STOLLER - Artaud, Rouch and the Cinema of Cruelty

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A R T A U D , R O U C H , A N D

THE CINEMA OF CRUELTY

PAUL STOLLER

Ima gine the following scene. W e are seated in the film

theater of the Musee de l'Ho m m e. It is 1954, and a select

audience of African and European intellectuals has been

assembled to see a film screening. Marcel Griaule is there

as is Germaine Dieterlen, Paulin Vierya, Alioune Sar and

Luc de Heusch . Jean Rouch , who is in the projection

booth, beams onto the screen the initial frames of Les

Maitres Fous. Rouch begins to speak, but soon senses a

rising tension in the theater. As the reel winds dow n, the

uncom promising scenes of Les Maitres Fous make people in

the audience squ irm in their seats. Rouch asks his select

audience for their reaction to the film.

Marcel Griaule says that the film is a travesty; he tells

Rouch to destroy

it.

In rare agreement with G riaule, Paulin

Vierya also suggests that the film be destroyed. The re is

only one encouraging reaction to

Les Maitres

Fous, that of

Lucde Heusch.

1

Thi s reaction clearly wo unded Jean Rouch . Should he

destroy this film? In filming Les Maitres

Fous

Rouch's

intentions were far from racist; he wanted to demonstrate

howSonghay people in the colonial Gold Coast possessed

knowledge and practices not yet known to us. Just as in

one of his earlier films,

Les Magiciens de Wanzerbe

1

(1947),

in which a sorcerer defies common sense expectations by

vom iting and then swallowing a small metal chain of power,

so

in

Les Maitres Fous,

Rouch wanted to document the

unthinkable — that men and women possessed by the

Ha uka spirits, the spirits of French and British colonialism,

can h andle fire and dip their hands into boiling cauldrons

of sauce with out bur nin g themselves. Always the provoca-

teur, Rouch wan ted to challenge his audiences to think new

thou ghts abo ut Africa and Africans. Could these people of

Africa possess knowledge no tye t known to

us,

a veritable

challenge to racist Europ ean concep tions of Africa's place

in the history of science?

Perhaps Rouch 's intent in

Les Maitres

Fous was naive.

The brutal images overpower the film's subtle philosophi-

cal themes. After other screenings to selected audiences in

France, Rouch decided on a limited distribution — to art

theaters and film festivals.

Rouch was troubled by such criticism, for his prior

practices and commitments were clearly anti-racist, anti-

colonialist, and anti-im perial ist. Critics have suggested

that the controversy surrounding Les Maitres

Fous

com-

pelled Rouch to make films, especially his films of ethn o-

fiction, that m ore directly confronted Eu ropean racism

and colonialism. Such a view may well be correct, for after

Les Maitres Fous

Rouch mad e a seri

es

of

films

ha t portrayed

the political and cultural perniciousness of European eth-

nocentrism and colonialism in the 1950s. But Rouc h's

political films are not simply the result of his reaction to

stinging criticism; they also embody, in my view, a cin-

ematic extension of Artaud's notion of the theater of

cruelty. In a cinema of cruelty the filmm aker's goal is not

to recount per se, but to present an array of unsettling

images that seek to transform the aud ience psychologically

and p olitically. In the rem ainder of this essay I first discuss

the Artaudian theories of the cinema and theater and

speculate abou t the con tours of a cinem a of cruelty. I then

use those contours to analyze four of Rouch's more politi-

cally and philosophically conscious films

Jaguar

(1953-

66),

M ot, Un Noir (1957), La

Pyramide

Humaine (1959),

and PetitaPetit(\969). I conclude wi th a discussion of the

contemporary philosophical and political importance of

Rouch's cinema — of cruelty.

5

Volume 8 Number 2 Fall 1992

Visual nthropology Review





immediate enough for his revolutionary program of social

transformation.

