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Filmmaking as Ethnographic Dialogues: Rouch's Family of “Scoundrels” in

Niger
Anne Mette Jørgensen

To cite this Article Jørgensen, Anne Mette(2007) 'Filmmaking as Ethnographic Dialogues: Rouch's Family of “Scoundrels”
in Niger', Visual Anthropology, 20: 1, 57 — 73
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/08949460601061701
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08949460601061701

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 Visual Anthropology, 20: 57–73, 2007
Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 0894-9468 print=1545-5920 online
DOI: 10.1080/08949460601061701

Filmmaking as Ethnographic Dialogues:

Rouch’s Family of ‘‘Scoundrels’’ in Niger
Anne Mette Jørgensen

This article is an investigation of the dialogic collaboration between Jean Rouch and his
family of ‘‘Scoundrels,’’ with whom Rouch made numerous films in Niger. By ‘‘walk-
ing in the footsteps of Jean Rouch’’ and making a film with these informants, friends,
and collaborators, the author has studied their methodologies. In this essay, she dis-
cusses their dialogic aspects, including the impact of this collaboration on the lives of
the informants. She poses the question of whether dialogic methods may lead not only
to the sharing of knowledge but also to a dialogic exchange of ways of knowing.
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We are sitting in the front seat of a white pickup truck on our way through
Niamey, the dusty capital of Niger. The camera and mike point at Moussa at
the steering wheel, who clearly knows his way in the roundabout. We continue
across the large Kennedy Bridge. The steady flow of the Niger River passes under
us, matching the steady flow of people on the bridge—trucks, taxis, a few
bicycles, and tall camels, which seem even taller with their enormous bundles
of cargo strapped between their humps. We are sweating profusely, slightly
annoyed that Moussa, again today, is wearing his woolen striped scarf over his
blue gown. Combined with the grey sky it must convey to our prospective view-
ers a sense of climate that is far more friendly than the actual 35 Celsius and the
dry and dusty air, which hits us like a fist every afternoon. The radio is playing
pop music from Mali, and despite the growing patches of grey hair and his thick,
square glasses, there is no mistake about Moussa’s energy. We have asked him to
introduce the film we are about to make together:
Moussa Hamidou: Well, we are entering the Kennedy Bridge now. We [ . . . ] are
going to the other side of the river, to the area called
Lamorde. We will meet Damouré Zika. Damouré is [ . . . ] a
doctor who’s retired. Actor in all of the films by Jean Rouch.
Jean Rouch is a Frenchman, anthropologist, cinematogra-
pher who has made a lot of films about tradition . . . not only
in Niger, I would say, but here and there all over Africa. And
I, I am his sound engineer, that is beside the camera, never in

ANNE METTE JØRGENSEN is a social anthropologist. She has done extensive work on the
films and anthropology of Jean Rouch and on film and television production in West
Africa. She is the vice-general secretary of the Nordic Anthropological Film Association
(NAFA) and a project coordinator at the National Museum of Denmark. E-mail: annemj@
mail.dk

57
 58 A. M. Jørgensen

front of it, through 40 years. We are going to meet Damouré

in his clinic and talk a bit about Jean Rouch. Because Rouch
has been for us the . . . well, he’s the grandfather of cinema in
Niger. It’s by his hands that cinematography came to Niger.
We continue along the Niger River, arriving at the residential quarter called
Lamorde. Here Damouré lives, surrounded by his seven wives, most of his 35 chil-
dren and even more grandchildren; and this is also where he still treats patients in
his medical clinic. We follow Moussa through the compound and feel an almost sur-
real sensation when looking through the open window into the clinic, seeing the
blue crosses painted on the red mud walls. It’s almost like entering one of the many
film sequences that have been shot here. We meet a couple of his sons and three of
his wives, who jokingly throw a series of insults at Moussa, who retorts by express-
ing even worse insults. Damouré appears, a cup of morning coffee in his hand, and
Moussa suggests that he replace his wives with some younger women. The reply is
deafening laughter. We agree to go to his office to discuss our film project. We take a
seat in the confined space of his office, which is decorated with pictures of Rouch,
Moussa, Damouré, Tallou, and Lam, who had died, alongside other celebrities of
African cinema, as well as numerous doctoral diplomas and medals. I pass an intro-
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ductory letter, which Rouch kindly had given us, to Damouré.

