Principles of

Visual Anthropology
Third edition

edited by
Paul Hockings

Mouton de Gruyter
Berlin New York 2003
Our Totemic Ancestors and Crazed
Masters

JEAN ROUCH

THE TOTEMIC ANCESTORS

It is not easy to write about what I would call a time for visual anthropol-
ogy. First, I must pay respects to my totemic ancestors, Gregory Bateson,
Margaret Mead, Marcel Griaule, and also to the pioneers of our discipline
who were not really anthropologists but yet were the fathers of anthro-
pological film: Robert Flaherty and Dziga Vertov. It is always difficult to
speak of another epoch long ago; but if we want to prepare a future we
have to refer to the past. In one of my films, Funerailles a Bongo: le vieil
Anai~ the old man says, "It's no more the time of old people, it's the time
of young people; it's no longer the time of young people, it's the time of
old people." It's his idea that old people are necessary to the young; that
the generations are like waves, and that at first when the wave has not yet
formed it's the duty of the young people to listen to what the old have to
say, then to roar forward into a surf, and to die on the sands.
When we see the film that Mead and Bateson made, showing a birth
(First days in the life of a New Guinea baby), we have to pay tribute to the
skill with which it was shot, using an old camera that needed rewinding
perhaps every 25 seconds. Similarly Flaherty was doing all of the labo-
ratory processing, and then screening his film day after day, as he was
shooting Nanook of the north. Why did these ancestors of ours feel the
visual image was so important?
In that same period European documentary filmmakers were sometimes
included in the post-war artistic movement. Joris Ivens, for example (also
one of our totemic ancestors), was shooting in the nineteen-twenties in
218 JEAN ROUCH

35mm. with a magazine holding one minute's worth of black-and-white

film . (His father owned a big camera shop in Amsterdam.) With this Agfa
camera he shot The bridge at Rotterdam; then with Henri Storck he shot
Borinage; later the camera was given to Mannus Franken who made some
of the first films in Indonesia; and later yet when he could afford a better
camera he gave Ivens' camera to Boris Kaufman and Jean Vigo, who used
it to shoot A propos de Nice, Zero de conduite, and L'Atalante. That is
the story of people who were sharing in an experiment; because they did
not think of themselves as professional filmmakers. Such people did not
really have a job: they were members of the "avant-garde". And I think
the same was true of Bateson, a man of very broad culture who was in fact
a philosopher. So too with Marcel Griaule, who was a poet at first, and
was in the Sun·ealistic movement. Such people worked in an atmosphere
like the Bauhaus, and were multi-talented. Thus they considered filming
as something like drawing, and were trained to do photography. (I too was
trained by my father to do watercolors, to draw and paint.) Marcel Griaule
was trained also as an aircraft pilot, and during the Second War in Africa
he was doing aerial photography right above the Dogon in a small French
military plane. He was ready to shoot films from the air too, but the plane
was too unsteady.
Such people were ready to do the necessary pioneering work; whereas
today's young people are not so willing to cook the dinner although they
are willing to eat it.
We have to determine how the shift away from this situation came about.
Perhaps something can be learnt from my personal experience. When I was
at the Engineering School (Ecole des Ponts et Chausees de Paris) I trained
myself in film art. I joined the Cinematheque fran~aise in 1937, founded
just the year before by Henri Langlois; and every week we went to a small
screening-room where Langlois was screening films, the entire repertoire
of French film culture. This was very important in my development: it was
from him that I first learnt about film art and the film industry.
Then at the beginning of the Second War I was in the army, fighting
against the Germans, and soon all our ideas about the superiority of the
French army were suddenly destroyed. I thought what was happening was
an impossible thing: I had seen older people who during the terrible First
World War had lost an arm, whose lungs were seared by the mustard gas, or
who were blind veterans, and we thought it so unbearable ... In Britanny,
in 1941, I had been arrested by the Germans together with my friends
Jean Sauvy and Pierre Ponty. We had departed together to become civil
engineers in West Africa. We had fought together in the same branch of the
Army Engineers. And we returned together to a liberated Paris to take the
Our Totemic Ancestors and Crazed Masters 219

same courses in anthropology and philosophy. Maybe my strength came

to me when, at the end of the war, I realised I was still alive and was full
of joy. To awake in the morning and know you don't have to rush into
battle any more is an exhilirating feeling. Richard Leacock had the same
sort of experience in Burma. Maybe the Japanese people had been through
a similar hell, and that is why filmmakers like Junichi Ushiyama felt it was
important to make anthropological films, to do something totally different
overseas.
It was just after the Second World War when I started to make films.
Now among the prophets I recognize there was Andre Leroi-Gourhan,
who was at the Musee de !'Homme in Paris. He decided just after the war
to give advanced technical training to anthropology students beyond the
M.A. level, and also to train them as filmmakers. He therefore opened the
first school at the Musee, having students during the decade that followed
the war make some documentaries for training purposes: they were making
short films in 35mm., using a tripod, and following a little story, as Flaherty
had done.