In time Artaud turned m ore and m ore of his attentions

to the theater, specifically to his Thea ter of Cruelty. Co n-

sidering the imp act that A rtaud's writings have had on the

theory and practice of theater in the Twentieth Century, it

is ironic that his great dram atic experim ent closed only tw o

weeks after it opened in June of

1935-

Like other aspects of

Artaud's voluminous w ork, his writings on the Theater of

Cruelty are fragments, jagged pieces of puzzle that never

form a coherent whole.

Arta ud's early experience in the Parisian theater disil-

lusioned him . H e reviled so-called masterpieces. O ne of

the reasons for the asphyxiating atmosphere in which we

live witho ut possible escape or remedy... is our respect for

what has been written, formulated, or painted, what has

been given form (Artaud 1 958: 74) . In fact, Artaud felt

that the literary staidness of the cerebral arts was socially

unhealthy.

Masterpieces of the past are good for the

past:

they are

not good for

us.

W e have the right to say what has been

said and even what has not been said in a way that

belongs to us, a way that is immediate and direct,

correspon ding to present mo des of feeling, and u nder-

standable to everyone. (Ibid.:

74 )

For Artaud, the Theater of Cruelty was the solution to

social asphyxiation, for it constituted aspace of transforma-

tion in which people could be reunited wi th their life forces,

with the poetry that lies beyond the poetic text.

3

More

specifically, the Thea ter of Cru elty

...means a theater difficult and cruel for myself first of

all.

And on th e level of performance, it is not the

cruelty we can exercise upon each other by hacking at

each other's bodies, carving up our personal anato-

mies... but the much more terrible and necessary

cruelty which things can exercise against us. W e are

no t free. And the sky can still fall on ou r heads. And

the theater has been created to teach us tha t first of all.

(Ibid.: 79)

In some respects Artaud yearned for the participatory

theater of yore which foregrounded transformative spec-

tacle. According to Artaud, th at idea of theater had long

been

lost.

H e traced this

loss

to Shakespeare and Racine and

the advent of psychological theater, which separates the

audience from the imm ediacy of violent activity. Th e

advent of the cinema com pounded this loss.

It is clear from Artaud's comments about myth, spec-

tacle and theatrical

violence

that his vision for the T heater

of Cruelty was inspired by pre-theatrical rituals in which

powerful symbols were employed for therapeutic ends. In

his first m anifesto on th e Theater of Cruelty (193 3), Artaud

wrote:

But by an altogether Orien tal m eans of expression, this

objective and concrete language of the theater can

fascinate and ensnare the organs. It flows into the

sensibility. Abandoning Occidental uses of speech, it

turns words into incantation . It extends the voice. It

utilizes the vibrations and q ualities of voice. It wildly

tramples rhythms underfoot. It pile-drives sounds. It

seeks to exalt, to benumb, to charm, to arrest the

sensibility. It liberates a new lyricism of gesture which,

by its precipitation or its am plitud e in th e air, ends by

surpassing the lyricism of words. It ultimately breaks

away from the intellectual subjugation of language, by

conveying the sense of a new and deeper intellectuality

which hides itself beneath gestures and signs, raised to

the dignity of particular exorcisms. (Ibid.: 91)

Althoug h A rtaud disassociated him self from the Surrealists

in the late 1920 s, the influence of Surrealism twists its way

throug h his writin g: the suspicion of logic, language and

rationality; the use of the arts to liberate the power of

hum an vitality from the repressed uncon scious; the promo -

tion of social revolution; the juxtap osition of primitive

and civilized imagery to create transformative poetry (see

Breton 1929;Lippard 1970;Balakian 1986; Clifford 1988;

andRichman 1990).

Artaud's writings on the Theater of Cruelty also evoke

spirit possession rituals. Albert Berm el, an Artaud critic,

suggests that the rites associated with the Corybantes, an

early Greek secret society, are quite similar to those pro-

posed for the Theater of Cruelty. Thro ugh music and

dance the Corybantes initiates were whipped into a frenzy,

a crazed state that was expiated thr oug h purification rituals,

an experience not dissimilar in kind to the one Artaud

seems to have had in m ind (Bermel 1977 :40).

