The young goat herders from the cliff of Bandiagara practice on the stone drums of their ancestors. An ethnomusicological film experiment describing the subtle plays of the right and left hand of Dogon drummers.
Traditional houses and new architecture in Ayorou, an island on the River Niger in the archipelago of Tillaberi. The village and its activities; the building of the house of a newly-wed young man.
Jean Rouch filmed this loving and humorous portrait of anthropologist and filmmaker Margaret Mead in September 1977 while he was a guest of the first Margaret Mead Film Festival. As both a friend and colleague, Rouch reveals a glimpse of the legendary Mead in her later years.
Jean Rouch's return to Niger, to meet his African friends and the play "Perses" by Aeschylus provide him with the opportunity to relate his Dionysian vision of the world and Songhai mythology. Lam, the Fulani shepherd who is now deceased, once invented a dream: “to be stronger than death”. It...
A compilation of black and white excerpts from five previous color films by Jean Rouch: Yenendi, the Rainmakers, Cemeteries in the Cliff, The Millet People, The Circumcision, Battle on the Great River.
In front of Jean Rouch's camera, Germaine Dieterlen recalls her ethnographic itinerary, at the Musée de l'Homme, in Mali and in the Paris of the 1930s.
This film, made in one afternoon, is an "inspired promenade," the discovery of an exhibition with improvised text and commentary. Five shot sequences of ten minutes apiece, following the chronological order of the history of cinema as conceived by Henri Langlois thirty years ago. Two weeks later,...
Not much film stock, an inspired camera, a meditation on time, period songs: using contemporary images, shot at a time when the broken city was starting to heal its wounds, Jean Rouch recalls his impressions in Berlin immediately after the war.
In Sangha, through the window of her house, Germaine greets Djamgouno, her main informant. He then translates for her a conversation she has with a half-blind old man. She recounts her memories of a past party at which Amadigné worked with her as an informant. Later, in front of the cliff,...
The fourth year of the Sigui ceremonies, celebrated every sixty years by the Dogons of the Bandiagara cliffs, Mali, takes place in the village of Amani.
Two parts magical drama and one part straight documentary, this outing from famed ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch is set somewhere in Nigeria near a small village.
"Tourou et Bitti", an eight minute documentary concerning a ritual in Niger, is yet another example of Rouch's excellence in creating documentaries which surpass the conventional documentary format. Just as frightening and fascinating as "Les maîtres fous", this one goes straight into the roots of...
When the male nurse Damouré Zika talks about AIDS with his two friends Lam and Tallou, under the admiring eye of his own wife Lobo, who is a nurse's aide, it is because he believes that AIDS is a "disease of love that can only be conquered by love." And this right to love has only one passport for...
On the occasion of the bicentenary of the French Revolution, a group of Haitians in Paris undertake a voodoo ritual in front of Les Invalides, to reconcile the spirits of Napoleon Bonaparte and Toussaint L’Overture, the Haitian revolutionary who died as a prisoner of the French Emperor.
The second year of the Sigui ceremonies, celebrated every sixty years by the Dogons of the Bandiagara cliffs, Mali, takes place in the village of Tyogou.
