| Rouch in Reverse
In this film, Diawara pioneers what he calls "reverse anthropology" - where the subjects of investigation study their former investigators. He explains: "I made this film on Rouch as a rite of passage for myself. Rouch has played such a key role in the representation of Africans on film. I wanted to pass through Rouch in order to render visible new African voices and images: the ones that defy stereotype and primitivism." Diawara locates Rouch at the epicenter of 20th century ethnography as a collaborator in the Présence Africaine group with Michel Leiris and Marcel Griaule and as a founder of the cinema vérité documentary movement. The two filmmakers discuss their sometimes contrasting views of clips from such seminal but rarely seen works as Rouch's Les maîtres fous (The Mad Masters), Moi, un noir (Treichville) and Chronique d'été (Chronicle of a Summer). Reflecting on Rouch's forty films, Diawara notes that the same European technology which preserved and appropriated traditional African cultures on film destroyed these same societies. A cross-section
of African intellectuals living in Paris discuss the difficulty of developing
identities, simultaneously African and modern, in a society which persists
in seeing them as "primitive." Rouch in Reverse enters into a
vigorous intertextual dialogue with 20th century ethnography to decenter
these familiar images so contemporary Africans can create their own
version of the past and the present. |
"Opens a new
frontier of scholarly exploration...Moves beyond 'protest' and 'victim'
discourse to transform the colonizing 'gaze' into the object of its
own rancor-free inquiry." "Concise, provocative
and proudly personal. Diawara's film reframes an important and controversial
figure in African cultural studies, raising crucial questions of race,
culture, identity and film." "An insightful
portrait of one of the most controversial figures in film and anthropology
but also a creative meditation on post-colonial representation itself." "Informative,
provocative and lots of fun." "Disrupts any
unitary view of representations of West Africa, the history of African
film and Rouch's cinematic politics." Producer: Parminder
Vir
Video Purchase: $195
|
Rouch
in Reverse is the first film to look at European anthropology from
an African perspective. Malian filmmaker and New York University professor,
Manthia Diawara's provocative new film critiques visual anthropology
through the work of Jean Rouch, perhaps the most distinguished ethnographic
filmmaker living today. The resulting cross-cultural encounter is alternatively
affectionate, strained, personal but always insightful - a film no one
committed to a truly multi-cultural social science can afford to miss.
