Studying Rouch, I came to wonder what effect the pairing of sociology/anthropology with cinema has on cinema-based scholarly writing concerning Rouch—considering "The 'Dialogic Imagination' of Jean Rouch" as a case study. The anthropological frameworks that are detailed in the studies on Rouch, specifically revolving around the idea of ethnography, seem more geared towards anthropology and the study of human beings rather than the study of cinema. Perhaps this is appropriate as Rouch was first an anthropologist and secondly a filmmaker. It is also possible that taking on such a large amount of information—including indigenous populations on camera, criticisms, documentary, and cinema—has found the ethnographic components of Rouch's work more important to foreground than simply their documentary-like form. While his films are important, they are hardly the first ethnographic films (as detailed in Heider's "A Hisotry of Ethnographic Film").
In considering Diane Scheinman's essay, my first questions arise in how exactly the dialogic is obtained through cinema verité and how this is new and different from a more objective, observational direct cinema. Scheinman quotes Baktin's idea that "A word, discourse, language or culture undergoes 'dialogization' when it becomes relativeized, de-priviledged, aware of competing definitions for the same things.[1]" This idea pertains to the 1960s era of decolonization in France that followed the problematic war in Algeria. The center / perhiphery relationship between France and its former colonies allowed Rouch to obtain this force of dialogism in his films. If there were not competing definitions of culture, there would be no discussion of dialogism. It is possible that the simple mechanism of a camera, whose history is so strong in France beginning with the Lumiere brothers in 1895, presents this dialogism even before any political issues of decolonization present themselves. More strongly stressed in Scheinman's essay however, is the idea of Eurocentrism working in contrast to native African cultures.
"As in his subsequent films, in Les maitres fous Rouch is concerned with the psychological impact of colonialism on indigenous populations and with the adaptive responses such cultural contact occasions" (192). This psychological impact works in Rouch's new de-eurocentrising developments in anthropology. Manifesting in films, this mix of redefining the study of anthropology mixes with defining a subgenre of cinema verite in the field of documentary is a dual development, but perhaps mixes issues of documentary with anthropology. This mixing in turn creates a converged medium of anthro-documentary that cannot be studied simply through cinema or simply through anthropology. Similar problems present themselves in other combinations of anthropological/sociological/cultural studies with film studies, highlighted by Willemen in his discussion on national cinemas: "the issues of the national and the international, and indeed of the colonial and the imperial, are present in film studies in specific ways that are different from those adopted, for instance, in anthropology or in comparative literature."[2] Willemen presents theoretical problems that there is not adequate time to consider in this brief essay. However, in keeping with this idea of a problematic consideration of anthropology within film studies or film studies within anthropology, I find it necessary to consider Rouch's filmmaking carefully. (This is perhaps analogous to the way in which Francois Truffaut is said to have called Night and Fog a meditation rather than a documentary in Van der Knaap's book).
At this point, I find it important to note that while Rouch worked closely with indigenous cultures in Africa, he was also concerned with western culture, as detailed in his focus on Paris in Chronicle of a Summer (1961). His multicultural focus in Chronicle is similar to the multicultural depictions of America in Reichenbach's films. However, in Chronique, there is a distinct psychoanalytic, "meta" study of cinema that does not exist in direct cinema filmmaking. Rouch, at the end of his film Chronique, acknowledges that there is an idea that the presence of a camera has an effect on people's action and continues to interrogate his subjects on their actions in front of a camera. While considering these more sociological effects of performance, Rouch was also considering the multicultural atmosphere of 1960s Paris. In mixing the two, his film becomes an ethnographic study of western culture. But it also studies the medium of cinema in an at once connected but distinct genre of study. Considering this mixing, we might apply the theory of dialogism in the teaching of Jean Rouch's films. While weighing upon the field of anthropology and presenting a new "shared" anthropology, Rouch mixes his fieldwork in anthropology with his own studies of cinema (in a meta-study of performance styles, effect of music on image, etc). This might be contrast against direct cinema filmmakers who took on fly-on-the-wall observational styles that were subjective in terms of where and how the filmmakers used their cameras but objective in terms of psychological analysis.
Curiously, the film careers of Rouch and Reichenbach began the same—at least in relation to sound. As detailed in Scheinman's essay on Rouch[3] and in a short biographical note on Reichenbach[4], both directors were disturbed by the addition of sound to their first silent films (which both had negative reactions from audiences who saw them first without sound), holding faith in image more than with music or words. However, finding added sound problematic, Rouch turned to synchronous sound while Reichenbach turned towards essayistic tendencies, presenting his "French," narrated perspective on a situation rather than an observational synchronity that occurred with synchronous sound. (Admittedly, self-identification with national cultures is another theoretical problem that there is no time for in this essay—but an important concept to take note of.) Curiously, the acknowledged subjectivity of music and "perspective" of Reichenbach's work present a study that is different from both direct cinema and Rouch's cinema verité. While Rouch's subjects are studied on film as creatures of their society, Reichenbach himself is the subject of study when considering anthropological approaches to his film. The idea that "the camera is never a neutral presence, but one that prompts constructions of 'reality' by those on whom it is turned[5]" might apply to both filmmakers, but in different layers of their own cinema.
-- Carrie Reese
[1] Dialogic 427 in Scheinman, Diane. "The 'Dialogic Imagination' of Jean Rouch: Covert Conversations in Les maitres fous." Documenting the Documentary. Eds. Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1998. Pp. 188-203.
[2] Willemen, Paul. "The National Revisited." Theorising National Cinema. Ed. Valentina Vitali and Paul Willemen. British Film Institute, 2008. Page 31
[3]Scheinman, 201
[4] Widhoff, Francoise. « Francois Reichenbach Vu par Francoise Widhoff. » Pamphlet. Francois Reichenbach : Hommage, Volume 2. DVD-PAL (Zone 2). BQHL Distribution. Page 5
[5] Scheinman, 194