Moi, Un Noir (Jean Rouch)
Featured Director: Jean Rouch
•
1h 13m
Directed by Jean Rouch • Documentary • 1958 • 70 minutes
Winner of the prestigious Prix Louis Delluc in 1958, MOI, UN NOIR marked Jean Rouch's break with traditional ethnography, and his embrace of the collaborative and improvisatory strategies he called "shared ethnography" and "ethnofiction."
The film depicts an ordinary week in the lives of men and women from Niger who have migrated to Abidjan, Cote D'Ivoire for work. The film captures both the sorrows and the occasional joys of their experience in all of its psychological complexity. A landmark of documentary cinema, Rouch's stylistic innovations here exerted a profound influence on the French New Wave, and his collaborative process helped bolster the national cinemas of West Africa.
"MOI, UN NOIR is, in effect, the most daring of films and the humblest."—Jean-Luc Godard, filmmaker
"Seminal."—Richard Brody, The New Yorker
Up Next in Featured Director: Jean Rouch
-
The Human Pyramid
Directed by Jean Rouch • Documentary • 1961 • 93 minutes
At the Lycée Français of Abidjan, Ivory Coast, Rouch worked with students there who willingly enacted a story about the arrival of a new white girl, Nadine, and her effect on the interactions of and interracial relationships between the wh...
-
The Punishment
Directed by Jean Rouch • Documentary • 1962 • 64 minutes
An aimless young woman is sent home from school with nothing to do. Drifting through the streets of Paris, she comes across a variety of people.
"Extraordinary and extraordinarily rare movie about public misogyny."—Richard Brody, The New ...
-
The Fifteen Year Old Widows
Directed by Jean Rouch • Drama • 2023 • 25 minutes
“When I’m old, at 25, I’ll get married and that will be the end.” —Véronique
In this short, Jean Rouch turns his anthropological eye to bourgeois teenage girls in Paris, in the summer of 1964. Caught in the in-between world of adolescence (the...
