Resumen de Reading the Image: Visual Literacy and the Films of Jean Rouch
This chapter addresses the visual cinematic style and approach of the French ethnographer and filmmaker Jean Rouch (1917-2004). Throughout six decades of making films, the majority in West Africa, Rouch understood the power of the visual image to represent the complex reality of the lives of the people he filmed.
At the time of his death he had made well over one hundred films, and between the first and the last film, Rouch’s approach disrupted conventional methods and theories about representing reality in documentary film. His films countered predominant colonial representations and brought forth the political and poetic possibilities of the visual image. Overall, his filmmaking practice enabled an understanding of the complexities of colonialism and representation. This presentation will focus on reading Rouch’s filmic style through a discussion of The Human Pyramid (La Pyramide Humaine) made in 1959. This collaborative and experimental documentary deals with the relationships between white and black students in an Ivory Coast High School on the eve of independence. The film has a reflexive structure and incorporates fictional elements and improvised scenes. I consider how this filmmaking approach invites a heightened reading of the image and thus a deeper understanding of the colonial situation. In The Human Pyramid the visual style serves to support, enrich, and more importantly, to complicate the narrative. This is a critical point given the colonial context and repressive censorship laws. As a filmmaker and ethnographer Rouch privileged visual cultures and a re-view of his films highlights the ongoing importance of exploring critical issues in terms of reading the image. In this chapter I will illustrate how the significance of Rouch’s contribution to filmmaking is clearly understood when reading the visual cinematic style of the film.
