Moi, Un Noir (Jean Rouch)
Prismatic Ground • 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 Prismatic Ground
-
Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vie...
Directed by Lynne Sachs • Documentary • 1994 • 33 minutes
When two American sisters travel north from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi, conversations with Vietnamese strangers and friends reveal to them the flip side of a shared history. Lynne and Dana Sachs' travel diary of their trip to Vietnam is a ...
-
Abendland
Directed by Nikolaus Geyrhalter • Documentary • 2011 • 90 minutes
Western standard of living and the urge to exclude others from it are at the core of this film. Entirely shot at night, Geyrhalter takes us on a very personal journey through Europe and the structures that guarantee our “civilized...
-
Route One/USA (part 1)
Directed by Robert Kramer • Documentary • 1990 • 125 minutes
Part 1 of 2 In 1988, nearly a decade after leaving the US for France, renegade filmmaker Robert Kramer returns. “Back,” he emphasizes. Not “home.” To try to understand the contemporary United States, he decides to travel the entire len...