NURTURING A BABY HIPPOPOTAMUS

My professor, Marcel Griaule, said to me that since I had decided to canoe

down the Niger River I would have to take a camera with me, and a
recording machine. I was ready to do this, of course, but when I asked
what kind of machine he meant, he said that he used an old Edison wax-
cylinder recording machine.
And he added that maybe he would give me his camera: it was an old
35mm. camera weighing some 20 kilos. Fortunately one of my friends,
Edmond Sechan, was a cameraman, and he told me to go to the Paris
flea-market where I could find a Bell & Howell. 16mm. machine which
the American news photographers had used during the war. For less than
$200 I bought a wonderful Filmo-70 camera with very good Cook lenses,
which I had to rewind every so often; and it was with that camera that I
discovered how to make films.
In the beginning, then, I had to make a film using shots that would last
only 20-25 seconds, and with reels that had to be changed after 3 minutes.
It also had a turret with two lenses, 25 mm. and 50mm., which sometimes
had to be changed too.
My first discovery was that while you are rewinding you must think
at the same time. Thus I found that I was editing the film while actually
shooting it. As I often tell students, it's very good to be trained in this
220 JEAN ROUCH

sort of thing, because anthropologists so seldom are. In anthropological

fieldwork you are collecting data and writing them in a notebook, yet you
are never doing the analysis on the spot that you are obliged to do while
shooting a film. This is much less true with a video camera today, which
permits uninterrupted shots of 10, 20 or even more minutes' duration.
When I told Griaule that floating down the Niger might take six months
to a year, he said, "I think it's a stupid idea, but you have to do it because
you are young. Try to stop sometimes for a week or two and do a survey."
And so, with Jean Sauvy and Pierre Ponty, my two old friends from the
Engineering School, I did just that. We lived on the river for nine months,
travelling on foot, on raft and canoes as we followed it down from its source
at the frontier of Guinee and Sierra Leone, to the Delta 4,200 km. away in
Nigeria. Since Griaule had told me to "film everything" as we descended,
I filmed the right bank, where the landscape was moving from left to right,
and the left bank, where it moved from right to left - impossible to edit
together!
Following Griaule's suggestion we stopped from time to time, and so
were able to visit the village of Ayorou which I knew very well, because
in 1941 I had constructed the road through it from Niamey to Gao; a
little village surrounded by fast, clear water, where one could find herds of
hippos living in the backwaters . The people on the banks and the islands
there were the descendants of great traditional hunters of the animal who
used harpoon and spear. The Sorko fishermen told about this hunting and
how the hunters, who called themselves Faran Maka Hama, were descended
in a direct line from Faran Maka, the hero who around the seventh century
had come up the Niger River with his flotilla of hunting canoes from its
juncture with the Benue River (which they had used as a river route all
the way from Upper Egypt) right up to Gao, which was founded by the
hero, to Timbuktu and the fossil delta of the Niger River, where he threw
himself upon the Bozo fishermen .
With these Sorko people we decided to film the traditional hippopotamus
hunt, just as it had been described by the Arab geographer el-Bekri when
he had passed that way nearly ten centuries ago.
When we returned to Paris with a black-and-white film that was to be-
come Au pays des mages noirs, there was no other edited material available
in 16mm. We ran the film through a projector, we stopped it, then we over-
lapped one shot with the next one and, after scraping off the emulsion of the
latter with a razor-blade, stuck the two pieces together under the pressure of
a thumb! In this way I was able to prepare a half-hour version for the First
International Congress of Films on Ethnography and Human Geography,
which was organized in 1947 by Andre Leroi-Gourhan, then Sub-Director
Our Totemic Ancestors and Crazed Masters 221

