Loizos response (Chapter 3 45-64)

Jean Rouch's technique and style of film making is unique with what some consider to be 'avante-garde.' As seen in his films "Les Maitres Fous" and "Jaguar," his documentary style ethnographic films have an almost comedic, and loose approach to capturing his subjects. Loizos calls the style of Rouch's film making a "sophisticated and empathic kind" (Loizos 46). Rouche was one of the first to master the hand-held camera techniques, creating films which can be described as 'fluid' (46). The modernization of film technology during the 1970s allowed for Rouche's experimentation with capturing cultures, yet the result was beyond more than just fooling around with a modern camera; he changed the way the spectator viewed the subjects in an up-close and personal way, as they had never seen before. The movement of the camera allowed not only a more modern sense of capturing and watching films, but capturing the realism of the world through the eye of the camera. Even in this modern age I can see how Rouch's filmmaking techniques could have been seen as controversial, eye opening, and revolutionary for anthropologists as well as filmmakers. An example of his controversial work can be seen in "Les Maitres Fous," in which he documents the Hauka people of Ghana.
The film has a beginning, middle and end, similar to the life, death and afterlife sequences. In the beginning he shows the hard lives of the unhappy workers, with the "pressures of migrant life in Accra" and then goes into showing the same group in a trance, taken over the identities of the white colonialists. As they violently tear at a dog carcass and foam at the mouth, the most shocking detail of Rouch's film is the fact that he gives no explanation for the trancing, he provides no background information of the cultural, only explains which person is taking over the personality/character of a certain colonialist (i.e. the governer, etc). The film ends, shockingly, with the same people where were in a trance together, now smiling at Rouch and happily working together in a ditch. The sequencing of the film suggests that the trance was a sort of "indigenous auto-psychiatric cure for the intolerable pressures and oppressions" (Loizos 48). Loizos concludes with summarizing the work of Jean Rouch with the subjects of "collaboration with the subjects, bringing their voices into the films, allowing their dreams and fantasies to take shape, and adding a mode of documentary which was not documentation-realism" (64). Rouch has an unapologetic way of capturing a culture and focusing on the individuals themselves in a shocking, unforgiving way, without explaining motives or traditions, simply capturing the truth and realism of the subjects in a stark, often disturbing way.