Lecture date: 2000-06-09
‘Sometimes the film is more real than reality’. A discussion between legendary French filmmaker and ethnographer Jean Rouch and legendary AA Unit Master Pascal Schoning. Early in his career Jean Rouch broke new ground in ethnographic film practice, developing a collaborative style he termed ‘shared anthropology’. Extending his range beyond the frame of the ethnographic film he radically redefined the documentary genre and exerted a seminal influence on the French New Wave in the 1960s. Cocteau, Genet, Truffaut, and Peter Brook were all enthusiastic admirers of Rouch’s work. Godard called Rouch’s 1959 ‘ethno-fiction’ Moi, Un Noir, ‘the best French film since the Liberation’. Jacques Rivette once claimed that Rouch was ‘more important than Godard in the evolution of French cinema’.
NB: Occasional image problems (sometimes during clips from Rouch’s films). Some loss of volume during the middle of discussion.
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