Film/Anthropology

“Rouch is to African cinema what Jean-Paul Sartre was to Negritude.” Manthia Diawara, New York University

“The publication of Ciné-Ethnography by Jean Rouch, a living legend in documentary film and world anthropology, is an event to celebrate. It introduces readers to the provocatively challenging visual world of Jean Rouch-in his own words. It is a wondrous world, indeed.” Paul Stoller, author of The Cinematic Griot: The Ethnography of Jean Rouch

One of the most influential figures in documentary and ethnographic filmmaking, Jean Rouch has made more than one hundred films in West Africa and France. In such acclaimed works as Jaguar, The Lion Hunters, and Cocorico, Monsieur Poulet, Rouch has explored racism, colonialism, African modernity, religious ritual, and music.

Ciné-Ethnography is a long-overdue English-language resource that collects Rouch’s key writings, interviews, and other materials that distill his thinking on filmmaking, ethnography, and his own career. In essays and interviews, Rouch discusses the ethnographic film as a genre, the history of African cinema, his experiences of filmmaking among the Songhay, and the intertwined histories of French colonialism, anthropology, and cinema. The most thorough resource on Rouch available in any language, Ciné-Ethnography makes clear this remarkable and still vital filmmaker’s major role in the history of documentary cinema.

Jean Rouch was born in Paris in 1917. He studied civil engineering before turning to film and anthropology in response to his experiences in West Africa during World War II. Rouch is the recipient of numerous awards, including the International Critics Award at Cannes for the film Chronicle of a Summer.

Steven Feld is professor of music and anthropology at Columbia University.

Visible Evidence Series, volume 13
University of Minnesota Press
Printed in U.S.A.
Cover design by Jeanne Lee
Cover art: Still from Moi, un Noir (1958) by Jean Rouch, courtesy of Jean Rouch and Comité du Film Ethnographique; Rouch filming Petit à petit (1968–69), courtesy of Jean Rouch and Comité du Film Ethnographique.