at the Musee de l'Homme along with Claude Levi-Strauss. By some mira-

cle our film received the approval of our professors and colleagues. It was
during this event that we discovered Tjurunga and Walkabout, the first
films that Charles P. Mountford had made on Central Australian Aborig-
ines; and they opened our eyes to the ethnographic quality of Kodachrome
color film. At this Congress too, another viewing of Flaherty's Nanook of
the north offered an unforgettable lesson to all.
When Griaule saw iny first film he thought I was lost to Anthropology:
he was in some ways envious, for he had himself made some films among
the Dogon (Au pays Dogan and Sous les masques noirs). These were
shown for a week or so in a theater, and then closed. I denied that I
was through with anthropology; under Griaule I had started on a doctoral
dissertation, and now I completed it without even making mention of my
films (something that would have been taboo at the Sorbonne). I was only
the fifth person in France to get a Ph.D. in Anthropology: the first had been
Marcel Griaule (a student of Marcel Mauss), then Andre Leroi-Gourhan,
Claude Levi-Strauss, and Germaine Dieterlen. At about that time Leroi-
Gourhan wrote, a propos my film, "All technical work is a drama, the 'play
between man and matter' which only the cinema can reconstitute."
The musicologist Gilbert Rouget had invited to the Musee de l'Homme
screening some young French musicians who were much taken with New
Orleans jazz and who played at the end of each afternoon in a basement
of a Latin Quarter hotel, the Lorientais (calling themselves Claude Luther
and his Lorientais). They asked me to project my film there silently, while
giving a live commentary on it. The young pianist, Claude Azzi, was very
enthusiastic and spoke to his father about the film; that man happened
to be the production manager of Actualites fran~ais, a film company. He
decided to distribute the film, and blew it up to 35mm. so that it could
be projected in theaters. This was the first 16mm. film to be so treated in
Europe. The film rights were very fairly bought from us, and we got 60
percent of the box-office, but on the other hand the film company reserved
the right to edit, add sound, narration, titles, according to their require-
ments; and they did. Thus we finished Au pays des mages noirs, which
was shown in the same program with Roberto Rossellini's Stromboli. My
material was no longer presented chronologically, however: for example,
the possession ritual in which the fishermen asked the River Spirit for per-
mission to take part in a hippopotamus hunt was now put after the hunt
itself, as if it were offering thanks to the god, because, said the producer,
it was more spectacular that way. And the insertion of stock shots taken
out of safari movies, showing antelopes, lions, leopards and so on, was
done without consulting me. The sound track made heavy use of "Persian
222 JEAN ROUCH

Market" music (what filmmakers call jam music). The commentary, done
like a sports announcement, was given by a well-known radio commenta-
tor who broadcast the Tour de France cycle race every year, thus making
a stereotypical text even more ridiculous. And the title which replaced my
own simple one (Hippopotamus hunting with a harpoon) seemed insulting
to us. The film, shortened from half an hour to twelve minutes, closed with
the cliche observation: ''This is darkest Africa, ageless Africa!"
Nevertheless this first film covers in synopsis the subjects of all my later
films in the Niger Valley, namely possession ritual and hunting. There too
we see the first manifestations of the Hauka cult which I was later to film
more effectively in Les maftres fous at Accra.

THE CRAZED MASTERS

I had discovered ethnology when, as a public engineer in August 1942,

lightning had struck our work-site and killed ten people. A young Sorko
assistant there who would \ater appear in the hippo-hunting film introduced
me to his grandmother, who led me to see one of the most extraordinary
possession rituals I have ever witnessed, a ritual of desacralization about
which I understood nothing. Yet when I look at this first film again, there is
a moment in it when the woman Hawa who is almost entering a possessed
state, before throwing herself down in front of the orchestra, puts one hand
in her mouth and she looks at us. This gesture suggests to me a sort of
question that might be posed by a sphinx. I still don't know how it is that
people are able to transform themselves simply through bodily techniques
that we have altogether lost the secret of.
After some fifty films showing possession I have no more idea than I
did at the outset as to what the techniques of possession are. At first we
thought these rituals were essentially therapeutic, that they were for curing
purposes. Today we think there is more to it than that: if this is therapy,
then it is group therapy, social curing, as well as individual therapy; for
example, the possession of the Hauka cult, which was a reaction against
the colonial power of the British and French authorities.
The latter part of my first film deals essentially with possession ritual.
The orchestra is made up of a group of calabash drummers and a man
playing a ratchet, whose rhythm accompanies the melody of an old mono-
chord viol, the godye. The men and women who dance together represent
the horses of the gods. There are three movements in the dance: the windi,
a cycle of concession in which the horses, that is to say the possessed
persons, together turn in an anticlockwise direction; the gani which is a
Our Totemic Ancestors and Crazed Masters 223

