Now considered one of the most important film-makers from a variety of perspectives.
Has made more than 70 films over more than 50 years. Most shot in Africa, many concerned with religious experiences, particularly possession. He had a huge impact on fiction film makers, largely in Europe, particularly the French New Wave, but also in the US.
Trained as a civil engineer, Rouch fled Nazi occupied France to Niger to work as a road builder. There he experiences Songhai possession rituals.
After the war, returns to France to study anthropology with Marcel Griaule, one of the great French Africanist scholars, and Marcel Mauss, who was perhaps the greatest living French anthropologist (but who might not have been fully sane himself at the time).
Throughout the late 1940s he makes a series of films in West Africa using handheld camera.
Starting then, Rouch gets closer to his subjects than pretty much anyone else. He says that he adopted Flaherty's practice of showing film to its subjects...but in fact, while Flaherty did this once or twice, and largely just to get the Inuit interested in making the film, it becomes a hallmark of Rouch's work and Rouch really incorporates his subjects into his film making.
Rouch has been interested in possession ritual since WW II, and in the 50s, takes his three closest African associates, Damoure Zika, Lam Ibrahim Dia, and Illo Gaoudel, to Ghana, where they film Les Maitre Fous.
Maitre Fous is radical for the 1950s...and continued to be cutting edge really until the 1980s
1) Other films tried to show "pristine" natives. Maitre Fous deals specifically with the issue of contact and colonialism.
2) It is specifically critical of colonialism... The title is double entendre...It's not clear who the crazy masters are.
3) He incorporates Africans both as interpreters of their own culture and as actual makers of the film (Damoure Zika is the soundman here).
In his next film Jaguar a feature length fiction piece, Damoure, Lam, and Illo become the key actors as well as scriptwriters.
In subsequent films, Rouch plays a critical role in developing "Cinema verite," using the camera to provoke reaction and using the reaction of actors to seeing themselves to provide commentary. A critical example of this is Chronique d'un ete (Chronicle of a Summer), where Rouch and a sociologist named Morin wander around Paris getting reactions of the French to the end of the Algerian War (and reactions by Africans to those reactions).
Maitre Fous was made by request of the possession priests. However, it conceals the full context of the possession ceremony (conflict with the colonial authorities). French and British authorities jailed cult members in the 20s and 30s. "F. Fugelstad notes that the Hauka were openly dissident, and suggests the "most original aspect" of their movement was "their total refusal of the system put into place by the French."
The priests had two goals for the film: first, to document the ceremony; second, more subversively, to project the film audiences, including Hauka cult members, who would be triggered, by the film's music and images of the processed, to go into trance. These goals were never really tested because the Brits banned the film.
When Rouch first showed Les Maitres Fous in Paris, prior to its release, improvising his voice-over while the silent footage was projected for the Musee de l'homme audience, the reaction of the spectators was overwhelmingly negative. African intellectuals felt they were exoticized, due to the scenes of blood sacrifice, the ingestion of dog meat, and lurid close-ups of men folding at the mouth. Europeans objected to the ugly reflection of themselves enacted in the possession ritual. But Rouch felt that he had documented something important and powerful and though disturbed by such reactions, released the film in 1955. He was, however, unable to show it in the Gold Coast because of British censorship-it was felt that the film was an insult to the Queen and British authority, and that it showed cruelty to animals. French administrators believed it insulted French culture. Those African viewers of the film who were triggered to go into trance did so such an uncontrollable matter that Rouch was unable to screen it for the Hauka themselves. In the 1960s, African intellectuals reacting to the film accused Roche of perpetuating racist stereotypes, decontextualizing their lives, and studying them like insects. Today, however, according to Rouch they no longer banned his film in black African Cinemas but screen it as a "rare audiovisual document" that gives "a very precise image of what British and French colonialism was" and that reflects the Hauka's understanding of "the concept of colonial power" (from Diane Scheinman, Les maitres fous 1998)
Film was awarded best short film award in Venice in 1957. It served as critical inspiration for Jean Genet (play, The Blacks) and