Transparency in Postwar France by Geroulanos Stefanos

Author:Geroulanos, Stefanos [Geroulanos, Stefanos]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2017-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

15

The Ethnographer, Cinéma-vérité, and the Disruption of the Natural Order

Chronicle of a Summer

I learned with the Dogon that the essential character in all these adventures is not God, representing order, but the foe of God, the Pale Fox, representing disorder. So I have a tendency, when I’m filming, to consider the landscape . . . as precisely the work of God, and the presence of my camera as an intolerable disorder. It’s this intolerable disorder that becomes a creative object. Marceline would never have walked alone, talking all by herself, if there hadn’t been a camera there, if she wasn’t wearing the microphone, if she didn’t have a portable tape recorder. It was provocation; it was disorder.

Jean Rouch, Ciné-ethnography (2003: 154)

Thus the cinema can call itself cinéma-vérité, all the more because it will have destroyed every model of the true so as to become creator and producer of truth: this will not be a cinema of truth but the truth of cinema. This is the sense intended by Jean Rouch when he spoke of “cinéma-vérité.”

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1989: 151)

From Leiris, Griaule, and Lévi-Strauss on, ethnography thematized the ethnographer’s return to Paris as an uncomfortable return from other to self: the hero arrives in a changed Ithaca, but no conclusive reconciliation seems likely. In a letter to Paul Valéry dated May 2, 1939, Griaule described Paris as a rat-filled sewer and himself as a man boxed in it; he wished he could somehow bridge the distance to the Dogon people he was studying without having to endure travel or to stay.1 Lévi-Strauss, as we have seen, portrayed himself as someone permanently out of joint. The ethnographer who engaged with this thematic most interestingly was Jean Rouch, the director of the ethnographic films Les Maîtres fous (1956) and Moi, un noir (1959). Rouch marked his own return by teaming up with a leading revisionist Marxist, Edgar Morin, director of the journal Arguments, to make Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a Summer).

Morin said to me, “Jean, you have made all your films abroad; do you know anything about contemporary France?” He said that I should turn my gaze onto the Parisians and do anthropological research about my own tribe. In fact I really didn’t.2

Deeply committed to the kino-pravda (cine-truth) that Dziga Vertov had made famous in 1929 with Man with a Movie Camera,3 Rouch and Morin embarked on their project with the explicit intention of asking Parisians, “How do you live?” This question was the original title of the film. Chronicle centered on workers’ and professionals’ ordinary life and work and instituted cinéma-vérité as the medium of a putatively transparent representation of the everyday. Yet this transparency was ambiguous and profoundly troubling, even to the directors and to the film’s protagonists. A short examination of Chronicle allows us to unfold the layers of its two authors’ intentions and understand how anxieties over transparency were ascertained, established, and covered over in the film.

Morin’s Cinéma-vérité and Rouch’s Situations

“We shoot the final encounter.

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