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The Cinematic Griot
The Ethnography of Jean Rouch
by Paul Stoller
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Book Presentation:
The most prolific ethnographic filmmaker in the world, a pioneer of cinéma vérité and one of the earliest ethnographers of African societies, Jean Rouch (1917-) remains a controversial and often misunderstood figure in histories of anthropology and film. By examining Rouch’s neglected ethnographic writings, Paul Stoller seeks to clarify the filmmaker’s true place in anthropology.
A brief account of Rouch’s background, revealing the ethnographic foundations and intellectual assumptions underlying his fieldwork among the Songhay of Niger in the 1940s and 1950s, sets the stage for his emergence as a cinematic griot, a peripatetic bard who "recites" the story of a people through provocative imagery. Against this backdrop, Stoller considers Rouch’s writings on Songhay history, myth, magic and possession, migration, and social change. By analyzing in depth some of Rouch’s most important films and assessing Rouch’s ethnography in terms of his own expertise in Songhay culture, Stoller demonstrates the inner connection between these two modes of representation.
Stoller, who has done more fieldwork among the Songhay than anyone other than Rouch himself, here gives the first full account of Rouch the griot, whose own story scintillates with important implications for anthropology, ethnography, African studies, and film.
See the publisher website: University of Chicago Press
See the complete filmography of Jean Rouch on the website: IMDB ...
> On a related topic:
The Adventure of the Real (2010)
Jean Rouch and the Craft of Ethnographic Cinema
by Paul Henley
Subject: Director > Jean Rouch
The Ethnographic Optic (2024)
Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and the Turn Inward in 1960s French Cinema
Three Documentary Filmmakers (2009)
Errol Morris, Ross McElwee, Jean Rouch
Dir. William Rothman
Subject: Genre > Documentary
Ulrike Ottinger (2024)
Film, Art and the Ethnographic Imagination
Dir. Angela McRobbie
Subject: Director > Ulrike Ottinger
Roger Sandall's Films and Contemporary Anthropology (2019)
Explorations in the Aesthetic, the Existential, and the Possible
Subject: Director > Roger Sandall
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