Sarah Cooper

Essay: Sarah Cooper "Knowing Images: Jean Rouch's Ethnography"
"Engendering an ethics that relies on distance within proximity, the Rouchian aesthetic allows us finally...to point up the limits of knowledge and vision."

-from Sarah Cooper's book Selfless Cinema?: Ethics and French Documentary ( Oxford: Legenda, 2006 )
© Modern Humanities Research Association

Sarah Cooper is a professor at King's College in London. Her principal research interests are in film theory and continental philosophy; ethics and film, especially documentary; and modern critical theory, especially feminist theory, queer theory, and psychoanalysis.

Chronicles of African Modernities: A Retrospective of Jean Rouch's Films at New York University

Chronicles of African Modernities
In 2000, New York University's Center for Media, Culture, and History held a retrospective of several of the ethno-fictions that Rouch made with his African friends; films which chronicled "the emergence of distinct West African modernities over the last half century."

Rouch was present at the screenings and held extensive post-screening Q & A sessions accompanied by Paul Stoller, Manthia Diawara, Jean-Paul Colleyn, and Steven Feld. These events were filmed and later transcribed by Jamie Berthe in 2006.

Paul Stoller

Essay: Paul Stoller "The Work Must Go On"
"Jean Rouch’s path to the felicitous fusion of art and science was a circuitous one..."

Paul Stoller is a professor of Anthropology at West Chester University. He is the author of The Cinematic Griot: The Ethnography of Jean Rouch.

Laurent Sauerwein interviewed by Elizabeth Oliva

Interview: Laurent Sauerwein
"That is something about Rouch's films that is close to my own preoccupations, something precious that could be found in all his films, from the first to the last: that fresh air..."

Laurent Sauerwein is a designer and an artist. Trained as a film-maker in the United States, he is a former senior-reporter on French public television and a pioneer in interactive multimedia.

Interview: Jay Ruby
"Rouch discovered this approach in the 1950s. It took anthropologists who write another 30 years to catch up..."

Jay Ruby recently retired from the department of Anthropology at Temple University in Philadelphia. His publications include: The Cinema of Jean Rouch (Visual Anthropology - Gordon and Breach; December 30, 1989)

Interview: Steven Feld
"Rouch's work challenges our notions of boundaries..."

Steven Feld is a Professor of Anthropology and Music at the University of New Mexico. His books include: Jean Rouch: Ciné-Ethnography (editor/translator, 2003, U. Minnesota Press)