Ethnography of the Movie Camera - Essay Example

Ethnography of the movie camera 2009 Jean Rouch is sometimes referred to as the pioneer of a form of documentary style filmmaking in France called Cinéma Vérité, which roughly translates in English to “cinema of truth”. This type of film shares its aesthetics with direct cinema, a genre that developed in North America and Canada between 1958 and 1962, distinguished primarily by its direct narration of reality truthfully and questioning the link between cinema and reality. He is also known as one the pioneers of visual anthropology and the procreator of ethno fiction ( use of story techniques in ethnographic films) by making clear about the presence of the camera in his films to conduct what he called a ‘social experiment’ in both anthropological terms as well as cinematic ones. He also made a point of casting real people, rather than actors, providing them with general storylines and character attributes, while all at once giving them the freedom to explore these constructs through improvisational means. In other words, many scenes were not scripted; simply an outline of the aim of the scene was given to his actors enabling them to explore these ideas in their own way. Through a means of ‘shared anthropology’ also mentioned as reflexive anthropology) and collective and communal discussion, he followed his actors on a journey of not only self discovery, but the discovery of “the truth behind the camera”1. Rouch was not so much interested in the story per se; rather, he was interested in the ways the reality and cinema are smudged. That is, to say, Rouch was particularly fascinated with how the presence of the camera could inform as well as control the improvisational techniques his actors used to create the film. These aspects of Roach’s work can be explored through close discussion and analysis of two of his films in particular-- The Human Pyramid (1959) and Chronicle of a Summer (1950). While these films differ in the narratives, they both use this concept of the ‘social experiment’ in order to investigate the reality of what happens around the camera and as a result of the camera rather than in front of it. Rouch and his shared anthropology Born in born in Paris, Jean Rouch (1917-2004), was inspired with scientific interest from the childhood by his naval officer father while his mother, a painter introduced him to the arts. Rouch spent some of his early life in Algeria, Morocco and Germany as his father’s job demanded relocations. As a civil engineer in his early career Rouch preferred West Africa where he came to anthropology by watching Songhay rituals. After the Nazis defeat in WWII and after France was freed from German occupation, his amateurish concern found an academic support at the Musée de l'Homme, where he studied social anthropology under Marcel Mauss and ethnography under Marcel Griaule. Griaule was the first ethnographer to use movie camera for research field surveys. Inspired by Griaule Rouch went down the Niger in 1946 in a hollow canoe with a 16mm camera to make his first ethnographic film. From the mid to late fifties, a series of technological advances (both inadvertent and intended) eased the documentary film maker with lightweight 16mm cameras and Aaton and Arriflex and Nagra tape recorders, Magnecord and other forms of recording, making it easier for small crews to record and film in real time. Like so many “schools” or “new waves”, Direct Cinema avoids definition. But lack of voice-over, hand held camera, natural light and on location recording are common traits in such films, traits that led to a growing desire to narrate the lives of the deprived, the politicians, famous people and the rising counterculture– the filmic counterpart of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moment(the best bunch of Cartier-Bresson’s photo- works, with their eerie sense of timing, accuracy and profound perceptions on human emotion and character ). Editing the huge raw footage also needed a shared commitment to the situation so that a fundamental truth is finally passed on to the audience and it is this commitment to a “basic truth” that explains the pass on quality of Direct Cinema. Which is very close to the cinema verite of Jean Rouch that Dave Sanders. Details in his book, Direct Cinema: Observational Documentary and The Politics of The Sixties (2007). Looking at the key films belonging to the genre of Direct Cinema, within the context of the i within the context of the chaos in America during the decade. Saunders intensely depicts how such films contained a visual that seized the hustle of the sixties with the same accuracy as the New Journalism of, say people like Norman Mailer and others, meaning those who together with newer technologies developed a new style. Technological progress of the day also gave Jean Rouch the scope to use frisky sound tools and a special wide-angled camera made by associate cinematographer Michel Brault, through this new technology Rouch attained a sense of nearness lacking earlier. Despite the type of people interviewed (mostly Morin's friends) and the ruthless (twenty-five hours of recording to the ninety film), Chronicle of a summer (Chronique d'un été, 1960) was praised as the new realism, or cinéma vérité (Sanders, 2007, Hill, 2007). Rouch, of course, used the term Direct Cineman Cinema not in the way it was used in North America. He used the term cinéma direct to free himself from the implied sense of the French term, cinéma-vérité.  During the 1960's, filmmakers started to record events in a totally new way.. For Rouch, technological advances like lightweight cameras and synchronous sound meant that the contact between filmmaker and his/her subject would now be in a more friendly way giving scope to get closer to his subjects, having more ‘direct’ touch with the people he was filming; drawing together the impersonal and the personal sides of documentary filmmaking. But, for American documentary filmmakers the tern stood for a way to ‘disappear.’  