The Late Colonial Imprint on Jean Rouch’s Life and Work

Jean Rouch’s career followed a jagged and convoluted path. When Rouch first arrived in Africa in 1941, he did so as a “white engineer and toubab par excellence” who knew absolutely nothing about African customs and culture.Footnote ⁷ That is an unlikely starting point for a key forerunner of the French New Wave and the oft-cited “grandfather of Nigerien cinema.”Footnote ⁸ Following the twists and turns of Rouch’s professional trajectory, alongside his own self-understanding of his experiences and career itinerary, helps to illuminate the tortured logics and ambivalences of late colonialism in French Africa and its consequential afterlives in postcolonial France.

Rouch graduated from one of France’s top engineering schools in Paris in 1941. Eager to get away from Nazi-occupied Paris, he and two friends applied for posts in French West Africa (AOF), then under Vichy control. Even in the midst of war, there was ample demand for civil engineers there, as building up African infrastructure was an important late colonial priority for all of the colonial powers. Upon arrival, twenty-four-year-old Rouch was assigned to a massive roadbuilding project and put in charge of thousands of African forced labourers in the landlocked West African colony of Niger.Footnote ⁹ When a dozen of those labourers was killed by lightening during a violent storm, a local medium came to perform a special ritual for the dead. Rouch’s interest was piqued. He subsequently enlisted one of his subordinates, Damouré Zika (the medium’s grandson, who was himself a traditional Songhay healer) to be his interpreter and cultural guide as Rouch began to dabble in local ethnography. Damouré would become one of Rouch’s most important lifelong collaborators and closest friends.

Rouch did not remain in his initial post in Niamey for long. At odds with the esprit de corps of colonial officialdom, Rouch was dismissed for publicly mocking the governor of the colony and sent to Dakar to await transport back to France. But in late 1942, AOF rejoined the Allied camp, and Rouch was able to reenlist in the Gaullist Free French army.Footnote ¹⁰ After the liberation, Rouch decided to pursue formal training in ethnography. He went back to Paris to work on a doctorate in anthropology under the direction of Marcel Griaule, the most prominent French anthropologist of West Africa in the 1930s and 1940s, who also made ethnographic films as part of his fieldwork.Footnote ¹¹ Like most anthropologists of his day, Griaule was a complicated figure who sought to promote and celebrate traditional African culture while working closely with the late colonial state.Footnote ¹² In this, Jean Rouch was very much “the son of Griaule,” as cultural anthropologist Paul Stoller suggests.Footnote ¹³ Both men eschewed any kind of explicit anticolonial politics; they worked within late colonial institutions and in some cases, sought to expand and strengthen them.

After the war, Griaule served in the Assembly of the French Union (AUF), a novel third chamber of the French parliament dedicated to issues relating to overseas France. The AUF is a good proxy for the ambivalence of late colonial political reform in general. Its founding was part of a massive overhaul of French colonial governance with the constitution of 1946, which established the Fourth Republic and French Union (1946-1958), and subsequent legislation that turned African colonial subjects into citizens of the new republic.Footnote ¹⁴ As the lone parliamentary chamber with anything close to proportional representation for France’s newly minted African citizens, the AUF was supposed to give some teeth to the rhetorical transition from “colonial empire” to the more democratic and inclusive sounding “French Union.” Instead, it quickly became a symbol of the hollowness of that rebranding effort. An exclusively consultative body with no legislative authority, whose seat in Versailles was far removed from the real corridors of power in Paris, the AUF embodied the stark limitations of postwar colonial reform, even for its members.Footnote ¹⁵ As the AUF’s own leadership publicly questioned its relevance and impact, Griaule continued to labour away as chairman of its Commission on Overseas Cultures and Civilizations, where he advocated for the dissemination of knowledge about Africa and the preservation of African culture. Wary of the corrosive effects of French civilization and Western modernity on traditional African societies, Griaule championed a conservative vision of a renovated empire that was increasingly at odds with his new African colleagues’ more dynamic conception of the future of Franco-African relations. For the first cohort of Africans elected to France’s postwar government, African access to French education and the social promotion of African youth were a sine qua non for continuing the Franco-African relationship.Footnote ¹⁶

While his mentor worked to reform and preserve the empire in the AUF, Rouch steered clear of the realm of formal politics. He hastily finished his doctorate and returned to Niger to make ethnographic films with Damouré Zika and other friends Lam Ibrahima Dia and Illo Goudel’ize, who became his steadfast film crew and often appeared onscreen in Rouch’s productions. For the next decade, Rouch moved back and forth between Niamey and Paris, traveling around AOF making films with his African friends on the one hand, and working with Griaule and others to entrench visual anthropology and ethnographic film in the French human sciences and metropolitan cultural landscape, on the other. In 1952, Rouch, Griaule, Claude Levi-Strauss, Alain Resnais, and others founded the Comité du film ethnographique. That same year, Rouch also helped establish the Comité international du film ethnographique, which in 1959 was expanded to include sociological films and re-housed in France’s venerable Musée de l’Homme, an institution Rouch would later direct.Footnote ¹⁷ Film scholar Peter Bloom underscores that Rouch remained ardently committed to the Musée de l’Homme to the last and vociferously opposed its subsumption in the new Musée Quai Branly in the late 1990s. As Bloom notes, the Quai Branly project was part of a wider “state-centered repackaging of the French ethnographic heritage as part of an incremental national strategy of rebranding as a gesture toward museum-centered multiculturalism.” Rouch’s opposition, Bloom argues, underscores his lifelong “ambivalence in liquidating the colonial legacy.”Footnote ¹⁸ ‘Son of Griaule’ indeed.