particular dance for each spirit listening, in which the horses dance to the
music of whoever will be their future rider; and the fimbyan, rolling the
head around in front of the orchestra which in general leads to possession.
The people who take part in these dances are of both genders, all ages, all
social statuses: something which is most unusual in a society that has been
subjected to Islamic discipline for more than a century. One mother dances
with her child on her back. A woman named Hawa ("Eve") comes to a halt
in the middle of the dance area: she is at the same time herself, a village
housewife, a horse, and the rider, who is Harakoy Dikko, the water spirit,
who begins to possess her, while the other horses continue to dance around
her. The Sorko priest, waving his hand around, tells her the sayings of her
spirit, Harakoy Dikko. Then the woman weeps, throws herself about, and
is possessed. She is no longer Hawa, but the River Spirit. The violinists
are only playing music of Harakoy Dikko. But some other horses are also
possessed, some of them by new, modem spirits, the Hauka, the "crazed
masters".
They were still very rare at this time in the villages of Niger, but rep-
resented shifts in the traditional pantheon, the new "gods of power", the
genius of French and British colonial rule, the spirits of technology whom
one could easily recognize because they behaved like Europeans - they
had brusque gestures and always seemed to be angry, just as Europeans
were supposed to be. They burnt themselves with firebrands because they
did not fear fire. They slobbered greatly because of the tongue stirring up
saliva to create a kind of emulsion like mayonnaise! That is the distinctive
sign of their possession.
In the middle of all this tumultuous disorder, Harakoy Dikko gives his
assent to the Sorko fishermen: they may harpoon just one hippopotamus.
That then is the end of the possession. Hawa, who was possessed by the
Water Spirit, falls to the ground and coughs: in this way the spirit leaves
a body it is possessing. We no longer see Harakoy Dikko, master of the
Niger River, but Hawa, the mother of a family. The next day the village
has resumed its calm appearance, and none of the possessed remembers
the trance of the day before. Anyway, the Sorko can go ahead with their
preparations, as they have received the agreement of the spiritual master
of the river through the possession ritual.
Later, in 1951, I went back to the Niger to make a second film about
hippopotamus hunting, because I was really ashamed of the first one: I
now disagreed with everything in it, the narration, the music, and so on.
Previously I had shot in black-and-white, but I'm not a very good pho-
tographer, and so now I switched to Kodachrome. Framing in color is so
much easier!
224 JEAN ROUCH

Three years later, I went back to the island of the Sorko fishermen,
showed them this new color film, and for the first time they understood
what I was doing with this strange machine that was always in my hand.
They saw their own image in the film, they discovered film language, they
looked at the film over and over again, and suddenly they started to offer
criticisms, telling me what was wrong with it. This was the beginning
of anthropologie partagee, a sharing anthropology: we suddenly shared a
relationship. I gave them my Ph.D. thesis, and the books I had written
about their culture, but they had no use for them. If only you can go back
to a people with a screen, a projector and an electric generator, you have
your passport to them. As time goes on, the film acquires more and more
value: the people recognize faces from the old days, and they weep and
wail. In my case the women came up and thanked me for showing them
that their husbands had indeed gone on the hunting parties - as they
had claimed at the time - and were not dallying with maidens in other
villages. It was very important for these women to see their husbands out
hunting: they were excluded from the activity themselves, but knew it was
dangerous, and now saw their menfolk in a more heroic light. The hunters
themselves asked why I had used this inappropriate music while showing
the hippopotamus hunt? I told them it was the "Gawe-gawe" which gives
courage to hunters, and seemed very appropriate to me. They said it would
more likely give courage to the hippopotamus, and he would escape! So
now I made my next film, Bataille sur le grand fleuve, and today it is a
sort of classic. It has been shown repeatedly on television in Niger, and all
the young boys there know the story of Lam, of Damoure, of Daouda the
fisherman, of hunting the big hippopotamus: it's a part of their tradition.
When the first signs of the Hauka cult emerged back in 1927, the colonial
administration was opposed to them and wasted no time in banning the
rituals as causing disorder. The persecution of the Hauka, like all religious
persecution, merely augmented the prestige of the new gods, who thereby
became gods recognized (in this sense only) by the French and British who,
in proscribing them, gave them their letters patent. So I quickly realized
the importance of doing a film on the subject.
When I was in Accra in 1954 some migrants from Niger were living
there. In that period Accra, capital of the Gold Coast, was also the Mecca
of the Hauka cult, its chief religious center. Some of these people had
come to see my earlier film at the British Council, and after the screening
they asked me to make another film with them, which they could later use
in their own possession rituals. This was how Les maftres fous came to be
made. We really do not know what the consequences would have been of
a ritual projection of Les maftres fous by the Crazed Masters themselves:
Our Totemic Ancestors and Crazed Masters 225

