In the Thick of Things: Rouch and Morin's Chronique d'un été Reconsidered

1 Michel Marie, `Direct', in Mick Eaton (ed.), Anthropology - Reality - Cinema - The Films of Jean Rouch ( London: British Film Institute , 1979), 39. Shooting began with a 10kg (22 lb.) Arriflex movie camera, but Rouch shot some scenes with a borrowed prototype of the KMT Coutant-Mathot Éclair, `the first light, silent portable 16mm camera with sync-sound' (Eaton, 14). Sound was recorded on a Nagra Neopilot tape recorder connected by cable to the movie camera.

2 Fereydoun Hoveyda, ` “Cinéma vérité”, or Fantastic Realism', in Jim Hillier (ed.), Cahiers du Cinéma: 1960-1968: New Wave, New Cinema, Reevaluating Hollywood ( Cambridge: Harvard University Press , [1961] 1986), 248.

3 Cited in Jean Collet, `An Audacious Experiment: The Sound Track of Vivre sa vie', in Royal S. Brown (ed.), Focus on Godard ( Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall , 1972), 160-162.

4 See Clifford Geertz, `Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture', in The Interpretation of Culture ( New York: Basic Books , 1973), 3-30.

and David MacDougall, Transcultural Cinema ( Princeton: Princeton University Press , 1998).

The exchange between Sembène and Rouch occurs in a 1965 discussion mediated by Albert Cervoni, reprinted in CinémAction, no. 81 (1996). A reading of the entire exchange suggests that Sembène's remarks are directed less ad hominem toward Rouch than toward Africanists in general and the disservice attributed by Sembène to ethnographic films with regard to Africans. Fifteen years earlier, Michel Leiris writes that because ethnographic inquiry involves observation of others like us (nos semblables), we are not in a position to adopt the indifference of the entomologist who watches with a curious eye as insects battle and devour each other (see Leiris, `L'Ethnographe devant le colonialisme', in Cinq Études d'ethnologie ( Paris: Gallimard , 1951), 85). Leiris tempers his sense of difference in light of a distinction between species proper to the primary meaning of the term `entomology' and at a remove from Sembène's figurative usage. His remarks also convey his attentiveness to the status of ethnography as a human science alongside physical and natural sciences. Gilles Deleuze discusses the passage between states in Les Maîtres fous, as it affects the characters as well as Rouch himself. He writes that what opposes the fiction `is not the real: it is not the truth which is always that of the masters or colonizers; it is the story-telling function of the poor, in so far as it gives the false the power which makes it into a memory, a legend, a monster' (Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. High Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 150). In a later passage, Deleuze notes that while Rouch can only with difficulty be called a Third World author, `no one has done so much to put the West to flight, to flee himself, to break with a cinema of ethnography and say Moi un Noir at a time when blacks play roles in American series or those of hip Parisians' (Deleuze, 223). I thank Louis Schwartz for pointing me to these comments by Deleuze.

7 Germaine Diéterlen credits Rouch with establishing the basis for an early video archive devoted to the collective memory of peoples living along the Niger river (`Portrait sous le signe de l'amitié', in Jean Rouch: Sous le regard du renard pâle ( Turin: Cultural Centre of Turin , 1996), 83-85).

8 James Clifford, `Power and Dialogue in Ethnography', in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press , 1988), 76. Peter Bloom has reminded me of the lineage connecting Rouch's practice of ethnography to the work of Diéterlen, Griaule, and Marcel Mauss.

9 Michel Delahaye offers incisive comments on attitudes toward perceptions of racial difference and racism in Moi, Un Noir and La Pyramide humaine, the two films by Rouch directly before Chronique. He also relates these films to Michel Leiris and notes that Leiris had given him a copy of L'Afrique fantôme with the inscription, `this book might have been called Moi, un Blanc' (`La Règle de Rouch', Cahiers du cinéma, no. 120, June 1961).

10 Morin and Rouch, Chronique d'un été ( Paris: Inter Spectacles , 1962), 9. Future references in the main text will cite it as CE.

11 Jean Rouch, `The Camera and Man', in Paul Hockings (ed.), Principles of Visual Anthropology (1974), 2nd edn ( Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter , 1995), 82.

12 Charles Musser, `Documentary', in Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (ed.), The Oxford History of World Cinema ( New York: Oxford University Press , 1997), 90.

13 Steven Feld, `Themes in the Cinema of Jean Rouch' , Visual Anthropology, 2 (1989), 226 .

14 See Louis Marcorelles, `Nothing But the Truth' , Sight and Sound, 32, no. 3 (1963), 114-115 .

15 I have retained usage in CE that refers to Marceline, Marilou and Angelo by first name and to Landry by surname. The practice of using first names derives from conventions of informality among comrades or collaborators rather than from paternalism or sexism. Reference to Landry by surname, however, follows the traditional mode of address in French schools.

16 David Bellos describes Marceline as `a redhead of striking independence and vitality who had survived several years as a child deportee' and who declined the amorous advances of a young Georges Perec (Georges Perec: A Life in Words ( Boston: Godine , 1993), 202). Bellos also mentions Jean-Pierre Sergent, Régis Debray and Edgar Morin in conjunction with the Arguments group, one of whose founders, Jean Duvignaud, had taught Perec in lycée.

17 William Rothman. `Chronicle of a Summer', in Documentary Film Classics ( New York: Cambridge University Press , 1997), 92.

Henri Lefebvre offers a third take on the matter in La Somme et le reste (1959) when he asserts that political revolution `would not resolve all the problems of individual life, of love, of happiness' (cited in Rob Shields, Lefebvre, Love and Struggle: Spatial Dialectics ( New York: Routledge , 1999), 93; my emphasis).

19 Rothman, 84.

20 Rothman, 87.

21 Rothman, 109.

22 La Punition is a 58-minute film shot in Paris in two days in 1962. Gare du Nord is one of six short films released as a set in 1965 under the title, Paris vu par... Other contributors included New Wave figures Godard, Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol. Les Veuves de quinze ans (1964) is part of a larger project, Les Adolescentes (alternate title, La Fleur de l'âge), devoted to disenchanted teenagers in Paris.

23 Another future activist briefly seen in Chronique is Régis Debray (born 1940) whose statements in sequence eleven opposing France's military involvement in Algeria convey the intensity of a political commitment that soon leads him over to Cuba, where he befriends Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. Debray follows Guevara to Bolivia, where officials imprison him in 1967 for revolutionary activity. Released in 1970 after appeals from noted literary figures in France, he writes fiction and non-fiction while militating in proximity to the French Socialist Party. From 1981 to 1988, Debray serves as a government advisor on Third World matters during François Mitterrand's first presidency. He continues to explore the practices and institutions of communication under the heading of what he calls medialogy.

24 This portrait comes at a personal cost to Angelo. In sequence sixteen, he recounts being reprimanded by his foreman (`Alors on fait du cinéma maintenant') for allowing Rouch and Morin to shoot footage inside the factory. (The expression faire du cinéma also means to make trouble.) The sequence suggests that he is about to be transferred to another part in the factory, a transfer that he is likely to refuse.

25 See Réda Bensmaïa, `Un Cinéma de la cruauté , CinémAction, no. 82 (1996), 59-68 .

26 I thank Paul Sandro for this point.

27 Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture ( Cambridge, MA: MIT Press , 1995).