Jaguar

Reviewed by: Jamie Stockholm-Berthe

Jean Rouch is known for his practice of what is referred to as “shared anthropology”. Rouch himself claims that he derived this technique from Flaherty’s film Nanook of the North, in which Flaherty collaborated with the Inuit’s he was filming in order to integrate their ideas and suggestions into his depiction of their lives. Shared anthropology destabilizes the authority of the ethnographer; it is a collaboration between the ethnographer and her/his subject.

Given that there was no synchronous sound at the time that Jaguar was made, Rouch decided to invite the men he filmed into the studio to do voice overs which corresponded to the images on the screen. The result was a film in which the “exotic other” is not only the subject of the film, he is the one guiding us through the images we are witnessing. The “other” is giving a voice to the visual material. One of the most colorful and telling scenes of the film is when Damouré and the others are confronted by a tribe that, in their opinion, seems exotic. The wit and profundity of their comments is surprising for the viewer and illustrates the complexity of the African continent with more lucidity than any commentary by a westerner could have.

The combination of imagery and commentary in Jaguar take the viewer on a journey that is a unique tale of discovery, migration, amusement and enchantment. This film is setting the stage for Rouch’s move towards total collaboration, a move which will lead to films such as Madame L’Eau, where Rouch is not only giving a voice to those he is filming, he is also making public the fact that he is behind the camera and ordering the images. With moves such as these Rouch is able to free the practice of ethnographic filmmaking from certain presuppositions which had hitherto rendered its practice questionable. With this move he approaches, as Rouch himself has said, not a cinema of truth, but the truth of cinema.

 

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