In his early ethnographic films, Rouch clearly shared Griaule’s conservative preoccupation with how collective historical experience is embodied, performed, and recreated through ritual in traditional African societies. Rouch’s work from this period (ca.1947-1953) centred on hippopotamus hunts, circumcision rituals, and possession cults among the Songhay peoples along the banks of the Niger River. And yet, despite their conventional themes, even these early films brought his African friends into the production process. Their participation and collaboration, in turn, was instrumental in pushing Rouch in more radical directions, with regards to both form and content.Footnote ¹⁹

Rouch’s groundbreaking feature-length “ethnofictions” of the later 1950s—that blended “semi-fictional flourishes into ethnographic documentaries in which Rouch’s camera came to play a self-consciously participatory role”—came to focus on intra-African migration from the interior to coastal cities for work and education.Footnote ²⁰ Rouch’s focus on the dynamism of colonial African society rather than the presumed stasis of African tradition was indeed a radical departure from traditional ethnographic filmmaking, a cinematic parallel to the same kinds of moves the sociologist Georges Balandier was making in Africanist ethnology at this time. As Justin Izzo notes, Rouch began to turn his camera “on bustling colonial and postcolonial urban centers and focusing on how young, usually male, Africans cultivate and negotiate complex and paradoxical relationships to labor and (neo)colonial capitalism, technology and modernity,” to capture how intra-African migrants “negotiate their adaptation to city life and, more broadly, to colonial, African, and global modernities.”Footnote ²¹

Rouch’s first foray into this other kind of ethnographic filmmaking came in 1954, when Rouch, Damouré, Lam, and Illo decided to make a film together about a group of Nigerien migrants making the arduous trek down the Niger River to Accra in the Gold Coast (contemporary Ghana) in search of work. The film drew on Rouch’s extensive fieldwork, but, crucially, it was his friends who first proposed the idea, and they played the lead characters themselves. After months of shooting, Rouch screened the footage for them to get their feedback, which he recorded and ultimately included in the final version of the film.Footnote ²² Such scenes of reviewing footage with his participants became a signature of Rouch’s films and a critical aspect of his conception of “shared anthropology,” in which “the anthropologist’s camera divests itself of some of its authority and enters into a dialectical and dialogic relationship with the people being filmed.”Footnote ²³

On the precipice of decolonisation, Rouch widely broadcast his innovative ethnographic method, which he framed as a moral imperative. In a televised interview that aired just months before African independence in 1960, Rouch explains that he always shows the rushes from his films to his African collaborators; if they see something they do not like he will cut it, even if he would prefer not to. He then mused rhetorically that if he did not bring them into the process, what right would he have to go there and film them for white audiences? His goal, he proudly declared, was “to give voice to an Africa that wants one thing: to express itself.”Footnote ²⁴ Rouch made similar remarks a few years later, from the other side of the late/post- colonial divide, while chairing the film jury of the 1966 Festival des arts nègres à Dakar. Rouch described the Festival as a major turning point in a televised interview from Dakar: “For me, this festival marks a transition, the transition from films made by non-Africans, myself included [with a wink and a chuckle], to the birth of African cinema.”Footnote ²⁵ That ostensible passing of the torch notwithstanding, Rouch continued to play an important role in the development of African film infrastructure as well as film production long after the end of empire. He played a major role in compiling the first inventory of ethnographic films made in Africa, published by UNESCO in 1967.Footnote ²⁶ He also served as the director of the Centre de recherche en sciences humaines in Niamey and founded a film production unit there.Footnote ²⁷

Rouch continued making movies with Damouré, Lam and Illo until the end of his life.Footnote ²⁸ The tremendous impact of those friendships on Rouch’s life and work cannot be underestimated. It was through interracial intimacy and friendship that Rouch first came to know and love Africa. Furthermore, it spurred him to live his whole adult life split between Paris and Niamey, and, as Paul Stoller has observed, it was “the compounding of this Nigerien-French experience that creates the stories projected in Jean Rouch’s films, giving them a narrative immediacy and power rarely seen in documentary cinema.”Footnote ²⁹ Most importantly, interracial friendship and intimacy incited his formal experiments and radical ethnographic method that transformed the traditional objects of ethnographic film into veritable subjects and co-producers of ethnographic knowledge. In sum, interracial friendship turned Rouch, ‘the perfect toubab,’ into a “cinematic griot” (Stoller’s phrase).Footnote ³⁰

