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Jean Rouch n'a pas volé son titre de carte de visite: chargé de recherche au Musée de l'homme. Existe-t-il une plus belle définition du cinéaste?
- Jean-Luc Godard

The filmmaker and ethnographer Jean Rouch died in northern Niger on February 19, 2004. At 86 years old, he left behind a legacy of over 120 films - the bulk of which were recorded in West Africa.

Jean Rouch's interest in Africa began during World War II when, in 1941, he was sent to the French colony of Niger as an engineer from L'Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées. In 1947 he filmed his first piece in Africa: In the Land of Black Magi. Over the next several decades, Rouch continued filming in Africa while concurrently working as a research director for the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and founding the Comité du film ethnographique at the Musée de l'Homme in Paris.

In 1960 Rouch labeled his filming style cinéma vérité. Inspired by filmmakers such as Robert Flaherty (Nanook of the North) and Dziga Vertov (Man with a Movie Camera), Rouch was an innovative and important figure in the French post-WWII film scene, working alongside French directors of the New Wave, serving as President of the Cinémathèque française, founding the Comité du film ethnographique, and inspiring the Direct Cinema movement in the U.S.

Rouch's work in Africa is characterized by "shared anthropology" and "ethno-fiction" and all his films illustrate a keen rethinking of both ethnography and filmmaking. Combining fiction and non-fiction techniques and often integrating a sort of documentary surrealism, Rouch's practices blur the traditional distinctions between subject and observer as well as those between fiction and documentary film.

Through his reflexive filmmaking techniques, Rouch not only recorded events, he became an active participant in whatever event he was filming. According to Rouch, the relationship between filmmaker and subject reached its creative zenith when the filmmaker was able to "get into the subject"- when he slipped into what Rouch called a ciné-trance.

With his novel and fresh techniques, Rouch visually articulated a theory of ethnographic filmmaking which illustrated that - for Rouch, at least - the cinematic experience is first and foremost a shared one.

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