Direct Cinema in the States was known for its attempt to document reality while reducing the influence of the filmmaker's authority (Glossary of, maitres-fous.net, Brennan, All Movie Guide, Hill, 2007, Stoller, 1997). For Rouch, cinema verite had a different implication. The term developed in Russian film maker Dziga Vertove’s Kino-Pravda (meaning, "cinema of truth" and "truth of the cinema"), a documentary series of the 1920s. While Vertov's declared aim was using film as a way of reaching at "hidden" truth by fusing images. Rouch wanted stir up Vertov’s wish to depict the dense reality through the exclusivity of cinema. He said: "For me, however, kinopravda... designates not 'pure truth' but the particular truth of the recorded images and sounds - a filmic truth" (Ciné-Ethnography, 99). And, in an interview (published here) with Enrico Fulchignoni, Rouch stated: "With the ciné-eye and the ciné-ear, we recorded in sound and image a ciné-vérité, Vertov's kinopravda. This does not mean the cinema of truth, but the truth of cinema."(Ciné-Ethnography, 167). Cinéma-vérité offered Rouch a break to make a specific kind of cinematic truth, describing a totally new vision of ‘reality.’  But as there was a chance to be misread - the 'truth' of cinéma-vérité often faked a claim about the film’s detachment and thereby pretending to be close to the Direct Cinema (Feld, introduction to Ciné-Ethnography, 12-16). Chronicle of a Summer was not a detached kind like what we saw carefully in 'direct cinema'. In the film, Rouch and Morin explored the nature of happiness by interviewing onlookers in the streets of Paris, but as the film advanced, the inquiry becomes a plea to get into people's exclusively personal thoughts about life and their relationship. In this film, Rouch is thought to be responsible for presenting the term cinema vérité, as homage to Vertov, to make a real relation between information and imagination through the camera's synchronized features of impersonal and personal. Afterward the term has been take on to depict projects that differ greatly from them, because of the ambiguous word 'truth', and its convoluted relation to the filmic image. As one critic says: “What Rouch wishes to recuperate from Vertov is not the notion of the cinema-eye, radically different from the human eye, but rather the possibility of a marriage, a synthesis, between the human eye and the cinema eye – a fusion whose result will be a greater humanity and a greater objectivity at the same time.” (Eaton, The production of cinematic reality) Rouch promoted the idea of a "shared anthropology" as a new method of research consisting of ‘sharing’ with the people who, earlier, were only the objects of research. Rouch wanted to make anthropological objects into participants – palpable in his films Moi, un noir (1957), and Jaguar (1967), two experiments in "ethnofiction." The films depict the incident of Songhay migration to the Gold Coast by letting the young male protagonists to create, and then describe, their own travel adventures (Pinohbeck, 2003). In essence, Rouch’s intention was to blend the main character of the camera and the human eye, and to find a new significance in their relation in changing social situation. Rouch understood the vast change in perception his camera made and conversely, his technical background made him realize he was making on the viewer. In fact, Rouch considered that the observer cannot be overlooked and should be given importance so as not to cancel the results of the observation. His experiences with the camera come straight from such an attitude (Bruni, 2002). The Human Pyramid’ and Chronicle of a Summer Compared toChronicle of a Summer, the team work of Jean Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morin, Rouch's documentary The Human Pyramid could not stir up so much an excitement. Although most of his previous documentaries were filmed in Africa, Chronicle of a Summer was set in Paris, after the Algerian war, before Ftance went through a lot of revolts and turmoil for about a decade(1954-1962). Chronicle of a Summer didn’t have a conventional structure but is driven in an erratic way by its characters and their camera responses. It was perhaps Rouch's mosr popular and most talked about work in documentary filmmaking for its pioneering cinematic techniques, its set-up (the streets of Paris during a major flashpoint of history) and for being the first film to use the term cinéma-vérité. Rouch' s documentaries are context driven . In Chronicle of a Summer , the context was Parisian society after the Algerian war, while in The Human Pyramid it was racial tensions felt by the teernage black and white students of a school on the Ivory coast. The Human Pyramid, even while having some of the same traits of Chronicle of a Summer, had almost a surreal ambiance. It was less prearranged, most of it was left to the children to decide. Hence, The Human Pyramid is knotty than Chronicle of a Summer and simpler because its subjects were only modestly linked to society in general, and more convoluted because of this 'unreality' that had numerous insinuations (Bruni,2002). In Chronicle, Rouch was more at ease with the camera’s role on the surroundings, and, he wasn’t then just filming a specific rite or happening, but was rather more committed to inciting an action: “Rouch, the observer of rituals, crossed the line to become a creator of rituals in his own right”. (Fieschi, 1979). Chronicle and Human Pyramid have certain traits in common , like: Rouch himself personally on camera explaining the limits of the 'experiment' at the very start and 2.including the viewing of the film to the actors finally; 3.including the 'before' and 