Bermel is not th e only scholar to suggest links between

ritual and theater. Gilbert Rouget (1980) argues that

classical Greek theater evolved from the Coryb antes, w hich

he calls a possession cult. Other French scholars have

proposed links among possession, poetry and theater

(Schaeffner 1965;Leiris 1958;G ibbal 19 88). TheA rtaudian

scenario outlined for the Theater of Cruelty also bears

striking resemblance to many West African possession

rituals, including those practiced by the Songhay in the

Republic of Niger — the subjects of most of Jean Rouch's

films.

4

ROU CH AND THE CINEMA OF CRUELTY

It is clear that Artaud believed that the Theater of Cruelty

could not be transferred from stage to screen. A lthoug h he

52

Vo lum es Number 2 Fall 1992




was fascinated by the cinema in his earlier writings, his

interests gradually gravitated toward the more ritualized

framework of the theater. Given Artaud's dispositions, is a

cinema of cruelty possible? Like the sets and co stumes of

Artaud's shortlived Theater of Cruelty, the images of the

great Surrealist films wage war against culturally condi-

tioned perception. Films like Un chien andoulou (1929)

and L'Age d'or (1930) play with generally recognized pat-

terns of perception; namely, th e illusion that that which is

patently unreal (the images of the cinema) is, in fact, real.

Surrealist film, following the argumen t of Linda W illiams

(1981), exposes the illusio n— som e would

say,

delusion —

of the perceptual processingofima ginary signifiers. A rtaud's

scenarios, in fact, dwell on themes that expose the

misrecognition of the cinematic image. In this sense,

Surrealist film meets some of the criteria of Artaud's T he-

ater of Cru elty. But are these films transformative? Do they

alter behavior? D o they purify the spirit? D o they release

pent-up vitality?

Although the cinema can seduce us into a highly

personalized but relatively inactive dreamlike states, its

culturally coded images can at the same time trigger anger,

shame, sexual excitement, revulsion, and horro r. Artaud

wanted to transform his audiences by tapping their unco n-

scious through the visceral presence of sound and image,

flesh and blood. H e wanted to revert to what Andre

Schaeffner (196 5) called the pre-the ater, a ritualized

arena of personal transformation, a project for a ritualized

stage.

Although Jean Rouch has concentrated his artistic

efforts exclusively on th e

cinema,

his path shares mu ch with

that of Artaud . Like Artaud, h e was very m uch influenced

by Surrealism. In his various interviews, both pu blished

and broadcast, he often pays homage to the Surrealists.

When Rouch witnessed his

first

possession ceremony a mo ng

the Songhay of Niger in 1942, it evoked for him the

writings of Breton and the poems of Eluard (Echard and

Rouch 1988;Stoller 1992). Perhaps the vitality of Songhay

possession rituals, a virtual pre-theater— com pelled Rouch

to make cruel films. In some of his

films,

especially those

he refers to as ethno-fiction, Rouch pursues an Artaudian

path. Rouch always tells a story in his films, but the

narratives in these films are secondary to his philosophical

intent. In these films Rouch w ants to transform his viewers.

H e wants to challenge their cultural assumptions. H e wants

the audience—still mostly European and No rth Am erican

— to confront its ethnocentrism, its repressed racism, its

latent primitivism.

Any one wh o has been assailed by the brutal images of

Les Maitres Fous has experienced Rouch's cinema — of

Cruelty. In Les Maitres Fous, Rouc h's path is correct no t

only because he doesn't ignore colonialism, but because

leaving constantly his own environs and exhibiting nature

thro ugh the massive effects she prod uces elsewhere, it at no

time allows the spectator to remain indifferent, but co mpels

him in someway if not to take a position, at least to change

(Bensmaia quoted in Predal 198 2: 55). Ro uch's L es Maitres

Fous evokes the meanin g of decolonization: namely, that

European decolonization must begin with individual

decolonization — the decolonization of a person's think-

ing, the decolonization of a person's

self.

Such an effect

is clearly an element of a C inem a of Cruelty, a cinema that

uses hum or as well as unsettling juxtapositions to jolt the

audience.

