IJFS 14 (1&2) pp. 205–220 © Intellect Ltd 2011 205 International Journal of Fra

IJFS 14 (1&2) pp. 205–220 © Intellect Ltd 2011 205 International Journal of Francophone Studies Volume 14 Numbers 1&2 © 2011 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/ijfs.14.1&2.205_1 Keywords Rouch modernity narrative Moi, un Noir anthropology ethnographic cinema West Africa Narrative, contingency, modernity: Jean Rouch’s Moi, un Noir (1958) Justin Izzo Duke University Abstract This article deals with the ethnographic production of modernity in Jean Rouch’s film about Nigerien economic migrants in pre-independence Ivory Coast, Moi, un Noir. Following Fredric Jameson’s assertion that we can conceive of modernity as a rhetorical trope and a narrative category that is subject to potentially limit- less rewritings, the article suggests that Moi, un Noir’s improvisational narrative allows Rouch to ‘re-stage’ a narrative of modernity that relies on contingency and a geographical triangulation of idea(l)s of the modern between the United States, France and West Africa. Further, this article examines Rouch’s doctrine of collab- orative ethnographic work, what he calls ‘shared anthropology’, in relation to the collective nature of Moi un Noir’s narrative, which relies on the spontaneous participation of Rouch’s actors (who were also his research subjects) who were shown a rough cut of the film and prompted to discuss their lives as they saw fit. Finally, the article explores, how Rouch’s unique, experimental blend of fictional and documentary cinematic forms positions him as both a provocative theorist of modernity as well as a reflexive anthropologist avant la lettre. Résumé Cet article étudie la production ethnographique de la modernité dans Moi, un Noir de Jean Rouch, un film qui traite de la vie quotidienne des immigrés nigériens en Côte d’Ivoire juste avant l’indépendance de ce pays. Partant d’une discussion de l’observation faite par Fredric Jameson dans A Singular Modernity, que la moder- nité constitue une catégorie narrative, l’article postule que la narration improvisée dans Moi, un Noir permet à Rouch de recréer une narration de la modernité basée sur la contingence ainsi que sur une conception géographique triangulaire des idées (et des idéales) du moderne partagée entre la France, l’Afrique de l’Ouest, et les Etats-Unis. L’article examine ensuite la doctrine ethnographique collaborative de Rouch, qu’il appelle ‘l’anthropologie partagée’, par rapport à la nature collective de la narration de Moi, un Noir. Cette narration se compose de la participation spontanée des personnages nigériens (qui d’ailleurs sont aussi les objets ethno- graphiques étudiés par Rouch) qui, ayant regardé le pré-montage silencieux du film, improvisèrent un commentaire sur leur vie. Enfin, cet article explique sur un plan général comment le mélange expérimental de Jean Rouch du cinéma docu- mentaire et du cinéma de fiction nous aide à l’identifier comme un théoricien de la modernité de même que comme un anthropologue réflexif avant la lettre. 206 Justin Izzo 1. This is not to establish arbitrary dichotomies within Rouch’s œuvre but rather is intended to highlight certain thematic divergences within his work and to point to several features that char- acterize his more plot-driven narrative films. Les Maîtres fous (1955), Rouch’s most controversial film, is an important excep- tion in this regard, being a short film dealing with a partic- ularly violent Hauka possession ceremony held outside of Accra and with the striking contrasts between the behaviour of partici- pants when possessed and their everyday lives as labourers in the Ghanaian capital. Of anthropologist and film-maker Jean Rouch’s film, Moi, un Noir, Jean- Luc Godard wrote that ‘Toute l’originalité de Rouch est d’avoir fait de ses acteurs des personnages’ (Godard 1959: 19). Although Godard ≠ whose À bout de souffle (1960) was influenced by Rouch’s work – only had one of the latter’s early films in mind when making this observation, he nonethe- less touched on an important formal question that was to inflect the content of Rouch’s work throughout his long ethnographic career: how do actors play characters at the same time as they play themselves, and how does this role-playing imbue with fictional flourishes the everyday realities of social life that documentary films are supposed to capture? Many of Rouch’s more dramatic and plot-driven films, shot primarily in Francophone West Africa and in metropolitan France, can be read on some level as attempts at working out precisely this bifurcated problem of form and genre. Whether they deal with economic migrants in colonial Gold Coast, ‘reverse’ ethnography carried out by Africans on the streets of Paris or, in the case of Moi, un Noir, with everyday life in the proletarian quarter of Abidjan, Rouch’s plot-driven and feature-length documentaries function in many ways as meditations on the narrative and fictional