Damouré: Voilà, the letter from Jean Rouch. What’s he saying? . . . Ah, good
. . . ‘‘ . . . we make up a part of the Society of the Old Fools . . . ’’ hehe-
he . . . Okay . . . well . . . ‘‘ . . . she’s called Anne. They are charming, so I
demand you and Tallou to be wise. The time of love adventures is no
longer at our disposal . . . ’’ . . . He’s lying!
Moussa: He’s lying! He himself recently got married!
Damouré: He’s just married!
Moussa: Hehehe . . . he’s making a joke with us . . . hehe . . .
Through this joking and pulling of legs the two of us, female Danish anthropo-
logists approximately 40 years younger than either Moussa or Damouré, were
instantly accepted because of our letter of introduction from Rouch. They
enthusiastically agreed to make a film together with us and to ask their third col-
league from their film work, Tallou Mouzourane, to join us.
We thus recorded a film [Madsen and Jørgensen 2005] with them in February
and March of 2003 about their ways of collaborating with Jean Rouch, a film that
would explore the character of these extraordinary cross-cultural dialogues. Their
collaboration had lasted for about 50 years and, although Rouch was 86 years old
in 2003 and prevented from going to Niger by illness since 2001, his friends still
expected him to return. He did return in early 2004, when he was reunited with
Damouré and others. Unfortunately, this journey became his last: a car crash in
central Niger ended his life and thereby an era in visual anthropology.

FROM ‘‘SHARED ANTHROPOLOGY’’ TO ‘‘ETHNOGRAPHIC DIALOGUES’’

Long before arriving in Niger I had felt that Jean Rouch’s ways of approaching
his subjects and their enduring relations were highly relevant to the continued
 Filmmaking as Ethnographic Dialogues 59

development of ethnographic methodology [Ruby 2000: 13; Stoller 1992: 3].

Today there is a sharpened focus on what we actually do in our fieldwork, high-
lighting the relationship between ethnographer and informants. There is also a
growing interest in knowing the effects of our ethnographic work on the people
we study. I hoped to find new inspiration for this trend by examining the rela-
tionships that Rouch and his little group of main informants had developed since
their first encounters in the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s. My colleague and I felt that we
were best suited to do this with a camera and microphone as our research tools.
By plunging into the footsteps of Rouch and making a film together with them,
we hoped they would not only tell us but also demonstrate how they used to col-
laborate with Rouch. The film would become a story about and an analysis of
their collaboration. In this article, I want to sharpen that analysis further, drawing
on images and dialogues from the film footage as well as from my memory.
Rouch himself was not very interested in theorizing about his work. He often
used the term shared anthropology [for example, Rouch 1978] but never went into
much detail about it. He stressed, however, the important cross-cultural lessons
that he learned from experiments with feedback. Whenever he finished editing a
film, he brought it back to the people who were in the film, inviting them to
screenings and profiting from their reactions, which enabled him to improve
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the film and acquire knowledge about issues otherwise hard to depict [see,
e.g., Fulchignoni 1989: 274–527]. Such special opportunities arising when using
the camera as an ethnographic research tool fascinated Rouch, and he spoke of
them as ethno-dialogues [Rouch 1978: 8], I want to direct attention to such dialogic
aspects of the encounter between ethnographer and informants at various levels
in the methodology and epistemology of shared anthropology. The genre of films
Rouch termed ethno-fictions, which were created by him and a small group of col-
laborators, have particularly caught my interest.
Jean Rouch is mainly known as an ethnographic filmmaker, and only a few
anthropologists have engaged in theoretical discussions of his ethnography.
The two most outstanding of these, Paul Stoller in the United States and Marc
Piault in France, have both done fieldwork in West Africa, and met and worked
with Jean Rouch. The latter was for years a colleague at the Musée de l’Homme in
Paris; whereas Paul Stoller is an expert on religion and cosmology among the
Songhay in Niger, just as Rouch was. In a comprehensive analysis of Rouch’s
work from West Africa, Stoller [1992] depicted how Rouch came fully to under-
stand that spirits and ancestors are virtual collaborators upon whose acceptance
any appropriation of knowledge about Songhay culture and society depends. He
adapted to the thought systems of the Songhay, and they took him as an appren-
tice and brought him up to become a griot (a storyteller} who, according to tra-
dition, should understand the past and the present so perfectly well as to be
able to make the Songhay youth discover their own future. In this sense, being
heavily influenced by Songhay systems of thought, we may say—although
Stoller does not use these terms—that Rouch engaged in an epistemological
dialogue with the Songhay sages.
Marc Piault [Piault, 2006] described Rouch’s methodological attitude as ‘‘an
open-ended interaction’’ through which Rouch succeeded in reducing the distance
between self and other. Furthermore, he entered into a ‘‘permanent dialogue’’ [ibid.]
 60 A. M. Jørgensen

