Rouch

Jean Rouch was an influential and innovative man. It is obvious to conclude this from the articles written about him; from the Loizos's chapter to the nine articles brought together by Faye Ginsburg and Jeff Himpele to the discussion conducted by John Marshall and John W. Adams with Rouch. He was a very intelligent filmmaker, well known for his use of new technological methods like synchronized sound and lighter weight cameras. He brought his own style to ethnographic film. As noted in the article by Jean-Paul Colleyn, “He [Rouch] never tried to be the unnoticed observer, the invisible witness, or the neutral narrator” (113). This style of filming, of being directly involved with the subject matter of his own films, was and still is very controversial. I completely understand why this is an issue for anthropologists cannot then discern what is truth and what is fake. If the ethnographer places himself or herself in the context of the film, sometimes the viewer sees the message of the film as skewed in favor of one bias or another. In some ways, however, Rouch helped anthropologists improve the use of film as a device to convey information because he exposed its limitations. Rouch believed that “....academic ethnographic description not only freezes the situations described, but if those situations are 'tragic' as they so often are, that it is only by introducing fantasy and role-playing that the participants can transcend them and begin to discover a 'way out'” (Marshall 1005). Rather than shunning techniques used by non-ethnographers and documentary filmmakers, Rouch saw all of the abilities we are capable of, from dreaming to improvising, as valid methods to use in film to reveal something about another group of people.