JAGUAR

Jaguans not an insufferably cruel film; rather, it is infused

with what Italo Calvino once called the brilliance of light-

ness. I like to call Jaguar, Tristes Tropiques, African style

— with a very significant twist. Like Tristes Tropiques 2nd

other works in the picaresque tradition, Jaguar is a tale of

adventure, a story of initiation to the wonders of other

worlds and other peoples. The protagonists, Damore, un

petit bandit,

Lam,

aFula ni sheph erd, and Illo, a Niger River

fisherman, learn a great deal from their adventures in the

colonial Gold Coast. Th e difference between Tristes

Tropiques and Jaguar is an important on e. We expect

Claude Levi-Strauss to be enlightened by his voyage to

Brazil. But do we expect the same for three youn g N igeriens

from Ayoru? Can Oth ers embark on philosophical jour -

neys of Enlightenm ent? In Jaguar, Rouch forces us to

confront a wide array of colonialist assum ptions: that in

their backwardness all Africans are alike; that in their

backwardness Africans have no sense of the wanderlust;

that in their backwardness Africans do not extract wis-

dom from their journeys. With great humor, Jaguar shat-

ters our expectations. Along their journey to the colonial

Gold Coast, the Others (Dam ore, I^m and Illo) confront

their own Others: the Gurm antche who

file

heir teeth into

sharp points and drink millet beer; the Somba w ho eat dogs

and shun clothing. At the Somba market Damore' says to

Lam:

Mais, il sont com plement nus, mon vieux.

Com pletement, says Lam.

For Lam, Illo, and Damore' such a corporeal display is

unthinkable. They have encountered the primitive's

primitive, thus affirming Monta igne's affirmation that

each man calls barbarism w hatever is not his own practice;

for indeed, it seems we have no othe r test of truth and reason

than the example and pattern of opinions and custom s of


Volume 8 Number 2 Fal l 1992

53



the coun try we live in... (194 8: 152). Later in Jaguar,

Da mo r^ becomes very jaguar, (with it), Lam becomes a

small time entrepreneur

(nyama izo

— the ch ildren of

disorde r), and Illo toils as a laborer in th e port of Accra. A t

all juncture s in the film, difference is underscored: distinc-

tions are made between n ortherners and southerners, Chris-

tians and M uslims, traditionalists and m oderns.

In

Jaguar,

Africa is not a conti nent of sameness; it is rather a land of

finite distinctions, a space for the politics of difference.

Com me nting critically on Kwa me Nk rum aand his cronies,

Dam ore says:

Us sont bien nourris, ceux-la. (These ones are well

nourished)

A political commentary of visionary proportions, for the

leaders of newly independent Africa would become very

well nourishe d, indeed — fed by the political systems they

created.

And so in

Jaguar,

Africa emerges from the shadows of

sameness and is cast into th e swift cro ss-currents of political

fragme ntation. Rou ch's protagonists, like Susan Sontag's

Levi-Strauss, are heros — adventurers in a heterogenous

Africa who confront their own primitives as well as the

stormy p olitics of their epoch. As such, these wise and

articulate O ther s defy our expectations and make us

ponder our own categories of sameness and difference,

civilized and primitive. In this way, Rouch uses

Jaguar

to

critically juxtapose E urope and Africa.

Like the Artaud ian wanderer, Rouc h's fictional wan -

derers in

Jaguar

challenge the cultural assumptions of

viewers, forcing them to confront the centuries-old legacy

of European ethnocentrism and racism.

Jaguar

makes us

laugh as it subverts the primitivist imagery of Africa. Tr ue

to a cinema of cruel

xy, Jaguar

comp els viewers to dec olonize

their think ing, their selves.

Moi, UN Norn

To make

Jaguar,

Rou ch employed his friends as actors.

Although D amo re, Lam, and llo acted well in the film, hey

had never been migran ts. W hile he was editing Jaguar,

Rouch asked Ou ma rou G anda to attend ascreening. G anda,

who

badbeen

a migrant in Abidjan, challenged Rouch to

make a film about real migrants like

himself.