The central role interracial friendship and intimacy played in his life profoundly shaped Rouch’s conception of racism generally as an interpersonal problem as opposed to a political one, and his own self-understanding as a non-racist. We can see this in the way Rouch talked about his early African career in French media. In a televised interview on the eve of independence, Rouch matter-of-factly relays that when he first went to Africa as a civil engineer, “it was the era of forced labour.” He leaves it at that, giving little indication whether he took issue with the coerced, extractive colonial labour regime.Footnote ³¹ What he could not abide, however, was the attitude of his colleagues who walled themselves off in “tragic isolation” from African society. Whereas Rouch was excited to learn something about “this Africa I knew nothing about,” he says most whites in Africa at the time saw themselves simply as “technicians” – excellent doctors, engineers, etc. – who had absolutely zero interest in who used their roads, bridges, and hospitals. He takes Albert Schweitzer as a prime example, who Rouch describes as “a great doctor who worked with Africans because they were sick but could not have cared less and was completely ignorant of Africans as social and cultural beings.” For that reason, Rouch says flat out, “He is a racist.” Schweitzer was a racist, Rouch continues, because he was a doctor who believed in the superiority of European medicine and who felt he had nothing to learn from Africans: “I think a person is racist in Africa if he goes there to teach something, to do his job, but he does not himself learn anything.”Footnote ³² Rouch returned to this theme in another televised interview the following year (this time, after independence), in which he decried the “spiritual imperialism” of the Albert Schweitzers of the world and called on Europeans to go to Africa to learn, not to teach, and discover everything that Africa has to offer global humanity. “That will come,” Rouch says wistfully, before invoking Léopold Sédar Senghor and their shared belief that “métissage is the future of the world.”Footnote ³³

Rouch’s public embrace of a truly reciprocal, Senghorian vision of métissage set him apart from his white French contemporaries, just as he surely was exceptional in befriending his African workers in “the era of forced labour.” But even at his most utopian, Senghor never lost sight of the structural transformations that his vision of métissage would entail and the concrete relations of power that stood in the way.Footnote ³⁴ Rouch, conversely, remained aloof to questions of politics and power. What’s more, he did not seem to have ever really wrestled with the extraordinary privilege he enjoyed in French Africa as a white Frenchman, to which he owed even his ability to make films. Despite all the talk about democratising the empire after the war, French Africans were legally barred from making their own films in France’s African territories throughout the late colonial period. Damouré Zika, Lam Ibrahim, Illo Goudel – they were only able to make films under Rouch’s authority and authorship. Rouch chose to work with his African collaborators, whereas if they wanted to make films, they had no choice but to work with Rouch.Footnote ³⁵

The prohibition on African filmmaking originated with the 1934 Laval Decree (promulgated by Pierre Laval, chief architect of France’s wartime collaboration with the Nazis and Vichy’s prime minister), which remained in effect until the dissolution of France’s African empire in 1960.Footnote ³⁶ The Laval Decree sought to prevent the production and distribution of films that might spread anticolonial or other subversive content in the colonies, and it required formal authorisation from the colonial government for any and all cinematographic or sound recordings. That the Laval Decree was upheld after the war is itself a testament to the ambivalence of late colonial reform. As James E. Genova observes, though “administrators in [AOF] suddenly found the prevailing racist representations of Africans and African culture that dominated movie screens before 1945 to be highly problematic, if not subversive vis-à-vis their interest in sustaining French power in the region,” that sentiment “did not alter the imperialist nature of the cinematic images produced or authorized in the late colonial period.” He continues, “The change in their perception was itself the product of a transformed political environment in the metropole and colonies after the war, but it reflected the continued desire to maintain the existing fundamental relationship between France and its overseas territories.”Footnote ³⁷ These tensions between rupture and continuity in postwar film politics in French Africa are emblematic of the aims of the late colonial project as a whole: to renovate the empire without destroying it, and to soften the hard edges of racist stereotypes of Africans without effecting any meaningful change in unequal distributions of political power and material resources between white French and Black Africans, thereby leaving Africans’ status at the bottom of social hierarchy in metropole and colony intact.

The Laval Decree was not an inert relic of a bygone era; it was an active and effective censorship tool in the 1950s French Africa. Two instances of its application warrant mention here. In 1949, the metropolitan Ligue de l’Enseignement commissioned twenty-one-year-old René Vautier, a hero of the Resistance and recent film school graduate, to make an educational film about the benefits of French colonialism to be shown to African schoolchildren. The assignment itself reflects the premium placed on the role of African education in the late colonial project. Vautier happened to arrive in Côte d’Ivoire at the peak of the vicious political repression of the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA), the most powerful African political party in French Africa at the time. Disillusioned and disgusted, Vautier went rogue and started making a film about colonial oppression. French authorities got wind of Vautier’s change of focus and tried to stop production, but Vautier was able to finish the project with clandestine help from Félix Houphouët-Boigny, RDA leader and future Ivorian president. When Vautier tried to release Afrique-50 the following year, he was hauled into court and convicted of violating the Laval Decree. In addition to hefty fines, he was sentenced to a year in prison (which he served in military detention facilities in metropolitan France and French-occupied Germany). Afrique-50 was banned in France for the next forty years.Footnote ³⁸