'after' of the story-- aspects, handled in a very different way in the two films, and Morin's influence was also important here, While Rouch's work was infused by what Jean-André Fieschi calls “slippages of fiction”, The Human Pyramid was definitely his more extraordinary work with a novelty, because of its openness to anything that could take place, and it was this suppleness that made it lush while in Chronicle of a Summer Rouch and Morin were continually regulating the events. In The Human Pyramid, “once the project started, the director simply filmed it” (Jean Rouch, The Human Pyramid). Between camera and object Chronicle of a Summer takes an important place in arguments about documentary and the bond between camera and object. As André Bazin said in What Is Cinema (1967), “Simultaneously liberation and a fulfillment, it (photography) has freed western painting, once and for all, from its obsession with realism”. In the article Bazin showed how such a 'liberation' could fulfill and dissatisfy at once, by presenting a whole new set of questions more difficult than the ones that it answered. The technological advances during the late '50s and early '60s created more problems for the docu-film maker than they solved. Earlier, the documentary crews used the same bulky tools they used in fiction film forcing them to the practice of renovation. Once sound and camera tools became lightweight and silent, documentary film had to face questions about the relationship between the filmmaker an the thing he was filming..The object and its moral insinuations had to be treated from different perspectives. thought of, in a different way. The makets of the Direct Cinema, like, Richard Leacock, Donn A. The Direct film makers like Pennebaker and the Maysles brothers dealt it classically keeping the observer and the observed to a lowest. Interviews, commentary and other forms of interface with the theme were thought to pollute the observation. Some others, used the new tools to draw meaning from the outwardly trivial and dreary, trying to find greater value in the unity to the whole by assembling the small things of daily life (Bruni,2002). Rouch on the contrary stressed this mundane aspect and bringing it to its extremes. He observed that the presence of the camera fired up people's expression rather than freezing it, and that it could create strong responses regarding fictional situations , because of the subject feels vulnerability- responses that he/she wouldn’t have normally shown but responses that were boosted by the camera. The use of a poem called 'The Human Pyramid' recited by the young students in one of their classes, showed the director's attitude to cinema and life in general: I look at the human sciences as poetic sciences in which there is no objectivity, and I see film as not being objective, and cinema verite as a cinema of lies that depends on the art of telling yourself lies. If you're a good storyteller then the lie is more true than reality, and if you're a bad one, the truth is worse than a half lie( Rouch in conversation with Jacqueline Veuve, 1967) Rouch the poet and Rouch the scientist was in clash here, a clash making his films exceptional, and surpassing his anthropological visions. Rouch realized that the facts are always troubled by the person who questioned, and that he could permeate the logic prevailing in any kind of experiment with the poetic and the artistic. Rouch, however, remained committed to his anthropology, carrying on a scientific approach to the 'lies' that he created. If the philosophy upon which he founded his observations had broken the conventional subject/object link, his methodology has been working here surfacing out of his education. There was, thus, a distinct contrast between his 'poetic' philosophy and his laborious methods that made bizarre and confusing results. If “anthropology must destroy what it investigates”, (Georgakas,et al, 1978). Rouch was not dispassionate to treat human nature as an inert object before the camera, but wanted to depict as something living, breathing , moving , and growing --the camera thus was vital for him to record life(Bruni,2002) Rouche worked on such ethno-fiction films in which the characters are not professional actors but real people. However, such films run into problems of the real people surpassing himself and becoming actors. The film maker, too, contradicts himself by being an artist as well as an anthropologist. Such haziness between fiction and life, that Rouche pioneered, was later adopted by cinema verite. Works Cited Saunders, Dave, Direct Cinema: Observational Documentary and the Politics of the Sixties, Wallflower Press, New York, 2007 Brennan, Sandra, All Movie Guide, 2009 Hill Lee, Vertigo Magazine, No.12 - September 2007 Stoller, Paul. Sensuous Scholarship. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. Ciné-Ethnography, Edited and Translated by Steven Feld, Univ Of Minnesota Press; 1 edition , 2003 Eaton , Mick, “The production of cinematic reality”, in The camera and man, British Film Institute, p.51 Pinohbeck, Daniel, Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism, Broadway, 2003 Bruni, Barbara, ‘Jean Rouch: Cinéma-Vérité, Chronicle of a Summer and The Human Pyramid’, Sense of Cinema, Issue 29, March-April 2002 Jean-André Fieschi, “Slippages of Fiction”, The camera and man: Anthropology-reality-cinema: the films of Jean Rouch, ed. by Mick Eaton, British Film Institute, London, 1979, p. 73 Jean Rouch, The Human Pyramid André Bazin, What Is Cinema, 2 vols, essays selected and translated by Hugh Gray, (Berkeley: University of California, 1967), p.16 Jean Rouch in Conversation with Jacqueline Veuve," in Film Comment (New York), Fall-Winter 1967 Georgakas, Dan , Gupta , U dayan and Janda, Judi “Politics of Visual Anthropology, an interview with Jean Rouch”, Cineaste 8 (4) 1978, p.22 Read More