Rouch took

up G and a's challenge which resulted in

Moi, un noir,

one of

the first films, ethnogra phic or otherwise, that depicted the

pathos of life in changing Africa. In th e film, we follow

Ganda and his compatriots as they work as dockers in

Abidjan's p ort. W e see how hard they

work,

how little they

are paid, and how they are belittled as hum an beings. W e

see how work and life steal from them the last vestiges of

their dignity. In this space of deprivation and dem oraliza-

tion, we are touched by Ou ma rou Gan da's fantasies, ^ e

are saddened by his disappointments. W e are outraged by

his suffering. W e hear his sad voice. In this film on e of the

silent ones tells his sad tale. O um aro u G and a's story

enables us to see how the discourse of colonialism and

racism disintegrates the human spirit. Are not the dreams

of Oumarou Ganda the dreams of the oppressed — the

hope against all hopes that someday..?

Like

Jaguar, Moi, un Noir is

a film that obliterates the

boundaries between fact and fiction, documentary and

story, observation and participation, objectivity and sub-

jectivity. Rou ch calls

Moi, un noir

and

Jaguar

works of

ethno-fiction , works in which the fiction is based upon

longterm e thnog raphic research. In this way, bot h

Jaguar

and

Moi.un Noir are

biting critiques of the staid academ i-

cism that pervades the university in Europe and North

America. Imprisoned by eighteenth century intellectualist

assump tions in a postcolonial epoch, the academy was and

is ill-equipped to deal with the com plexities of the ch anging

world. These films, which are also indictm ents of European

modernity, remind us that in a world in which expectations

are continuously subverted, th e sky, to paraphrase Artaud,

can suddenly fall down on our heads. The intent of these

films is clearly political; through the subversion of re-

ceived categories, they invite us, challenge us to confront

our own ugliness — an exercise in Artu adian cruelty.

LA PYRAMIDE

HUMAINE

Rou ch's early critique of Europe an m oder nity does not end

with

Moi un Noir.

As Rouc h is fond of saying, one film

gives birth to ano ther.

Moi, un Noir

prompted Rouch to

make anothe r film set in Abidjan —

La Pyramide Humaine.

In this film, the title of which is taken from one of Paul

Eluard's Surrealist poems, Rouch explores the relations

between French and African students at an Abidjan high

school. He re viewers observe the divergent lives of impov-

erished African and affluent Euro pean stu den ts. Some of

the African students hate the Europeans; some of the

European stude nts are unabashedly racist. Th e studen ts

argue abou t colonialism and racism . The deba te intensifies

when a new female student from Paris begins to date an

African. Th is social act, which taps the fear of interracial

sexuality, unleashes a torrent of emotion and prejudice on

both sides. W hile

Moi, u n Noirfocused

upon th e plight of

African migratory workers,

La Pyramide Humaine

sets its

sights on the sexuality of interracial relations in a colonial

state — a volatile topic in 1959- N ot surprisingly, t he film

was bann ed in most of Fran coph one Africa. And yet, even

5 4

Volume 8 Num ber 2 Fal l 1992




today, it speaks eloquen tly to issues of the repressed fear of

interracial sex and of liberal duplicity and racism in Europe

and North America.

La

Pyramide

Humaine is

also very conscious of

its

own

construction. Rouch qua filmmaker appears in several

sequences of the film, using his presence to carefully weave

a subplot through the text. Th e main story involves the

confrontation of two worlds, two sets of prejudices; it is

about how confrontation can be transformative. Th e sub-

plot recounts how the making of the film transformed the

lives of the actors. Th e subplo t, the n, subverts the specious

boundary between fact and fiction and shows how film

constructs and transforms, how film is cruel in the

Artaudian sense. Sh ot in color, this film is cruel, indeed,

for it impels viewers to acknowledge in black and w hite their

culturally conditioned sexual fears and fantasies.

