Homepage / Interviews and Essays
Elizabeth Oliva interviews
Laurent Sauerwein:Elizabeth Oliva: How did you become aware of Jean Rouch's films/studies?
Laurent Sauerwein: It happened in the late 60's, at the Cinémathèque Française, the national film archive, just behind the Palais de Chaillot in Paris. That's where, in a jam-packed underground projection room, generations of french and foreign students have learned to love the cinema. That's where we became "cinéphiles", cinema-lovers or film buffs if you like. We'd frequently see two or three feature-length films in a row and then we'd emerge and walk home, late, all the way across Paris, passionately talking about what we had just seen, or sometimes stunned speechless, quietly making plans to go back and see more the next day. It is there, at the Cinémathèque, that we were exposed to a wildly eclectic mix of literally hundreds of films of all kinds - dramas, comedies, westerns, musicals, cartoons, fiction and documentaries from all over the world . That's where we discovered that the cinema, could, under certain circumstances, be an art form. Something certainly quite different from run-of-the-mill movies and quite possibly the opposite of what, more recently, has invaded our home screens under the pathetic misnomer of "Reality TV".
At the Cinémathèque, Jean Rouch was up there, another cinema cult figure, between Jean Renoir, John Ford, Carl Dreyer, Dziga Vertov, Ernst Lubistch, Roberto Rossellini and Yasujiro Ozu. It's interesting that it is in such company that we discovered Jean Rouch's films. His were ethnographic films, certainly, and therefore had a scientific purpose. But that's not all they were. As documentaries, they had something more, something which, still today, moves me precisely because I can't quite pin it down. Call it art maybe, if art can be very loosely defined as something more than mere recording or description.
Jean Rouch had what the French call "un regard" and that's something which is not easy to grasp. "Un regard" is not just a visual style, "an eye" shall we say. It is closer to what one might call a gaze, which is not a look. And Rouch did also have an ear, a passion for the spoken word, with an extraordinary sensitivity to how people's everyday chatter is interwoven with the epic tales that are passed on from generation to generation in the shade of huge African trees.EO: Why would you consider him an ethnographer?
LS: Jean Rouch was both an ethnographer and a film-maker, a scientist and an author if you like. Is that compatible? Can one be devoted to the objective study and systematic recording of, say, African cultures and be an artist? In any case, it didn't come to him early. He was first educated as an engineer, learning to build bridges and canal systems. That was before the Second World War, in Paris. Outside of his studies, he was drawn to Surrealism and also spent a lot of time at the Musée de l'Homme, which hosted, well, the Cinémathèque. That's where he saw ethnographic films, which ignited his interest in anthropology.EO: How many of his films have you seen? And have you viewed any of his photos, and if so what do you think?
LS: Rouch has made over a hundred films, of which I have seen less than a dozen maybe. "Moi, un Noir", "Chronique d'un Eté", "La Chasse au Lion à l'Arc", "Petit à Petit", "Jaguar", "Les Deux Chasseurs" are titles which now come to mind. I saw most of them 30 years ago, so what I can remember is a bit blurry. Actually, that's not the word. When I think of his films, I see very dry, grainy but sharp images, men and women with witty, sharp tongues. Black and white pictures of people telling generous, colorful tales - nothing blurry. Nothing mannered or affected. Something direct, straight-forward, frank, out-spoken. On the level. Does that define a style? An ethical stance? I don't recall having seen any of Rouch's photographs. It doesn't seem that laughter and voices can be easily photographed.EO: What is your favorite Rouch movie and why?
LS: I don't know. I can't reduce the profound influence he had on me to one particular, clearly identifiable film. Notice that I don't use the term "movie". I like movies, and watch some, on television mainly, because I enjoy being entertained like anyone else. But the term doesn't apply to Rouch. He made films. He had a difficult time finishing his films. Some of them, he would work on for several years, shooting, editing, shooting, editing some more, as if what counted most was that it went on and on. A passionate relationship with Africa. Not the landscape, the people. So what is it that really struck me when I discovered Rouch's films for the first time and has left a trace in my mind many years later? Something more than the discovery of West Africa and its cultures, something more than the documentary content. Something more than a single title: a relationship to a deep continent and an energy shared with its people. Something shared with intelligence and respect, with a smile.EO: Can you explain why Rouch is considered the father of Cinema Vérité?
LS: A lot of expressions have been coined about Jean Rouch's work : "shared anthropology", "ethnographic surreality", "cine trance", and "cinéma vérité" of course. Most of these expressions point to concepts of inter-subjectivity, the unconscious or hypnosis which might be more familiar to the psychoanalyst than to the documentary film-maker. They at least reflect the extreme originality of Rouch's approach as an ethnographer, and an acute awareness that the act of filming is an act of desire.
Does that make Rouch the father-figure of anything like a movement in either ethnography or film-making? What was Cinéma Vérité anyway? Was it a technology based on the use of light-weight, hand-held, sync sound cameras? A movement, a style or a genre that attempted to break away from Hollywood or academic conventions? Or was it just another term coined by the media, which are always in search of terms to coin and labels to stick? Was Cinéma Vérité an intimate, grainy, rough-cut aesthetic? An ethic? A synonym of shoe-string production? A bit of all these possibly. In any event, I'm not sure that Jean Rouch had any "children", disciples or followers, although he did have a profound influence, especially on the Nouvelle Vague, French film-makers like Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut or Jacques Rivette, who saw themselves essentially as authors, as creators of films rather than producers of movies in the film industry.If Cinéma Vérité was a term that was somewhat loosely applied to a variety of documentary film-makers in the 60's, it did not represent what one might call a homogeneous, coherent movement. It was at most a style based on light-weight, hand-held cameras and synchronous sound, in other words a phenomenon that was based on the advent of new technology. Naturally, Rouch had an impact on numerous documentary film-makers, ethnographic or not, many of whom adopted some of the idiosyncrasies they had found in his films, as recipes for what alas became another stale academic genre. It should be noted that Rouch's most profound and lasting influence was possibly not on documentarians, but on film authors working in the field of fiction, from Jean-Luc Godard to Jim Jarmush or Lars von Trier.
