LES MAITRES FOUS
*** (A must-see)
Directed by Jean Rouch
By rough estimate, Rouch has made well over 100 films since the late 1940s; it’s hard to be more precise because the most up-to-date Rouch filmography I can find is 11 years old. Most of these films are ethnographic shorts that have never shown in the United States, either publicly or privately. But some, including half of the eight that I’ve managed to see myself, are semifictional features that bear some relation to ethnographic work without fitting fully or comfortably into that category.
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Rouch’s first feature, Moi, un noir (Me, a Black Man, 1957)–focuses on three young men from Niger who work as casual laborers in Abidjan. They re-create their own lives and fantasies in front of Rouch’s camera, and one of them fancifully narrates the silent footage. All three assign themselves fictional movie names–Edward G. Robinson, Tarzan, and Eddie Constantine. (A woman in the story calls herself Dorothy Lamour.) La pyramide humaine (The Human Pyramid, 1959), a Rouch feature I haven’t seen, was selected in 1965 as one of the ten greatest postwar French films by seven Cahiers du Cinema critics, among them Jean-Luc Godard and Eric Rohmer. This fiction film about the segregation at a real high school in Abidjan is a sort of psychodrama featuring actual students. (In fact, the separate racial groups at the school had very little to do with one another until the film brought them together.) Needless to say, both of these early features were widely banned in Africa, and for all practical purposes, in the United States as well; neither, to the best of my knowledge, has ever been subtitled in English.
Rouch himself narrates in English, and the occasional awkwardness of his phrasing and pronunciation–“riffles” for “rifles,” for instance–helps to isolate this film from the pseudo- objectivity of conventional documentaries of the kind generally shown on PBS, in which the faceless and supposedly “neutral” voice-of-God narration is supposed to provide a transparent window on the action. But even without Rouch’s accent–which is, of course, apparent only in the English version being shown here–the editing, commentary, and structure already remove this film somewhat from the allegedly scientific stance that ethnographic documentaries are supposed to assume. At one point, Rouch cuts directly from the Hauka ceremony to the real British governor and his troops in Accra performing “the trooping of the colors”; he notes on the sound track that “if the order is different here from there, the protocol remains the same.” Later, when the participants return to work in Accra, Rouch explains in some detail what each of them does in daily life: the “general” is actually a private; many of the penitents dig ditches; some work at a mental hospital; one is a pickpocket.