the film was banned right away by the British as "an insult to the Queen"
and because of its "cruelty to animals". This "insult" was because the
film shows an egg being broken on the head of an image representing
the Governor-General, in imitation of the real Governor-General's plumes
cascading over his ceremonial helmet; the "cruelty" came in the form of
the bloody sacrifice, dismemberment, and cooking of a dog, and its public
consumption by members of the sect. Nevertheless their devotion to the
most violent images had a very stimulating echo for me. Today, there are no
new Hauka spirits and the former ones have already become embedded in
the traditional mythology - they have become the rowdy sons of Dongo,
the thunder god - and the film is no longer banned at the Sorbonne or
in black African cinemas as it had been for many years. We now find that
this particular film is one of the very rare audiovisual documents of what I
might call the "concept of colonial power", as it was understood by adepts
of the Hauka cult. It lets us sketch a theory of that concept in nonliterate
societies. The possession dance is based on the collective participation of
people- "horses", priests, musicians, villagers or urbanites- in a legend,
a conception, of a historic event.
This profound improvisation, if it is rejected (leaves no collective trace)
is an example of the trance of separation also seen among the possessed
people of Maradi in Eastern Niger under the influence of a hallucinogen of
the datura family. On the contrary, if the possession is shared by members
of the public who are amongst the faithful, it becomes the progressive
ritual elaboration of a myth, of an object of belief, a conception.
That is how Les maftres fous, long rejected by the Africans, has now
become a historic film giving a rather precise image of what British and
French colonialism was.
A young Niger anthropologist had the first insight into the true meaning
of this film. During 1960 Inoussa Ousseini, a student at the Niamey Lycee
(in the Republic of Niger) started a film club there, and every week he
showed the final-year students films borrowed from all the new embassies
in Niger. In this way Les maftres fous appeared in his program. For him,
a native of Manga, in Bornu, in the extreme east of Niger, it was a real
discovery, because his people did not practise these ritual possessions.
He was like an ethnologist discovering the ritual and culture of another
people. And perhaps too there was some regret. But in the most active
small town of his region, Zinder, there existed a popular theatrical festival
which seemed to him very close to the enigma of the Crazed Masters. If
amongst them there was possession, violent trance, sacrifice, here there
was just one yearly performance in which the entire population took part
in a theatrical re-enactment of an il)1portant historic event, whether real or
226 JEAN ROUCH

imagined. The name of this festival, and the film he made of it, is Wasan
kara, which means "straw game", a fragile game of which there remain
afterwards only a few broken whisps of straw. When Ousseini filmed the
event men who on the great day played the roles of Prefect of Police,
President of the Federation of Nigeria, or his A.D.C., had to abandon their
splendid uniforms the next day to become teachers, butchers or tailors
once more. But between them and their role models, who would have
been a little wary of taking part in a parody of themselves, there sprang
up relations of kinship and joking. It was the birth of catharsis.
For me today this Wasan kara film is a profane echo of the bloody ritual
in Les maftres fous. That the film was made by a young man of Niger with
a local cameraman and recordist represents the first proof of the vitality
of our discipline. In less than fifty years we have been able- to transfer
our techniques into the hands of those who up to now were the passive
subjects of a foreign cinema.

WORLD RENEWAL

It is very important to have a visual anthology of ethnographic films.

As Robert Flaherty wrote many years ago: "The cinema of the future
will be made by amateurs, people who like what they do". I consider
myself as an amateur in this sense. I was an amateur in anthropology too,
studying only what I wanted to: possession rituals, funeral rituals, and
something about migration. Richard Leacock did exactly the same thing.
John Marshall, one of the most extraordinary anthropological filmmakers, is
the best example of this attitude; even though while at the Peabody Museum
in Harvard University he was constantly under pressure to complete an
advanced degree and cease being a mere amateur.
From the very beginning I had some trouble with the technical trade
unions, because they thought it was a shame that the film industry should
give any money to a man who was so visibly and arrogantly "outside the
system". Had I made my films in France their criticism would no doubt
have been apt; but I was lucky to start this work in tropical Africa, which
was a long way off. For ~xample, just before I made my first film, some
French anthropologists went to the pygmies with a big crew of professional
filmmakers; this was the Ogooue-Congo Expedition, which included the
ethnomusicologist Gilbert Rouget, who made the first good sound record-
ings in a field situation, using a new disc recording-machine weighing a
ton. They stayed with the pygmies for three months, and shot some very
fine film with beautiful sound; and amidst all of their complicated 35mm.
 lj
I

