The Human Pyramid
Jean Rouch • 1h 32m
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 white colonial French and Black African classmates, all non-actors. Fomenting a dramatic situation instead of repeating one, Rouch extended the experiments he had undertaken in Chronicle of a Summer, including having on-camera student participants view rushes of the film midway through the story. The docu-drama shows how working together to make the film changes their attitude towards each other.
"Seminal; this groundbreaking metafiction by the French ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch is as much a political experiment as an artistic one. Rouch has a keen eye for the landscape and an avid tenderness for his performers." —The New Yorker
Up Next in Jean Rouch
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Jaguar
Directed by Jean Rouch • Documentary • 1967 • 88 minutes
One of Jean Rouch's classic ethnofictions, JAGUAR follows three young Songhay men from Niger -- Lam Ibrahim, Illo Goudel'ize, and the legendary performer Damoure Zika--on a journey to the Gold Coast (modern day Ghana).
Drawing from his o...
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Jean Rouch, the Adventurous Filmmaker
Directed by Laurent Védrine • Documentary • With Jean Rouch • 2017 • 55 minutes
Jean Rouch first went to Niger in 1941 as a 24-year-old civil engineer, building roads in the French colony. But unlike other colonists, he came to see Nigeriens as equals, spending much of the next 60 years in West ...
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The Lion Hunters
Directed by Jean Rouch • Documentary • 1965 • 77 minutes
Shot on the border between Niger and Mali over a period of seven years, THE LION HUNTERS is Jean Rouch's documentation of the lion hunt performed by the gow hunters of the Songhay people.
Rouch has said that he made the film 'to try to gi...
