Dok Night / SYMBIOPSYCHOTAXICINEMA

Jean Rouch was a cinema-anthropologist who went to west Africa and fell in love with it. When he saw first-hand what colonization had done to the continent, he decided to dismantle those power games and created his own ethnographic field  called ‘shared anthropology’. But for him, if he was going to be sincere, he knew that the real problem wasn’t in Africa but in his home country France. So he often returned to France and made films that were critical of the assumptions and arrogance of the European mindset. Because of his character, he didn’t do this in a dark and angry way, but reflecting what he loved in West African communities, he did it in a playful way.

In this movie he brings a group of his friends from Niger to Paris, including one of his favorite characters Damouré Zika. The fictional set up is that they want to come and look at building construction as businessmen, but the collective film actually is a critique of modern French life and capitalist society. As with all of this director’s films it’s a collaborative ‘shared’ effort and borders on the absurd and surreal. It is an example of another genre Jean Rouch launched, described as ‘docu-fiction’. This film was made spontaneously—little by little—as a collective… and therefore reflects a foreigner’s view on the insanity and ridiculousness of French culture and the modern world. You can bet it was also a deep learning experience for director Rouch as he went around the city he knew so well, and listened and learned from his friends and saw it through their eyes.

Jean Rouch’s films were groundbreaking culturally, and had a huge impact on cinema even though his name is rarely mentioned these days. Two of the five principal directors of the French New Wave of the 60s—Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Rivette—both pointed to films of Jean Rouch as the principal influence that ignited the entire Nouvelle Vague. The fusing together of fiction and documentary, the use of handheld cameras, shooting in the streets, improvisation, independence and nonlinear editing were principal aspects of his work that would be picked up by the so-called ‘young Turk’ filmmakers.