with people in West Africa, France, and the rest of the world with his anthropo-
logical films. They were well-suited to reach large audiences and engage with
political or controversial issues such as (de)colonialism, migration, development,
or spiritual beliefs, and on several occasions they brought tempers to a boil.
Rouch was daring, concerned, and completely explicit about how he was himself
being positioned. Piault wrote that ‘‘the films follow on from each other and
undergo the critical gaze of those whose existence they are attempting to capture:
this already constitutes the establishment of a procedure of incompleteness in the
sense in which I believe that, these days, any anthropological enterprise has to be
a permanent dialogue’’ [ibid.].
In what follows, I will bring such aspects of dialogue further into focus because
I believe there is still more to learn from Rouch’s open-minded, dialogical, and
experimenting approach. Both Stoller and Piault made it clear that Rouch is an
outstanding ethnographer and a genius as a cinematographic auteur, respectfully
collaborating with Africans and others in his shared anthropology [Stoller 1992: 193
ff; Piault, 2006]. They and other writers taught us a lot about Rouch’s strategies, just
as his own voice has been heard through his writings and presentations and, not
least, through a number of interviews.1 I have missed the voices of the particular
little group of people with whom Rouch collaborated most closely in the pro-
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duction of a vast number of films since the early 1950s—namely, Damouré Zika,
Tallou Mouzourane, Moussa Hamidou, and the late Lam Ibrahim Dia. I want to
add to the picture of Rouch’s shared anthropology by taking into account this ‘‘other
side’’ of the dialogue and their points of view on the validity of their shared anthro-
pology. How would they describe and evaluate the collaborations in which they
were engaged, and on which criteria of validity would they base this evaluation?
In what sense had they profited from their work with Rouch?
What was it more precisely that they had been sharing? Did Rouch and they
come to share knowledge and, if so, did their ethnographic films then come to
reflect their knowledge, Rouch’s knowledge, or perhaps a completely new kind
of knowledge? What can we as anthropologists learn from their experiences
about cross-cultural collaboration?
The concept of dialogue appears to be useful here, because it may shed light on
a range of different aspects inherent in the relationship between the ethnographer
and the people with whom he is involving himself. In this article, I will base the
term dialogue on three analytically distinct but, in practice, closely interrelated,
different perspectives—namely, methodology, epistemology, and dissemination.
I propose that we ask, to what degree can we consider a given ethnographic project
(film, text, process) to be dialogic? I will define the most dialogic ethnography as
one that is based on dialogue (the methodological aspect); consists of dialogue
(the epistemological aspect); and, ultimately, enters into dialogue in society
(disseminating knowledge).
In the process of fieldwork, the ethnographer evidently always enters into dia-
logue with her subjects and comes to base her knowledge on this. Dia- implies that
two persons are involved, and -logos that somebody speaks [Crapanzano 1992:
197–198], but the ways that two persons speak to each other, the openness of the
two parties, the balance of power, and the resulting production of knowledge
may vary immensely from fieldwork to fieldwork. Contrasting dialogue with
 Filmmaking as Ethnographic Dialogues 61

the concept of analogue—which in Greek means ‘‘talking above,’’ ‘‘talking beyond’’ or