Not long after the Vautier debacle, Paulin S. Vieyra, the first African graduate of France’s premier film school, the Institut des hautes études cinématographiques in Paris, applied for permission to make a film in AOF. His proposed topic: the social transformations taking place among Africans who were attempting to adjust to modern, urban life after migrating from rural areas. It should be noted that Vieyra submitted his request in 1954, the same year that Rouch – at his African friends’ suggestion – pivoted to precisely this theme. While Rouch launched his project in total liberty, Vieyra’s proposal was rejected. Undeterred, Vieyra decided to make a film about African life in Paris, beyond the jurisdiction of the colonial authorities. The resultant 21minute film, Afrique-sur-Seine (1955), transposed the exploration of African modernity from colonial African cities to the French capital, but, as Genova suggests, the ultimate objective remained the same: to reclaim African sovereignty over the construction of images of Africa and Africans consumed by non-African audiences.Footnote ³⁹

Vautier’s Afrique-50 is widely recognised as the first French anticolonial film ever made, while Vieyra’s Afrique-sur-Seine is considered the first film ever directed by a Black African, thereby marking the inauguration of the history of independent African cinema.Footnote ⁴⁰ That neither mantle could be claimed by Rouch or his African collaborators is an important signal about their place in the late colonial cinema landscape across France and French Africa.Footnote ⁴¹ It follows, then, that Rouch’s most direct exploration of interracial friendship and Franco-African relations, La Pyramide humaine (1961), shot in Abidjan (Côte d’Ivoire) during the height of the decolonisation process, does not explicitly discuss the colonial relationship between France and Côte d’Ivoire or the cascade of major turning points in the run-up to African independence. Not even the Algerian War (1954-1962), the collapse of the Forth Republic and advent of the Fifth (1958-59), or the wave of African independences that occurred during filming (1960-1), are ever really explored in this film whose central goal is to use film and filmmaking as an incitement to interracial dialogue about Franco-African relations. Footnote ⁴² The result is a fascinating enactment of the strictures of late colonial race talk, and a revealing dramatisation of the racial subtext of the contingencies, complexities, and ambivalences of late colonialism more broadly.

‘No Racism for the Youth!’: The Late Colonial Politics of Race, Knowledge, and Interracial Friendship in La Pyramide humaine Footnote ⁴³

The original film poster for La Pyramide humaine (PH) boldly declares, “No racism for the youth!” The film tells a somewhat different story. The challenge of creating the conditions for meaningful interracial dialogue about race and racism among young people in late colonial Africa is on full display from beginning to end. In early scenes we see Rouch in separate meetings with white French and Black African high school students at the Lycée Cocody in Abdijan. Having learned that the two groups have virtually no social intercourse outside of school, Rouch persuades the students (all non-actors) to make a film with him about the prospect of their own racial integration. The result is one of Rouch’s groundbreaking “ethnofictions,” in which the students play fictional roles but use their real names in an improvised drama of their own creation about their lived experience.Footnote ⁴⁴

Though the students’ chosen story arc might strike viewers as derivative – a love triangle that hinges on sexual competition between white and Black male students over Nadine, a pretty new student from the metropole—the real drama lies in the heated, improvised conversations about interracial relationships and race relations in Africa more broadly that Nadine’s arrival sparks among the two groups. Some of the white students personify racist characters who rehearse longstanding colonialist and white supremacist tropes about Africa and Africans, while some of the African students’ characters playact at being unreflexively anti-white and anti-French.Footnote ⁴⁵ Their performances of colonial racism and African chauvinism stimulate debate and critique among the others, effectively creating a mini-public sphere within the world of the film that models what more frank Franco-African exchanges about race might look like.

Rouch frames those exchanges as reciprocal give-and-takes, just as he construes the root cause of the French and African students’ isolation from one another as the product of mutual incomprehension. However, what we actually witness as the students’ conversations unfold is starkly one-sided. In tense discussions about a variety of issues, from racial segregation and everyday racism in Abidjan to Ghanian independence and apartheid in South Africa, the African students display experiential knowledge of how race and empire works that their white peers clearly do not possess.Footnote ⁴⁶ Indeed, we see the African students constantly educating their white classmates about the realities of what Georges Balandier called “the colonial situation,” simply by telling them about their lives.Footnote ⁴⁷ In a poolside scene at Nadine’s parents’ villa in the white Plateau district, Denise, the lone female African student in the group, relays that she lives with an aunt in Treichville, the poor and peripheral “African quarter” of Abidjan. When Nadine naively asks her why she does not live with her parents, Denise explains that she is originally from the neighbouring colony of Upper Volta (contemporary Burkina Faso and parts of Niger), and that she had to migrate to Abidjan to pursue her studies because there is no high school there.Footnote ⁴⁸ In scenes like this one, we begin to glimpse how the girls’ budding intimacy also brings about a kind of poignant colonial education for Nadine, as she is made to confront the discomforting fact that racial segregation and wildly unequal social opportunities along racial lines were organising principles in late colonial French Africa.