aesthetics of visual anthropology. This article engages with these cine- matic meditations and puts them into conversation with Gilles Deleuze’s conception of falsifying narration in film as well as with Fredric Jameson’s work on modernity as a narrative problem. The article argues that in Moi, un Noir Rouch produces a narrative of modernity that relies on improvisa- tion, geographical dispersion, and a collaborative approach to ethnogra- phy taken as a shared epistemological undertaking. Rouch carried out most of his ethnographic fieldwork in Niger and Mali from the beginning of his career in the late 1940s until his death in a car accident in Niger in 2004. Many of his shorter films depict intricate spirit possession ceremonies and hunting rituals in remote villages in the two countries; as Paul Stoller has pointed out, in these films Rouch is primarily interested in the ways in which collective historical experience is embodied, performed and recreated through ceremony (Stoller 1992: 48). In his longer films, though, Rouch often appears to take a different tack, turning his camera instead on bustling colonial and postcolonial urban centres and focusing on how young, usually male, Africans cultivate and negotiate complex and paradoxical relationships to labour and (neo)colo- nial capitalism, technology and modernity.1 Since these latter films are both organized around narratives and driven by storylines (however loosely defined or interpreted), they afford Rouch the opportunity to exper- iment explicitly with the ways fictional elements impinge upon and reshape the techniques ordinary people deploy in order to produce mean- ingful accounts of their subjective experiences. If Moi, un Noir occupies a privileged place within Rouch’s œuvre, though, it is not simply because it successfully and provocatively encapsulates his enduring commitment to formal experimentation or his enthusiasm for the production of new cine- matic realities through the creative intrusions of his participating camera in the lives of his filmed subjects. If these were our only evaluative criteria, any number of Rouch’s works might fit the bill. What is especially striking about Moi, un Noir, rather, is that in the film Rouch places his sense of formalism and his ethnographic vision of ciné-réalité (that is, a reality that 207 Narrative, contingency, modernity 2. Stoller (1992) offers an insightful discus- sion of the dialectical relationship between Rouch’s written work, which often makes for slow, plod- ding reading, and his more immediately joyful and vivid cine- matic productions. takes on a new kind of truth-value by virtue of its being filmed) into conversation with a particularly thoroughgoing reconceptualization of modernity. Moi, un Noir was filmed in Abidjan, Ivory Coast just prior to that coun- try’s independence, and functions as a ‘week in the life of’ documentary focusing on how young, male migrants from Niger negotiate their adapta- tion to city life and, more broadly, to colonial, African, and worldwide modernities. The film continues Rouch’s early turn towards more dramatic and story-driven film-making that begins with Jaguar (1957–67) and culminates with La pyramide humaine (1959), the last film Rouch shot before he started filming with fully synchronized sound in 1960’s Chronique d’un été. As we will see, the matter of (non)synchronized sound is crucial to our understanding of Rouch’s vision of the relationship of anthropology to fiction as well as to his theorization of modernity. In the 1950s, Rouch was commissioned to undertake more sociological and quantitative research on Nigerien migrants in the British Gold Coast, research that led to the rather dry monograph Migrations au Ghana (1956) and to the comparatively richer film Jaguar, a composite fictionalization of the results of Rouch’s research starring three young Nigeriens (Damouré Zika, Lam Ibrahima Dia and Illo Gaoudel) who had once served as conventional ethnographic informants but had since become amateur actors and Rouch’s lifelong friends.2 This film charts the migration cycle of three Nigeriens who travel on foot to the Gold Coast (as their warrior ancestors did), end up starting a small business in the vast market at Kumasi, and who return to Niger with tall tales and gifts to give away to friends and relatives. Several years after completing this work Rouch was commis- sioned to do similar research on Nigerien migrants in Abidjan, and it was upon showing Jaguar to his ethnographic informants in the Ivory Coast (including Oumarou Ganda, who would go on to become Moi, un Noir’s protagonist) that he was urged to make a film about Treichville, the Abidjan slum where the migrants from Niger had settled. Thus ‘one film gave birth to another’, as Rouch himself uploads/Geographie/ moi-un-noir-izzo.pdf

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• Publié le Apv 22, 2022
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