    But lack of voice-over, handheld camera, natural light, and on-location recording are common traits in such films, traits that led to a growing desire to narrate the lives of the deprived, the politicians, famous people the rising counterculture– the filmic counterpart of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moment(the best bunch of Cartier-Bresson’s photo- works, with their eerie sense of timing, accuracy and profound perceptions on human emotion and character ). Editing the huge raw footage also needed a shared commitment to the situation so that fundamental truth is finally passed on to the audience and it is this commitment to a “basic truth” that explains the pass on the quality of Direct Cinema.

Which is very close to the cinema verite of Jean Rouch that Dave Sanders. Details in his book, Direct Cinema: Observational Documentary and The Politics of The Sixties (2007). Looking at the key films belonging to the genre of Direct Cinema, within the context of the I within the context of the chaos in America during the decade. Saunders intensely depicts how such films contained a visual that seized the hustle of the sixties with the same accuracy as the New Journalism of, say people like Norman Mailer and others, meaning those who together with newer technologies developed a new style.

The technological progress of the day also gave Jean Rouch the scope to use frisky sound tools and a special wide-angle camera made by associate cinematographer Michel Brault, through this new technology Rouch attained a sense of nearness lacking earlier. Despite the type of people interviewed (mostly Morin's friends) and the ruthless (twenty-five hours of recording to the ninety films), Chronicle of a summer (Chronique dun été, 1960) was praised as the new realism, or cinéma vérité (Sanders, 2007, Hill, 2007).

Rouch, of course, used the term Direct Cineman Cinema not in the way it was used in North America. He used the term cinéma direct to free himself from the implied sense of the French term, cinéma-vérité. During the 1960s, filmmakers started to record events in a totally new way. For Rouch, technological advances like lightweight cameras and synchronous sound meant that the contact between filmmaker and his/her subject would now be in a more friendly way giving scope to get closer to his subjects, having more ‘direct’ touch with the people he was filming; drawing together the impersonal and the personal sides of documentary filmmaking.

But, for American documentary filmmakers, the tern stood for a way to ‘disappear.’ Direct Cinema in the States was known for its attempt to document reality while reducing the influence of the filmmaker's authority (Glossary of, maitres-fous.net, Brennan, All Movie Guide, Hill, 2007, Stoller, 1997).For Rouch, cinema verite had a different implication. The term developed in Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov's Kino-Pravda (meaning, "cinema of truth" and "truth of the cinema"), a documentary series of the 1920s.

While Vertov's declared aim was using film as a way of reaching at "hidden" truth by fusing images. Rouch wanted to stir up Vertov’s wish to depict the dense reality through the exclusivity of cinema. He said: "For me, however, kinopravda. designates not 'pure truth' but the particular truth of the recorded images and sounds - a filmic truth" (Ciné-Ethnography, 99). And, in an interview (published here) with Enrico Fulchignoni, Rouch stated: "With the ciné-eye and the ciné-ear, we recorded in sound and image a ciné-vérité, Vertov's kinopravda.

This does not mean the cinema of truth, but the truth of cinema."(Ciné-Ethnography, 167).Cinéma-vérité offered Rouch a break to make a specific kind of cinematic truth, describing a totally new vision of ‘reality.’ But as there was a chance to be misread - the 'truth' of cinéma-vérité often faked a claim about the film’s detachment and thereby pretending to be close to the Direct Cinema (Feld, introduction to Ciné-Ethnography, 12-16).

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