Our Totemic Ancestors and Crazed Masters 227

equipment there was a filmmaker who started to write all the story of the
film, as the documentarists did at this time. So, when a hunter was killed
by a gorilla they did not, would not film it, because it was not in the script!
This film was screened later along with my own film by Leroi-Gourhan,
who commented that although the Congo film was very impressive tech-
nically, it lacked something else that was to be seen in my film ... I was
very lucky that the professional cameramen there at the time also recog-
nized that I was doing important experimental work, and so told the trade
unionists that they should leave me alone.
I had the professional card of a cameraman from the start, though it was
very difficult to get in France, because one first had to make three films as
an assistant cameraman and two more as second cameraman. But I was a
pioneer in 16mm.: all the other cameramen were shooting in 35mm.
At the end of the 'Fifties I went to a small meeting in Locarno, where
I met Stefan Kudelski, who was then trying to market the earlier Nagra
tape-recorder. He saw some of my films there, and decided to give me
the latest Nagra as an experiment, to see if it would still be working after
a season in Africa under tropical conditions; and it was. The same thing
happened to me with Andre Coutant, who was developing the 16mm Eclair
camera. I was using this equipment under very bad conditions, and I was
also pioneering in the sense that throughout the 'Fifties I was dreaming of
producing synchronous-sound films. The time had come for this: Leacock,
Pennebaker and others who already had lightweight equipment wanted to
achieve the same thing.
This wonderful dialogue between industry and art is now at an end.
When I was working with Coutant and Kudelski, industry was ready to
help us; today they only want to sell us standard equipment.
I never went anywhere to teach, but always to learn: as an anthropologist,
you have to learn from other people. When I taught a summer school at
Harvard, I learnt a great deal from the American students. And when I went
to Ghana for the first time I was driving a station wagon, and at this time
Lam was only a young cook, but I let him drive too; and next thing he said
to Damoure Zika, "I could take the camera and film too!" I think it is very
good to go to such places and show people that they can indeed make films.
Unfortunately now the tools for this have become very complicated. It's
very sad that specialization has taken over everywhere, in flying aeroplanes,
in getting a book published, in writing for the professional journals too.
When I go back to this period over forty years ago I think the first thing
of importance to our discipline was the revolution in the Italian cinema
after the war: Rossellini, Fellini and others wanted to make films but had
little money to do so, and they decided to shoot outside the Rome studios.
228 JEAN ROUCH

This was Italian Neo-Realism, which shot films outdoors without the sound,
and then added the sound with the help of fantastic lip-sync. actors. The
second factor was the revolution in America, when Leacock and others
decided to do away with booms (" fishing-rods", some called them) and
use the "gun" microphones instead, holding them at hip level instead of
above the heads, thus avoiding lots of problems with shadows. The third
revolution came from the production of synchronous-sound equipment that
would be light and portable.
When I showed my first film to villagers in Niger, only about ten people
in the audience had ever seen a film before, and yet they quickly discovered
the flaw in my use of music during the hippopotamus hunt. And then a
man there said: "You made a film about hippo hunting. Come to my place.
I am a lion-hunter. Lion hunting is much better!" So that was the beginning
of a new film (The lion hunters). Damoure Zika was one of the fishermen
there. He was so proud playing with the baby hippopotamus in Bataille
sur le grand fleuve, and he wanted to make another film. At that time I
was thinking of going to Accra, to make a film on the Hauka cult. So
Damoure said to me, "Let'<; make a film about migration, those people
who're going to Accra." And that became Jaguar. All of this followed
from having projected that film in the village: suddenly everyone was free.
They were so happy to see the film over and over: such a thing never
happened over a book in the entire history of anthropology.
When I told this to Marcel Griaule he was very envious, because he had
never had an opportunity to screen his films for the Dogon, which were
in 35mm. At this time he knew that his days were numbered, for he had
already had two heart attacks. He said I was not a very good anthropologist
but I was a good ethnographic filmmaker, and he hoped I would have the
chance to make a film about the Sigui, this extraordinary ritual which the
Dogon have to perform every sixty years ...
So after his death I went back to West Africa with Germaine Dieterlen.
I was not happy about changing my field to the Dogon, because I am not
very good at languages. Worse yet, there are something like ten dialects
in Dogon; but I decided to accompany Germaine anyway to make the
film. We knew the Sigui was going to happen some years after Griaule's
death, and that it was very important. But I did not know why it was
important. It was fantastic that it was now going to happen again, as the
last one had been around 1910, but in the 1960s Mali had a socialist
government which would have nothing to do with tribalism and the old
animistic cults. Yet they gave permission, and we were so moved the first
year when we shot ( 1966) this totally strange ritual. It was nothing like
what Griaule had described, based on data he had collected twenty years
Our Totemic Ancestors and Crazed Masters 229