The substance and subtleties of those improvised scenes are muddled by Rouch’s directorial and editorial choices. In voiceovers that bookend the film, we are told that offscreen the students became friends through the process of the film’s production. The opening sequence follows Nadine and Denise walking together on the Champs Elysées, peering into shopwindows and cafes before ultimately popping into a small cinema. Rouch narrates over these images: “This film is the difficult story of friendships between whites and Blacks. Denise and Nadine are now students in Paris. They are friends. But a year ago in Africa, even though they were students in the same high school, they didn’t know each other” (PH, 0:0:18-0:0:38).

At the end of the film, Nadine flies back to Paris, and Denise, along with fellow students Alain and Jean-Claude, see her off. Rouch trains his camera on the pair of male students, one white, one Black, hanging out and smoking a cigarette together as Nadine’s plane takes off in the distance. We watch them laugh, shake hands, and ride off together on a single bicycle, as Rouch resumes his commentary. Whatever happened in the film, whatever he himself as the director did, he says that clearly something real happened in the process of making the film: “Ten Black and white boys and girls, Africans and Europeans, learned to love, to get angry, and to know each other.” The next shot cuts to Denise as Rouch’s voiceover continues: “This improvised film achieved what several years in a common class never did. For these young Europeans and Africans, the word racism no longer has any meaning. The film ends here. But the story is not over.” The image then cuts to a close up of Denise, who picks up the narration where Rouch left off: “Our story is so much simpler, and more complicated, but it’s up to us, all of us, to write it. Now we are all parting, but this film has made friends of us all” (PH, 1:26:30-1:28:15) With that line, the image cuts to Denise, Nadine, and the two boys from the bicycle scene walking four abreast down a Parisian boulevard, as older white passerby turn their heads and frown at the unlikely foursome. Oblivious, the group continues on, and the film concludes with this “integration-poster-image,”Footnote ⁴⁹ as Denise glosses an African proverb about friendship in the final voiceover.

PH was shot mainly in Abidjan in the summers of 1959 and 1960 on the eve of African independence, with supplemental shoots and postproduction in Paris immediately after. As such, PH straddles the late/post- colonial divide and functions as a unique sort of cultural hinge, at once a late colonial and a postcolonial depiction of Franco-African relations. PH also marked an important pivot in Jean Rouch’s filmmaking career from Africa to France and ever-greater cultural prominence, which would ultimately boost PH’s cultural currency and give Rouch and his idiosyncratic ideas about the nature of contemporary racism a wider platform.

Rouch had gained notoriety and acclaim in rarefied academic and anthropological circles in France for his early ethnographic films, which pushed the boundaries of ethnographic filmmaking with their surrealist aesthetics and reliance and creative input from Rouch’s African participant-collaborators. His breakthrough into avantgarde French cinema came with Moi, un Noir (1958), his first full-length ethnofiction. That film (which directly preceded PH) follows a group of young Nigerien migrants in Treichville/Abidjan on their daily search for work and nightly alcohol-fuelled revelries. As in PH, the characters are non-actors who play themselves, but in Moi, un Noir they also adopt alter egos drawn from classic Hollywood: the star, Oumarou Ganda, styles himself as ‘Edward G. Robinson,’ his friend Petit Touré as ‘Eddie Constantine.’ In the film’s most powerful scenes, Rouch films Ganda and Touré, walking alongside them with a handheld camera of his own design, as they amble and monologue around the city. Ganda/Robinson’s improvised dialogue often returns to his stint as a colonial soldier in the French army during the First Indochinese War, and Rouch shows off the nimbleness of his lightweight camera as he captures Ganda’s lively reenactments of his experience of combat, fighting off anticolonial nationalists in the jungles of Vietnam.

Moi, un Noir profoundly influenced the rising cohort of directors of the French New Wave, and Jean-Luc Godard has widely acknowledged the film as the direct inspiration for Breathless (1959). As film scholar Laure Astourian has cheekily observed, the parallels between the two films are so numerous—the hand-held camerawork, jump cuts, monologues while walking, the focus on youth in the city, the looming influence of Hollywood—that Breathless could have just as well been called, ‘Moi, un Blanc’. Footnote ⁵⁰ It is a quintessentially late colonial irony that the French New Wave, which contributed to the coding of “French youth” in this period as presumptively white, had African roots, and that its first muse was a young Black veteran of France’s colonial wars, living on the periphery of colonial African urban modernity and just barely scraping by.Footnote ⁵¹

When Rouch returned to Paris from Abidjan in the summer of 1960, he began work on what is arguably his most famous film, Chronique d’un été (1961).Footnote ⁵² A collaboration with sociologist Edgar Morin and a touchstone of cinéma verité, Chronique d’un été (CE) follows Rouch and Morin as they try to create situations for a group of their young friends and collaborators to have frank conversations about current issues in French society—race, class, the Algerian War, decolonisation, Holocaust memory, among others—as well more personal reflections on their own lives and struggles.Footnote ⁵³ The film centres on the question of whether it is possible to ever really be oneself on camera. Mixing intimate one-on-one interviews in small interiors, ad hoc anonymous interviews with passersby on the street, and informal but carefully orchestrated group discussions, CE probes the limits of authenticity, self-presentation, and perception, as well as film’s potential as a vehicle for and provocation to personal, social, and societal transformation.