PETIT

A

PETIT

On e film gives birth t o another. Mot, un A W gave birth

to La Pyramide Humaine, which gave birth to Rouch's most

famous

work,

Chronique dun Ete , a

film

about Rouch 's own

tribe, les Francais. In I96 0 how did the French deal with

difference — w ith Jews, Arabs, and Africans? Th e film ,

which was politically provocative, is considered a lan dm ark

in the history of the cinem a for tw o reasons: 1) it is amo ng

the first works filmed in synchronous sound; and 2) it

launched the Nouvelle Vague in French cinema. In the

1960s Rouch co ntinued to film in Africa. H e completed

The

Lion

Hunters

in 1964, and began to film the magnifi-

cent Sigui ceremonies of the Dogo n of Mali in 1967.

5

Bu t

he wanted to make yet anoth er film in France and decided

on Jaguar II, wh ich h e called Petit

a

Petit, after the corpora-

tion formed by Dam ore, Lam and Illo in the original

Jaguar.

Th e scenario of Petit

a Petitfocuses

upon two entrepre-

neurs,

Damore and Lam, who want to build a luxury hotel

in Niamey , Niger, wh ich wou ld cater exclusively to Europe-

ans. But Dam ore and Lam know nothing about Europeans.

Like a good anthropologist, Damore decides to travel to

Paris to study th e lifeways of the French tribe: to observe and

measure them. H ow else would they know how to design

the hotel's interiors? H ow else would they know how to

order sofas and beds of the correct dimensions? And so

Damore

1

flies to Paris, where he embarks on his study. But

Lam becomes quite so worried about the im pact of France

on Damore's being, he decides to join his friend in Paris.

With great humor, Rouch tells the story of Damore and

Lam's Parisian experience. As in

Jaguar,

Damore

1

and Lam

turn the tables of our ex pectations. Europeans are usually

the filmmakers, not the filmed. Europeans are usually the

observers, not th e observed.

Am ong the most mem orable scenes occurs on the Place

Trocadero, between La Musee de

l'Homme

and the

Cinematheque Francaise, a space filled with academic

significance. It is winter and Dam ore, posing as a doctoral

student, approaches several French people armed with

anthropometric calipers.

Excuse me

sir,

he says to an elderly gentle ma n, I am

student from Africa w orking on my thesis at the university.

Wou ld you permit me to measure you? W ith the

gentleman's willing consent, Damore measures his skull,

his neck, his shoulders, his chest and waist. Da mo re then

approaches a young woman, and again makes his request.

He measures her dimensions and then asks:

Excusez-moi, mademoiselle, mais est-ceque je pourrais

voir vos dents?

The woman opens her mo uth.

Ah oui. Tres bien. Merci, mademoiselle.

There is much, m uch more to this film, bu t I describe this

scene to underscore Rouch's ongoing contempt of the

academy's conservatism, its uneasiness with innovation and

change. Th rou gho ut his films Rouch casts aspersions on

what he calls academic imperialism. Such a them e blazes

a cruel trail for scholars wh o believe in the superiority of

Reason.

And so, Rouch's films of ethno-fiction cut to th e flesh

and blood of European colonialist being. Hi s films compel

us to reflect up on ou r latent racism , our repressed sexuality,

the taken-for-granted assump tions intellectual heritage. In

so doing, Rouch's films expose the centrality of power

relations to our dreams, thoughts and actions. Such

exposure is a key ingredient to a cinem a of cruelty.

TH E PO ET'S PA TH

Du ring my research on Ro uch's

oeuvre

wond ered why the

philosophical aspects of his work — embodied in filmic

images — are underappreciated in Europ e and unk now n

in No rth America. W hy is it that until recently contempo-

rary critics in European and N ort h A merica rarely, if ever,

considered the pioneering work of Rouch? Th e answer, I

think, is that most critics, philosophers and an thropologists

are still part of the academy that Rouch so skillfully re-

proaches for its conservatism. Academics are still bound to

reason, to word s, to plain style. Sc holars seek the discursive

and eschew the figurative. Images are transformed into

inscriptions that form a coherent discourse. Poetry and

what Me rleau-Ponty called the indirect language are out-

of-academic b ound s.

