Professional Documents
Culture Documents
PAUL STOLLER
Imagine the following scene. We are seated in the film challenge to racist European conceptions of Africa's place
theater of the Musee de l'Homme. It is 1954, and a select in the history of science?
audience of African and European intellectuals has been Perhaps Rouch's intent in Les Maitres Fous was naive.
assembled to see a film screening. Marcel Griaule is there The brutal images overpower the film's subtle philosophi-
as is Germaine Dieterlen, Paulin Vierya, Alioune Sar and cal themes. After other screenings to selected audiences in
Luc de Heusch. Jean Rouch, who is in the projection France, Rouch decided on a limited distribution — to art
booth, beams onto the screen the initial frames of Les theaters and film festivals.
Maitres Fous. Rouch begins to speak, but soon senses a Rouch was troubled by such criticism, for his prior
rising tension in the theater. As the reel winds down, the practices and commitments were clearly anti-racist, anti-
uncompromising scenes of Les Maitres Fous make people in colonialist, and anti-imperialist. Critics have suggested
the audience squirm in their seats. Rouch asks his select that the controversy surrounding Les Maitres Fous com-
audience for their reaction to the film. pelled Rouch to make films, especially his films of "ethno-
Marcel Griaule says that the film is a travesty; he tells fiction," that more directly confronted European racism
Rouch to destroy it. In rare agreement with Griaule, Paulin and colonialism. Such a view may well be correct, for after
Vierya also suggests that the film be destroyed. There is Les Maitres Fous Rouch mad e a seri es offilmsthat portrayed
only one encouraging reaction to Les Maitres Fous, that of the political and cultural perniciousness of European eth-
Lucde Heusch.1 nocentrism and colonialism in the 1950s. But Rouch's
This reaction clearly wounded Jean Rouch. Should he political films are not simply the result of his reaction to
destroy this film? In filming Les Maitres Fous Rouch's stinging criticism; they also embody, in my view, a cin-
intentions were far from racist; he wanted to demonstrate ematic extension of Artaud's notion of the theater of
howSonghay people in the colonial Gold Coast possessed cruelty. In a cinema of cruelty the filmmaker's goal is not
knowledge and practices "not yet known to us." Just as in to recount per se, but to present an array of unsettling
one of his earlier films, Les Magiciens de Wanzerbe1(1947), images that seek to transform the audience psychologically
in which a sorcerer defies common sense expectations by and politically. In the remainder of this essay I first discuss
vomiting and then swallowing a small metal chain of power, the Artaudian theories of the cinema and theater and
so in Les Maitres Fous, Rouch wanted to document the speculate about the contours of a cinema of cruelty. I then
unthinkable — that men and women possessed by the use those contours to analyze four of Rouch's more politi-
Hauka spirits, the spirits of French and British colonialism, cally and philosophically conscious films (Jaguar (1953-
can handle fire and dip their hands into boiling cauldrons 66), Mot, Un Noir (1957), La Pyramide Humaine (1959),
of sauce without burning themselves. Always the provoca- and PetitaPetit(\969). I conclude with a discussion of the
teur, Rouch wanted to challenge his audiences to think new contemporary philosophical and political importance of
thoughts about Africa and Africans. Could these people of Rouch's cinema — of cruelty.
Africa possess knowledge "notyet known to us," a veritable
PAUL STOLLER, WHO IS CURRENTLY NEH RESIDENT SCHOLAR AT THE SCHOOL FOR AMERICAN RESEARCH IN SANTA FE, NEW
MEXICO, IS PROFESSOR OF ANTHROPOLOGY AT WEST CHESTER UNIVERSITY. HIS TWO MOST RECENT BOOKS ARE THE TASTE OF
ETHNOGRAPHIC THINGS: THE SENSES INANTHROPOLOGY {\9%9) AND THE CINEMATIC GRIOT. THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF JEAN ROUCH
(1992).