Manthia Diawara's Rouch in Reverse: An interstitial perspective

Abstract

MORE THAN FORTY years ago Jean Rouch more or less initiated a form of ethnographic cinematography called cinema verite whose goal was to let the cinematic subjects of ethnographic films speak for themselves. He wanted to make films about Africans in which the filmmaker would yield the control over what would go into the film to the Africans he was filming. They would not just collaborate with him, they would take over the direction of what would be filmed and spoken. Rouch saw himself as a kind of griot or medium who would enter into the spirit of the culture--in the event, that of the Songhai in Niger--and allow the culture to speak. At the limit, he would let the state of trance he was filming inhabit the act of filming. This, in any event, was the ideal. To accomplish these goals, Rouch had to cease being an outsider and become accepted as one of the community. He had to learn not only to speak Songhai, but to accept Songhai religious beliefs and cultural practices as valid. And he had to convince the Songhai with whom he was working that this was the case. In short, Rouch had to `go native'. This, Paul Stoller (1992) tells us, Rouch succeeded in doing amazingly well, better than many an anthropologist who followed him. However, despite Rouch's success in acquiring the status of an outsider, a number of his best films, including the famous Les Maitres fous (1953-54), Moi un noir (1957), Afrique sur Seine 91969), and Cocorico, M. Poulet (1974), turn on what would fascinate Europeans, what might justly be termed the exotic, including religious practices, i.e. witchcraft, (1) and the life in the native quartier, i.e., slumming. (2) To be sure, Rouch entered into deep and lasting friendships with the people who came to be the subjects of his films, and some of them were to become well-known as filmmakers themselves, most notably Oumarou Ganda and Safi Faye. Nonetheless, trancing and sacrifice, common enough in traditional African settings, are given prominence in Rouch's work, and are central to his most controversial film, Les Maitres fous. Images of religious, ecstatically charged states often are presented as holding the central significance of the films. Perennially enthusiastic over `real' African culture, like Yambo Ouologuem's caricature of Vrobenius in Le Devoir de violence (1968), Rouch would always seem to have retained enough of the Westerner's fascination with the `strongest' images of Africa, those most striking to one outside the culture who seems to understand it and mediate that understanding to other outsiders. One not bothered by the label ethnographer. One not in dialogue with V.Y. Mudimbe (1988). After an exciting detour from his studies in 1946-7, during which Rouch, Ponty and Sauvy travelled down the Niger to its headwaters (3), Rouch returned to Europe to become a researcher in the CNRS (Centre National de Recherche Scientifique), and began to study ethnography under Marcel Griaule. For these serious scholars of the CNRS, Africa was a land of truth, and it is no surprise that Rouch's cinematography should be identified by the same term that signifies an unmediated essence, a purity associated with origins and identities. Like Griaule, Rouch set out to record and document that truth about Africa by gaining access to the knowledge available to the insiders, especially those insiders initiated to the truth. At the 1995 African Studies Association conference in Boston, I shared with Manthia Diawara a panel on African cinema. I remember that in positioning himself in his presentation, Diawara had characterised himself as a modern African. His use of the term `modern' surprised me: the binary modern/traditional had always seemed too reductionist and misleading. Yet, when Diawara used it, it rang true. He was calling attention to the site where his education, his `formation,' had led him, to a world of discourses informed by the modernist project. That project also had its insiders and outsiders, its enticements and its journey down swift currents to the headwaters to Paris, its own exotic glamour. …