While those formal and theoretical preoccupations are somewhat removed from the particular problem of Franco-African relations, two of CE’s most gripping scenes spotlight interracial conversations. In the first, we see Angelo, a young, thoughtful white factory worker, in conversation with Landry, an Ivorian university student (who had also appeared in PH). Angelo’s genuine curiosity and excitement to engage in an open dialogue with Landry is palpable as Angelo peppers him with questions. The class and racial dynamics of the exchange are complex. Landry says he could not imagine wanting to work in a factory. Angelo heartily concurs as he describes the drudgery and dehumanisation of factory work but says he had no other option. Angelo then asks Landry if he suffers from an “inferiority complex” for being Black in France, to which Landry replies that he has a system – if a door opens up for him, great, if not, so be it, and he moves on (CE, 0:23:02-0:28:05). Angelo chuckles at that and says that is an admirable way to go through life, before quickly steering the conversation back to questions of class and the miserable state of French workers.

The question of racism comes up again in a later scene that begins with a montage of newspaper headlines about the worsening situation in the Belgian Congo before cutting to Rouch, Morin, and a larger group of white French and Black African youth, seated around an outdoor table. They first launch into a discussion of interracial sex and attraction across the colour line. In a particularly awkward moment, Marcelline, a Jewish Auschwitz survivor, plainly says she is not attracted to Black men. When some of the other young people push back, Rouch interjects, “So, you are a sexual racist?” She quickly says of course not, it is simply a matter of attraction. The conversation escalates from there, as Morin turns to the news of massacres of white colonists in the Belgian Congo and solicits different takes from the group. Nadine expresses horror at the violence but also sympathy for the Congolese. Rouch, who first met Nadine in Abidjan, asks her if she had ever been to the Belgian Congo and she says yes, reporting that she has seen firsthand how Black Congolese live under a cruel regime based on racist oppression. The camera then turns back to Rouch, whose expectant look conveys unspoken pressure for the Africans at the table to reciprocate that kind of “mutual understanding.” But Landry asserts himself and tries to take the conversation in a different direction. He explains that of course as an Ivorian he supports the Congolese, not on the basis of “race,” but rather because of their shared colonial experience. It is the colonial situation that has pitted whites and Blacks in Africa against each other, he insists, not some vague or mystical racial solidarity. Tellingly, just then Rouch interjects and effectively shuts down the conversation by asking Landry if he understands the meaning of the numbers tattooed on Marcelline’s forearm. The discussion then turns to the topic of Nazism and concentration camps (CE, 0:48:20-0:53:29).Footnote ⁵⁴

Film scholar Ivone Margulies has described PH and CE as “two laboratories of self-awareness.” Both films, she argues, “turn cinema into a stage for processing identity through attention to deliberating, reflective speech,” and “expose cinema’s ambition to be the prime medium for self-revision, to test and effectively promote authentic social relations.”Footnote ⁵⁵ She has a particularly trenchant analysis of PH that draws out the ambivalences of late colonialism: “The enactment of a new, integrated community in The Human Pyramid serves as a corrective to the government’s empty talk about a ‘French Community’ in its colonies. Aware that the ‘images of an European and African community (frequenting each other outside of the school) only took on value if they were considered a document,’ Rouch framed the film as a documentary on an experiment in sociodrama. He believed that the film could only make an impact if seen as a document of a process of self-consciousness about racism.”Footnote ⁵⁶ That conviction drove Rouch to manipulate the ostensible “documentary” aspects of the film much more so than he typically did. For one, Denise was not actually in the others’ class; a friend of Rouch’s, she had graduated lycée the year before. The settings were also ersatz. Margulies notes that the school scenes were filmed in a classroom made of wallboards on a construction site by the Abidjan lagoon over three consecutive school vacations, and later in a mock-up of the classroom in Gaumont Studios in Paris. In contrast to Moi, un Noir, in which Ganda really was playing himself and improvised all of his dialogue, the students in PH are playing characters. Moreover, Rouch did not shy away from shaping the narrative himself. Margulies emphasises that though Rouch always tried to avoid talking about it, he wrote Denise’s and Nadine’s voiceovers, “an authorial intervention,” Margulies suggests, “that, inasmuch as it channelled characters’ consciousness, advanced the fiction of the students’ ‘conversion.’”Footnote ⁵⁷

Margulies also draws attention to the way PH “oscillates between argumentation and idyllic pockets of coexistence and, unsurprisingly, such scenes hastily bypass conflict.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Rouch’s aversion to wading too deeply into political debates onscreen was clear to his collaborators; in a 2006 interview, Nadine Ballot, who appeared in both PH and CE, said that Rouch’s whole circle was quite removed from politics.Footnote ⁵⁹ Morin pushed Rouch to the brink of his comfort zone with the heated political exchanges in CE. With PH, Rouch had more editorial control and could repackage them to his liking.