Meanwhile, in North America, another movement emerged, a documentary cousin of sorts. It was called Direct Cinema. American filmmakers, who sometimes called the style "direct cinema," were quick to adopt at least the technique, even if their approaches were quite different. Included in Direct Cinema are Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker, Albert and David Maysles, Frederick Wiseman and Robert Drew.EO: What are the major differences between Cinema Vérité and Direct Cinema?
LS: Cinéma Vérité and Direct Cinema had several things in common. They shared the same basic technology : the portable 16mm film cameras with sync sound that appeared around that time. The most popular of such cameras was the Eclair, a French make. Remember this was in the late 50's and the 60's, way before our time of ubiquitous video camcorders.
So you called it Cinéma Vérité or Direct Cinema, depending on where you stood, France for one, the United States and Canada for the other. Both sought to liberate documentary films from the traditional straitjacket of authoritative voice-over narration, static camera work and linear development of theses. These efforts to liberate the form of documentary films were accompanied by a greater freedom in the choice of subjects as well. Jean Rouch, for one, even ventured into fiction, in effect, to a certain degree "documenting fiction". As approaches to documentary film-making, Cinéma Vérité and Direct Cinema were quite different however. In some respect, they reflected cultural differences that are noticeable in journalism as well. I am particularly sensitive to that aspect, having worked as a journalist for many years, including as a senior reporter for television, an activity somewhat related to documentary film-making.
In the traditional anglo-saxon, positivist, tradition, the journalist must attempt to make her/himself transparent and, as author, work toward her/his erasure before "facts" that are allegedly merely recorded. I hasten to add that this model of journalism is not only anglo-saxon, and is the model of journalism applied on a global scale, at least where there exists some degree of freedom of the press. And it is not surprising that such a model should have been traditionally applied to documentary film-making, especially in a scientific context like ethnography.
However, there is a subjective dimension in the act of filming that is not acknowledged in the former model. As an ethnologist and as a film-maker, Jean Rouch believed that it is impossible to make the observer disappear and that it was best to come to terms with that reality. In his debates with american Direct Cinema colleagues, Rouch thought that it was best to acknowledge the film-maker's presence than pretend to deny it. The america protagonists of Direct Cinema followed their subjects as discretely as possible, lurking from a relative distance, hiding in dark corners, while Jean Rouch had what we could call a more "theatrical" approach to the documentary : he brought his fantasies out in the open, in broad daylight, shamelessly. That's the vérité his cinéma was about. He was clearly there mixing with other people, among them, not simply retreated behind his camera. He was always filming a relationship up-front, the observer and the observed. He was not only capturing the encounter, recording it passively, but constructing it, shot by shot, word by word, and he called it "Cinéma Vérité" because the real, the truth he was after was not only in front of his camera but he, himself, as film-maker, as ethnologist, as subject, was part of it.
Rouch's great invention was to connect and link, through fluid camerawork and editing, what other film-makers strive to separate: the document and the invention, the observer and the actor, the talking picture and the silent film, Black and White.
I often think of Jean Rouch in my own artistic practice, in the artist's books I now make and which can be seen on the web site www.youcantouch.com. In many ways, my picture books owe something to Rouch. Only they are much lighter than anything he, a great defender of an ultra-light form of cinema, could possibly imagine! But it is also true that my own artistic production has no documentary or scientific ambition: it is essentially poetic and can function in a small format of extreme brevity, often with only a handful of pages, just pictures and not a single word.
I just fell by chance upon an article in the Cahiers du Cinéma, a magazine which has always strongly supported Rouch's work. It is not about Jean Rouch at all, but about a budding young french film-maker, Christophe Delbecq. The author of the article is Alain Bergala and what he writes echoes what I think about the poetry of Jean Rouch's films: "The most difficult thing about making one's first film is keeping the ability to be 'passive before being active', to cite Jean Renoir's memorable phrase. Otherwise, everything is forced and purely willful. If you don't save some of this state of passive receptiveness, which is very difficult to maintain during the confusion and stress of a shoot, then the film won't be inspired and alive. [You need] a little vacuum, openings and gaps, to draw in fresh air."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. As an artist, he has shown at Gallery Sonnabend, the Cartier Foundation, the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. His work is included in several international collections, among which the Centre Pompidou and the Cabinet des Estampes in Geneva.
He uses his own digital photography to make artist's books - "real books with pages you can actually turn", he says. He has created over 70 books which are sold in galleries and bookstores in Paris, Berlin or New York, as well as his website www.youcantouch.com.
Trained as a film-maker in the United States, Laurent Sauerwein is a former senior-reporter on French public television and a pioneer in interactive multimedia. He currently teaches information technology and international communications at the American University of Paris. He also teaches at Parsons School of Design-Paris, where he is head of the Communication Design department.
In the Spring of 2005, he will be showing a new series of photographic pop-ups in Shanghai, China.