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A historic confrontation between Jean Rouch and Ousmane Sembène
This dialogue between Jean Rouch and Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène originally took place in 1965.  Selections were later edited and published by CinémAction in February, 1982 (issue no. 17, Paris: Harmattan). 

Sembène invented a paradigm for modern African cinema that all the other filmmakers have to measure up to or deconstruct.
-Manthia Diawara (2010)

 

Essays/Interviews

Sarah Cooper: "Knowing Images: Jean Rouch's Ethnography"
“Engendering an ethics that relies on distance within proximity, the Rouchian aesthetic allows us finally...to point up the limits of knowledge and vision."

Sarah Cooper is a professor at King's College in London. Her principal research interests are in film theory and continental philosophy; ethics and film, especially documentary; and modern critical theory, especially feminist theory, queer theory, and psychoanalysis.

Chronicles of African Modernities
In 2000, New York University's Center for Media, Culture, and History held a Rouch retrospective featuring several of his most well-known ethno-fictions.  Rouch was present at the screenings and held extensive post-screening Q&A sessions accompanied by Paul Stoller, Manthia Diawara, Jean-Paul Colleyn, and Steven Feld. These events were filmed and later transcribed by Jamie Berthe in 2006.

Paul Stoller: "The work must go on"
"Jean Rouch’s path to the felicitous fusion of art and science was a circuitous one..."

Paul Stoller is a professor of Anthropology at West Chester University. He is the author of The Cinematic Griot: The Ethnography of Jean Rouch.

Steve Ungar: "Whose voice? Whose film?: Jean Rouch, Oumarou Ganda and Moi, un noir"
"Rouch makes films critical of colonisation and colonial culture while neither asserting nor aspiring to the title of committed filmmaker (cinéaste engagé)..."

Steven Ungar has taught French literature, thought, and film at The University of Iowa since 1976.  His current research project, Making Waves, is a study of postwar French documentaries between 1946 and 1967.