after its previous performance. We were absolutely astonished, and were

discovering something fantastic: we were in ecstasy. The second year we
came back and filmed again, and this time the ritual was closer to Griaule's
description . Now I was a member of the Sigui cult, and could enter the
cave of the masks where there was an unpainted "big mask". A year later
when I made the third film in the series, the mask was painted; and as
Griaule had described it, but according to the style of Bongo. I could see
no relationship between the third film and the previous two, but when all
three were screened for the people in Bongo there was great enthusiasm,
a mingling of joy and death (for the village chief had just died). We were
all very sad. We were doing two months' preparatory work so as to shoot
the fourth year of Sigui, but found the Dogon elders reluctant. Germaine
thought it was because in screening film that showed dead people alive,
we had broken some taboo. But the new chief of Bongo said that if we
wanted to go to Amani, we would have to ask the Pale Fox. I went to
the Pale Fox and was quite afraid to ask, but the diviner gave the answer:
"You can go there, but you'll have a lot of problems." And in fact we had
lots of trouble with the camera, the car, ar.d so on, when we filmed this
fourth year of Sigui. It was not the same ritual: the masks and costumes
were different.
I was becoming weary, spending three months every year with the Do-
gan, and my friends in Niger wondered why I wanted to go among "slaves
from the mountains" when I could be staying with them, "free men on
the River". But whe.n I saw the rushes from the fourth year, I started to
understand. I said to Germaine that every year is a new part of the ritual,
and only in the seventh year will we have the key that unlocks the mean-
ing of the entire cycle. So every shooting had an element of adventure
about it: we discovered that the first three years of Sigui were a ritual of
death and the four following years the ritual of a new life, the life of a
new generation. Then we asked some Dogon to come to Paris, and we
worked together at the editing table. The first year of Sigui portrayed the
death of the first man, the second was his funeral, the third was the end
of the death period, the fourth was the procreation, the fifth was the birth,
the sixth motherhood, and the seventh year was the circumcision. So this
fantastic ceremony was telling the story of all creation, over a seven year
period.
We went back to the Dogon later and screened all of the film; then
Germaine started working with them again. They stated very candidly:
"All this will have to be compared with the next Sigui - sixty years
from now". Without knowing it, they had foreseen the anthropology of the
future, one which uses such films as audiovisual archives. We decided to
230 JEAN ROUCH

