Jean Rouch is an extremely influential filmmaker. His inability to reach an international and commercial audience is due partly to issues of distribution and partly to his own personal distaste for what is considered a "good film", aesthetically speaking. In challenging notions of the detached observer, Rouch's cinematic style allowed him to probe politics through a camera lens, dissolving the boundaries of same/other, modern/primitive, practical/poetic, mundane/magical, producer/subject.
Characteristic of all his films is the sense of fluidity, the notion that the view is transcending time and space and actually there, witnessing what is caught on film. This is due to Rouch's own participation within each of his works; he saw the camera as an active agent, and the result was a physical manifestation of synergy created through subject (both Rouch and Africans) and technology. His ability to provoke is the the essential quality of his work. Through provocation and improvisation, Rouch's films were literally created on the spot. He was in no way the sole producer of the work, since every person participating took on an active role in the film's production. The usually authoritative voice that dominates commentary became a source of poetic reflection in Rouch's films.
Rouch understood that in order to dissolve boundaries, and make European views uncomfortable with their own supposed position of authority over colonial Africans, he had to make himself uncomfortable as well. His critique of the West was embodied in his approach to filmmaking: there is a significant component of activism, and the dissolution of normative power positions allows for his films to act as mirrors for Europeans. Rouch explores human nature beyond physical and material culture, realizing that truth is something to be uncovered through cinema. His films allow for a multifaceted view of the individual, giving the viewer the experience of "being there. Through provocation, Rouch comes closest to capturing reality, and cinematic truth: reality in terms of the most authentic in relation to all those participating, rather than reality as discourse that has become most accessible and widely recognized because of propagation.
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