JEAN ROUCH, FILMS & PHOTOGRAMMES

14 x 19 cm / 80 pages / September 2017

isbn: 978-2-35137-233-3

Three films by Jean Rouch: La Goumbé des jeuns noceurs, Pam kuso kar, Cousin cousine

Text (in French only): Andrea Paganini

—

What is the world that Jean Rouch had before his eyes, that he chose to watch, listen to, show and tell?

This book-DVD offers a glimpse, based on three rare films and a few images taken from his filmic work, a few photograms scanned from the 16mm film he was so fond of: just thirty-six images, for an imposing, polymorphous filmic œuvre with some one hundred and eighty titles, between completed films and, for almost half of them, unfinished ones.

Choices dictated by the background and crest lines of the work, around themes or motifs that seem to work it: from work gestures to declensions of femininity, from the modernities Rouch discovers with enthusiasm and astonishment, to looks, laughter or scopic impulses...

As for the three films presented here - including the previously unreleased and unfinished Cousin cousine, which finds Damouré Zika... in Venice! - they, too, traverse the work, from the 1960s to the 1980s, from documentary to ethno-fiction, from Abidjan goumbés to rituals...