More than a generation ago Jean Rouch understood



55



the transformative power of poetry. Ma ny of his films are

poetic in the sense recently invoked by Trinh T. M inh-ha

(1992:86)

For the nature of poetry is to offer meaning in such a

way that it can never end with what is said or shown,

destabilizing thereby the speaking subject and expos-

ing the fiction

of

all rationalization...

So

to avoid

merely falling into this pervasive world of the stereo-

typed and th e cliched, filmmaking has all to gain w hen

conceived as a performance that engages as well as

questions (itsown)language... However... poeticprac-

tice can be'difficu lt' to a nu mb er of viewers, because in

mainstream films and media our ability to play with

meanings other than the literal ones that pervade our

visual and aural enviro nme nts is rarely solicited.

Literalness is the curse of th e academy, and yet the strong

poetic undercurrents of a few films and ethnographies

somehow survive.

Because of their literalness, academics are often t he last

people to stum ble upon innov ation. Such is the case in

anthropology — visual or otherwise. On e of my philoso-

pher friends a dm itted that professional philosophers are 50

years behind th e times. For inspiration, he advised

me,

look

to the arts. Indeed , for m ost of us the epistemology of plain

style means th at pho tograph y and film are, to use Jake

Ho mi ak's phrase, images on the edge of the text (199 1).

In Rouch's case, this means that his films are most often

judged in terms of technological innovation rather than

philosophical lyricism.

A generation before the experimental mo me nt in

anthropolog y, scores of filmmakers, artists and poets evoked

many of the themes that define the condition of

postmodernity: the pathos of social fragmentation, the

recognition of the impact of expanding global economies,

the cultural construc tion of racism, the legacy of academic

imperialism, the quan daries of self-referentiality, the re-

wards of implicated participation, the acknowledgment of

heteroglossia, the permeability of categorical boundaries

(fact/fiction//objectivity/subjectivity). In one of his many

interviews Rouch said:

For me, as an ethnographer and filmmaker, there is

almost no boundary between documentary film and

films of fiction. Th e cinema, the art of the double, is

already a transition from the real world to the imagi-

nary world, and ethnography, the science of thought

systems of others, is a perm anen t crossing point from

one conceptual universe to another; acrob atic gymnas-

tics where losing o ne's foo ting is the least of the risks.

(Rouch 1978)

Perhaps the way to the future of anthropology is to follow

Rou ch's cruel path and confront the some times inspir-

ing, sometimes fearsome world of incertitude.

Th e sky is lower than we think. W ho knows when it

will crash down on our heads?

N O TES

1 Th is scenario is reproduced from Echard and Rouch

(1988).

2 W illiam s' sem iotic and psychoanalytic analysis of

Surrealist film is an im porta nt contr ibut ion. Con trary to

the uncritical analysis of the Surrealism and the cinema that

preceded her w ork, W illiams suggests that S urrealist films

are about the signifying processes of desire in the hu ma n

subjec t. He r careful frame by frame analysis of

Un chien

andalou

is revelatory and dem onstrates how Surrealist

filmm akers used formal cinem atic devices to prom ote their

revolutionary ends.

3 Tyler (1987) makes a similar point in his analysis of

Paul Friedrich's poetry, some 50 years after the initial

publication of Artaud's manifesto.

4 Influenced by Aristotle's writings on trance in

The

Politics,

a grou p of French scholars consider possession as a

kind of cultural theater (see Schaeffner 1965, Leiris 1958,

and Rouget 1980). Thi s hypothesis is a highly attractive

one, bu t m y own suspicion is that while spirit possession is

doubtless a dramatic form, one cannot reduce such a

complex pheno me non to drama or theater (SeeStoller

1989)- Th e great majority of Rou ch's films are about

Songhay possession ceremonies, a ritual that has fascinated

him since 1942 when he witnessed his first ceremony in

Gangell, Niger.

