth and intimacy in his film as accurately portraying culture. This intimacy was created by how well the image was emblematic of the culture. Also he did more to evoke than explain the rituals furthur creating a more truthful representation.  He challenged notions of European superiority by presenting a world of different experiences which Modern Science could not explain.  Europeans were dismayed and unearthed. Seemingly, his work was documentary and artistic because the film of routines, family, school, work presented drifts, and the dialectical conversations and themes that viewers enjoy. 

Rouch was a Sociologist often of deviance or interaction.  He explanations were sociological and yielded poignant interpretations of communities and social life.  In one film, he devised a scenario for a group of kids.  Some students were black and others were white.  He told them to be racist towards the other race.  This scenario in which the kids must improvise played itself out in the long term and was seen in the jealousy and love interests between the kids.
This study shed light on how blacks could be racist towards whites.   It also was a documentation of reality which was what do people do in an abstract scenario.  This was much different from fly on the wall filming. 

This broke the Positivist thought of the time that interactions and patterns and forces of the world were grounded as very real and happened for scientific and functional reasons.  Rouch showed how a representational idea can change the story of people's actions as well as helping the Thomas Theorem that if "men define their situations as real, they are real in their consequences" 

His work was highly Modern because he managed to make film and reality align so that documentation was a transparent view of reality on many fronts.  And it was slightly postmodern because he showed that culture is not set in stone. There is real in what is spontaneous and what is of artifice such as a hypothetical situation can easily be played out and become reality.

His work though was viewed as slightly poetic and his view of other cultures is intimate maybe causing empathy. He could have perhaps romanticized the other cultures by not giving adequate scientific context for their culture. Even still I think poetry is justified for presenting reality.