In the most heated, explicitly political scene of PH, we see the students hanging around and talking in the ‘classroom.’ Denise picks up a foreign newspaper, whose front page is devoted to the violent suppression of a recent anti-apartheid protest in South Africa. She gets more and more animated as she complains that there is no coverage of it in the local press, and that France is not taking a stronger public stance against the regime. One of the African students says he thinks it is natural for France not to want to meddle in other countries’ affairs or bring the issue to the UN, because of the Algerian War (the only mention in the whole film). Newly arrived Nadine interrupts and asks naively about what is going on in South Africa. Denise goes on a long discourse about British and Dutch colonisation around the Cape and the origins of anti-Black racism (which she attributes to the Bible and the ‘Curse of Ham’). Some of the white students say they should be more focused on what is going on in Abidjan and the French Community; that whatever is going on in South Africa or Britain or elsewhere has nothing to do with them. Denise vigorously objects, insisting that the apartheid regime and the longer history of anti-Black racism are supremely relevant for what is happening in the French Community, which, she reminds everyone, is primarily populated by Black people. The conversation continues to escalate from there until an abrupt cut to an image of one of the white students standing by a film projector, as the camera pans to reveal the whole group, Rouch included, sitting close to one another, laughing, and gesticulating wildly, ostensibly discussing the screening of the scene. However, unlike in CE, which concludes with an extended scene of the film’s participants in a screening room engaging in long, animated exchanges with each other about the clips they just watched, we do not actually hear the debate among the students in the PH scene. Instead, we get another a voiceover from Rouch over the group’s indecipherable chatter, who redirects our attention away from the students’ “interminable political debates” and back to the film, and the fact that “they are now all friends.” “The film has turned fiction into a reality,” he tells us, before moving the narrative along to the denouement of the romance plot. Thus, we never get to know what the students actually thought of the exchange (PH, 1:06:19-1:12:25).

The sequence of the students’ conversation and the screening has been subject to contrasting interpretations. Paul Henley suggests that the scene got too heated for Rouch’s taste. For him, the abrupt cut to Rouch and the students looking at the rushes is an attempt to break the tension.Footnote ⁶⁰ Similarly, Margulies identifies this scene as “the film’s most explicit positioning of the French group’s ambivalence vis-à-vis Africa, and of the Africans vis-à-vis France.”Footnote ⁶¹ She considers the sequence as emblematic of the film’s ambivalent politics. Conversely, anthropologist Graham Jones has a more sanguine take. He reads the screening scene with Rouch and the students as indexing a “small, but seemingly real, public sphere the film helped create.” In that sense, Jones maintains, “Rouch’s camera was an instrument for liberating the imagination that fit scattered acts of play into a visionary epic of interpersonal and interracial exchange.”Footnote ⁶²

Viewers will surely find this scene, like PH as a whole, as open to interpretation, as all good art should be. However, most of the French public never saw the film in its entirety. Rather, they encountered clips excerpted from the larger work in various news magazines and longform explorations about race and Franco-African relations on French television. As we have seen, Rouch himself often appeared in these programs, and so his framing of the film’s message predominated. To take one example, Rouch was featured as a “scientific expert” in a 1961 hourlong program on racism in France. Rouch shares his conception of racism as mutual ignorance and incomprehension on an interpersonal level without any consideration of questions of power. He maintains, “On both sides [aussi bien de l’un côté à l’autre], there is the creation of these mythic figures, the white and the Black.” The show then immediately cuts to the early scenes in PH where the students, amongst themselves in their isolated racial groups, rehearse anti-Black and anti-French stereotypes. As Margulies has written of those scenes, while Rouch clearly believed “that by activating racist views consciously and through a scripted role, students can externalize and purge these ideas,” the scenes “could also confirm and heighten bias; imitation can describe a given state or influence and model future behavior.”Footnote ⁶³ Broadcasting those clips out of the ambivalent but still more complex context of the film, alongside a declaration of Rouch’s own narrow conception of racism, completely abstracts the problem of race from the colonial situation and concrete constellations of power. Little wonder, then, that the program ends with a voiceover from the showrunner exactly to that effect: “The truth is that we are all, more or less, in one way or another, a little racist.” Racism, he continues, “is as old as time,” and in the final analysis, “a personal affair, it is the conflict between ‘us’ and ‘us.’”Footnote ⁶⁴

This conception of racism as a matter of personal prejudice is directly at odds with the way French Africans understood it. For them, anti-Black racism was a specific, historically instantiated form of discrimination and inequality that was reflected not only in people’s attitudes and beliefs but in social relations and the distribution of material, political, and spiritual resources. Despite himself, Rouch vividly captures that disconnect in PH. Through his voiceovers and editorial choices, Rouch papered over the political and epistemological gulf between the French and African students, but it is unmistakably there. That foundational divergence in Black African and white French understandings of racism is precisely what made Franco-African consensus about what late colonial reform would really have to entail virtually impossible. Rouch and his work helped entrench a conception of racism in postcolonial French public discourse that undercuts anticolonial and antiracist critique. Africans and Afro-descendants in France continue to grapple with that legacy today.