5 For

a

detailed analysis of Ro uch 's Sigui films and their

relation to the Dogon origin myth, see Stoller 1992.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Artaud, Antonin

1958

The Theatre and Its Double.

(Mary Caroline Richards,

trans). New York: G rove Press.

1956

Antonin Artaud: Oeuvres Com pletes.

Paris: Gallimard

Balakian, Anna

1986

Surrealism.

Chicago: Univ ersity of Chicag o Press

Bermel, Albert

1977

Artaud's Theatre of Cruelly.

New York: Taplinger

Publishing Com pany.

Breto n, Andre*

1929

Manifestes

d u

Surrealisme.

Paris: Kra.





Buck-Morss, Susan

n.d. Th e Cinema Screen as Prothesis of Perception: A

Historical Acco unt. A paper read at the Annual

Meetings oftheAmerican Anthropological Association,

Chicago, Illinois, November 17-21, 1991.

Clifford, James

1988 The Predicament of Culture. Cam bridge, Mass.:

Harvard University Press.

Echard, Nicole and Jean Rouch

1988 Entretien avec Jean Rouch. A Voix Nu. Entretien

d'hier a Aujo urd'hui. Ten- hour discussion broadcast

in July of 1988 on France Culture.

Gibbal, Jean-Marie

1988 Les G ertiesduFleuve. Paris: PressesdelaRenaissance.

Homiak, John

1991 Images on the edge of the Text. Forthco ming in

Wide Angle.

Kuenzli, Rudolph (ed.)

1987

Dada andSurrealist Film.

N ew York: Willis, Locker

and Owens.

Leiris, Mich el

1980 LaPossession etsesAspects Theatraux Chez Us Ethiopiens

de Gondar. Paris: Le Sycomore.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

1955

Tristes

Tropiques. Paris: Plon.

Lippard, Lucy (ed.)

1970 Surrealists on Art. Englewoods Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice

Hall.

Montaigne, Michel de (Donald Frame, trans.)

1948 The Complete Essays of Montaigne. Palo Alto,CA:

Stanford University Press.

Predal, Rene (ed)

1982 Jean Rou ch, un griot Gallois. Special issue of

CinemAction 17. Paris: H arm attan

Richman, Michelle

1990 Anthropology and Mo dernism in France: From

Du rkheim to the College de Sociologie. In

Modernist

Anthropology, ed . Mark Manganaro , 183-215-

Princeton : Princeton University Press.

Rouget, Gilbert

1980 La Musique et la Trance. Paris: Gallim ard.

Schaeffner, Andre*

1965 Rituel et Pre-Th eatre. In Histoire des Spectacles, 2 1 -

54 .

Paris: Gallimard

Stoller, Paul

1989 Fusion of the Worlds: An Ethnography ofPossession

Among the Songhay ofNiger. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press.

1992 The Cinematic Griot: The Ethnography ofjean Rouch.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Trinh, T. Minh-ha and Nancy Chen

1992 Speaking Nearby: A Conversation with Trinh T.

Minh-ha. Visual Anthropology Review 8(1): 82-91.

Tyler, Stephen

1987 The Unspeakable: Discourse, Dialogue, and Rhetoric

in the Post-Modern World. M adison: University of

Wisconsin Press.

FlLMOGRAPHY

Bufiuel, Luis and Salvador Dalf

1929 Un chien andalou. Paris

Bufiuel, Luis

1931

L'age

d'or. Paris

Rouch, Jean

1949 LesMagiciens de Wanzerbe. Paris: Com ite des Films

Ethnographiques (CFE).

1955 Les Maitres Fous. Paris: Films de la Pleiade.

1957 Moi, un Noir. Paris: Films de la Pleiade.

1959 La Pyramide Humaine. Paris: Films de la Pleiade.

1960 Chronique dun £ti. Paris: Films de la Pleiade.

1964 The Lion Hunters. Paris: Films de la Pleiade.

1967 Jaguar. Paris: Films de la Pleiade.



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STOLLER - Artaud, Rouch and the Cinema of Cruelty

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