train young anthropologists to go on filming the Sigui sixty years later,

since Dieterlen and I would no longer be there. Now we are preparing for
the Sigui of 2026, just as Griaule too had looked to the future Sigui, and
this gave a new dimension to everything.
My group of assistants from Niger were Moslems, but they became
very enthusiastic about the project, and one of them exclaimed, "That's
really Africa! We need nothing to do with Islam: look, these people are
so happy, they have all the knowledge of the world!" There was a sharing
of that knowledge, and it came about only because I brought a camera
to the Dogon. I was really very lucky to be stimulated by a professor
who was a poet, and was somewhat envious of me, yet encouraged me to
try to understand this extraordinary ritual which indeed he had never seen
himself. Perhaps the lesson of all this is that you cannot create a real visual
anthropology in one generation.
We decided to train two young people to film this new Sigui, Philippe
Lourdou and Nadine Wanono. As Philippe shot a film on the Bozo fish-
ermen, Nadine made a film among the Dogon which was not particularly
good, and other young filmmakers were ready to discourage her from fur-
ther efforts. It is strange that they can be so envious. What happened though
is that in the mid-1980s I was ready to leave for the Dogon with Germaine
when she broke her leg the day before the departure and went to hospital.
She had two surgical interventions under total anaesthesia, and this when
in her eighties. With the blessing of the doctors, and between the two op-
erations, we screened Nadine's film for Germaine in her hospital room.
Germaine's reaction was, ''I'm very tired, and I'm suffering a lot, but this
film has to be corrected. We'll talk again about this soon, so bring the
film back after a month. We'll go back to the Cliffs of Bandiagara yet."
The doctor approved of her spirit. Then one day Germaine said to me,
"Let's try and call the Dogon: there's a new telephone kiosk in Songo."
So I called them, and said I wanted to speak with Dyamguno. They said,
"Call back in ten minutes," and in no time Dyamguno was on the phone
with Germaine, and she was sitting up on the side of her bed ready to go.
She begged him to come to Paris, and we were in fact able to send him
a ticket so that he could be with Germaine for three weeks. She returned
to her flat, and every morning for those three weeks Djiambuno walked
around the block with her. They looked at all of the Dogon films, includ-
ing Nadine's, and by the time he returned home Germaine was walking
properly, although with a stick. But this shows the tremendous importance
of enthusiasm, something I have learnt from visual anthropology and have
tried to pass on to others.
Our Totemic Ancestors and Crazed Masters 231

Nowadays there are only four or five universities in the world that are
training students in visual anthropology, in how to handle a camera, shoot
film, and follow the whole process through. It is particularly urgent that
such training be given. I have the impression that the younger generation
are making films less and less, but are writing more and more about the
subject instead. This could mean that instead of shooting over 110 films
(as I did) they will shoot just four or five films.
And this is a dangerous trend. But, even if there will be only one or two
filmmakers of the third generation (Nadine and Philippe) ready to shoot
the next Sigui in 2026, from my point of view it means that the time for
visual anthropology is coming. 1

FILMOGRAPHY

DUPONT, JACQUES, PIERRE GAISSEAU, EDMOND SECHAN, GILBERT ROUGET

1947 Au pays des Pygmees. Color, 25 mins.
FLAHERTY, ROBERT JOSEPH
1922 Nanook of the north. B & W, 70 mins.
GRIAULE, MARCEL
1935 Au pays Dogan. B & W, 10 mins.
1938 Sous les masques noirs. B & W, I 0 mins.
IVENS, JORIS
1928 De brug/The bridge. B & W, 27 mins.
LOURDOU, PHILIPPE
1978 Kebo. Color, 13 mins.
1987 Olhos de Cana. Color, 18 mins.
MEAD, MARGARET, AND GREGORY BATESON
1951 First days in the life of a New Guinea baby. B & W, 19 mins.
MOUNTFORD, CHARLES P.
1946 Tjurunga. Color.
1946 Walkabout. Color, 25 mins.
OUSSEi"NI, INOUSSA
1979 Wasan kara. Color, 18 mins.
ROSSELLINI, ROBERTO
1949 Stromboli, terra di Dio. B & W, I 07 mins.

1 This text has been edited by Paul Hockings from the original version which was
recorded verbally, and was later submitted to Jean Rouch for correction. It was first
published in Cinematographic theory and new dimensions in ethnographic film (Paul
Hockings and Yasuhiro Omori, eds.), [Senri Ethnological Studies no. 24: 225-238]; and
is reproduced in slightly emended form here by kind permission of the Director of the
National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka.
232 JEAN ROUCH

ROUCH, JEAN
1947 Au pays des mages noirs. B & W, 12 mins.
1952 Bataille sur le grand fieuve. Color, 35 mins.
1954 Les maftres fous. Color, 28 mins.
a
1964 La chasse au lion !'arc/The Lion Hunters. Color, 90 mins.
1965 Jaguar. Color, 93 mins.
1966-1974 Sigui Annees 0-VII . Color; series of eight films.
a
1972 Funerailles Bongo: le vieil Anai'. Color, 75 mins.
STORCK, HENRI, AND JORIS IVENS
1933 Borinage/Misere au borinage. B & W, 26 mins.
VIGO, JEAN, AND BORIS KAUFMAN
1929 A propos de Nice, point de vue documente. B & W, 42 mins.
1933 Zero de conduite. B & W, 62 mins.
1934 l'Atalante/Le chaland qui passe. B & W, 89 mins.
WANONO, NADINE
1978 L'huile de Pegou . Color, 15 mins .
1987 Demain, au bout du fieuve ... Color, 40 mins.