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How have Africans reacted to Rouch’s work and viewed his legacy? Few take as strong a position as Ousmane Sembène, celebrated Senegalese author and filmmaker who is widely considered the ‘father’ of African cinema. In a heated 1965 exchange, Sembène accused Rouch of depicting Africans “like insects” onscreen.Footnote ⁶⁵ But many contemporary African filmmakers hail Rouch as a great champion of Africa, Africans, and African film. These more sympathetic critics are quick to note that Rouch’s earliest African collaborators became lifelong friends and creative partners, and that he spent his career promoting African filmmakers, actors, and technicians as well as the development of African film infrastructure. Successive generations of Nigerien filmmakers in particular proudly refer to Jean Rouch as the “grandfather of cinema in Niger.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Rouch’s local legacy and lasting affection towards him among friends, colleagues, mentees, and successors in Niger is on full display in Laurent Védrine’s 2017 documentary, Jean Rouch: un cinéaste aventurier. In an extended scene with Abdoulaye Boka, Nigerien griot and filmmaker, Boka performs an original composition about Rouch, singing in French as he strums his kora:

Sociologist Carmen Diop regards Rouch’s legacy similarly. In a 2007 piece celebrating Rouch’s idiosyncratic approach to ethnographic filmmaking, she insists that Rouch advanced African empowerment. She contests the idea that Rouch appropriated the right to analyse African cultures and speak on Africans’ behalf. “What strikes me as most important,” she writes, “was his commitment to his craft and to give his friends [‘copains’] in the South the means to produce their own discourse.” In that way, Diop argues, Rouch made an invaluable contribution to the development of knowledge from the Global South.Footnote ⁶⁸

What about African views of Rouch’s legacy in France? In one of Rouch’s few “African” films that mainly takes place in the Hexagon, the acerbic and darkly comedic Petit à Petit (1970), Damouré travels to Paris on a reconnaissance mission. He and Lam play directors of a booming import-export company in Niger, who hear a rumour that a competitor is planning to build a multistorey building in Niamey. So Damouré goes to Paris to study the city’s skyscrapers and consult with architects for advice on how to build their own such structure. The mission soon broadens to a more general investigation of French people and French life. In a particularly cutting scene, we see Damouré stopping white French passersby on the street, asking them to let him measure their skulls and inspect their teeth. Turning the ethnographic gaze back on itself, the film skewers colonial ethnography as one part of its broader satire of French-African relations.

A quarter of a century later, US-based Malian scholar and filmmaker Manthia Diawara sees himself following in Damouré’s footsteps as he boards a transatlantic flight from New York to Paris to make a film about Jean Rouch and “his people” in the opening scene of Diawara’s 1995 film, Rouch in Reverse.Footnote ⁶⁹ The film is both a critique of visual anthropology and an attempt to undo its most noxious tendencies in a method Diawara calls “reverse anthropology.” In an early voiceover, Diawara asks why even dabble with anthropology given its colonialist, racist, and paternalist history? He responds plainly: to gain knowledge, but also power. Power, he suggests, has always been the real advantage of studying other cultures. The driving question for him, he says, is to see whether Rouch’s “shared anthropology” could actually reveal something important about cultural relations between the “the powerful and the disempowered.” Diawara is keenly aware that his particular challenge on that score will be Rouch himself, who, Diawara notes, “is notorious for not answering questions and setting his own agenda.”

Later in the film, Diawara interviews a number of African professionals, students, and academics living in Paris, noting slyly that that was something Rouch rarely did. Their experiences are basically the same as the young Africans who came to France in the late colonial period: they have trouble finding housing, white people constantly stare at them and question or deny their Frenchness. “They know nothing about us,” one tells Diawara. “Despite all the progress,” another adds, “you always have the sense that we are poorly known.” With this scene, Diawara establishes the disconnect between Rouch’s sense of identification with Africa and Africans and the potential to overcome racism through interpersonal connections, and Africans’ continuing experience of isolation and exclusion in the French capital.Footnote ⁷⁰

Diawara’s film about Rouch, quite fittingly, ends on a similarly ambivalent note. In the late colonial period, Rouch invited Africans into the national conversation about racism, but it is unclear if he ever really heard or understood them. Diawara detects echoes of those same dynamics in his own experience, making a film with Rouch so many decades later. Diawara’s final voiceover is overlaid of images of himself, not with Rouch, but rather with Diawara’s African friends and informants, dining and laughing in a Parisian restaurant. His monologue begins, “With reverse anthropology, I have learned something about my informant, Rouch, and his people. But it was not always easy to maintain the power relationship of the scientist, between Rouch and I. Rouch was uncomfortable whenever I raised the question of politics. He liked joking with me, making references to my Malian identity, and introducing me as his ‘American friend.’ But he had some difficulty taking me seriously as a scientist.” The image cuts to an earlier shot of Diawara and Rouch walking around the Musée de l’homme (itself a reference to similar shots of Rouch and Morin in CE), then back to Diawara and his African friends. His voiceover resumes: “France is still a closed society with regard to Black people. The French are not used to seeing Africans in the role of university professors, filmmakers, actors, lawyers, and scientists. This surprised me, given the number of Africans trained at the Sorbonne. Reverse anthropology also taught me about my own privilege making this film, knowing that Rouch would have said no to many offers. I thank him for that.”