‘‘talking later’’—illuminates the dynamic aspects of dialogue; the process and
change that are inherent in the concept [Tedlock 1979: 389]. Further, we may see
dialogue as a perspective that, ideally speaking, if forming an integral element
of the epistemology, requires that any given ethnographic project be designed in
collaboration between the ethnographer and his subjects, indicating that the result-
ing knowledge in this sense is shared. Finally, dialogue may be regarded as an
intrinsic element of disseminating knowledge, to the extent that the anthropologist
engages in dissemination of knowledge in the society in which she carries out
research. In a dialogical approach, the process of the ethnographic encounter
and its products (texts, films, photos, exhibitions, CD-ROMS, internet presenta-
tions) are shared and ideally to the benefit of ‘‘the ethnographied’’2 as much as to
the ethnographer.

ROUCH’S COLLABORATORS IN NIGER AND HIS FAMILY OF ‘‘SCOUNDRELS’’

Rouch worked with many different people in Niger. Many of them became col-
leagues at the Institut de la Recherche en Sciences Humaines in Niamey (IRSH),
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which was inaugurated by Rouch in 1964 and with which he maintained close
ties for the rest of his life, some of the most important activities right from the
beginning being detailed ethnographic descriptions and the collection of oral tra-
ditions on audiotapes. The number of people Rouch met during his making of
more than 60 films was countless. We met many of these people while visiting
Niger, and I am sure that even many we did not have time to speak to could have
contributed further to our understanding of the different aspects of Rouch’s col-
laborative approach. However, we were forced to make priority decisions in
order to ensure coherence in the film and to work more closely with the small
group of people who had been Rouch’s nearest partners in filmmaking over
the years.3 Our point of departure was Damouré Zika, who had been Rouch’s
closest friend and assistant during filming and ethnographic fieldwork since
1941. Together with Tallou Mouzourane and Lam Ibrahim Dia, both around 10
years younger, Damouré was the most important actor in the ethnofictions the
group developed together. Tallou joined the group as a leprous orphan and,
apart from acting, took part in varied practical work in connection with the pro-
duction of the films. Tallou, who still lives in the village of Ayorou close to the
border to Mali, became an important poetic source of inspiration in the group
and was the one who was best at singing, dancing, dreaming . . . and insulting
people. Lam, who passed away in 2001, had until then been the innovative ideas
man during the planning of the films, as well as the driver and cook. Finally, we
chose Moussa Hamidou as the third protagonist of our film. He had been the
sound recordist of almost all films Rouch made in Niger. To Moussa, it was
something new to be in front of the camera, but we quickly sensed that he had
a good memory and was an excellent storyteller, and he obviously enjoyed his
new role. According to Damouré, the group consisted of ‘‘real scoundrels who have
come together. We don’t own shyness and we tell each other stories. And now we have
become a family—a family of scoundrels.’’
 62 A. M. Jørgensen

FILMMAKING IN DIALOGUE: COCORICO, MONSIEUR POULET

Right from the beginning, we agreed with Moussa and Damouré that we should
visit a number of locations from their films to assist their memories and to visua-
lize what we were doing. It was evident that they were emotionally attached to
these locations, and they could hardly hold back proposals as to which places we
should visit. Most locations were near Niamey, but we also decided to go to
Ayorou to visit Tallou Mouzourane and the locations from the films La chasse à
l’hippopotame=Bataille sur le grand fleuve [1951] and Jaguar [1967].
One of the films we frequently returned to was Cocorico, Monsieur Poulet [1974],
one of the group’s best ethno-fictions.

Moussa: Cocorico comes very close to being the true story about Lam. Because
Lam . . . . When Rouch is here, he is his chauffeur. [ . . . ] And he owned
a 2CV, you know, the same as Cocorico, the car in the film. Rouch said
‘‘But what do you actually do, Lam?’’ ‘‘When you are not here [ . . . ]
I go to the villages. I transport people and millet and other things.
Now and then I buy some chicken to sell at the marketplaces’’. And
one day we were sitting together, eating together. Somebody said
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‘‘Hey, listen, this story about Lam. It may make up the subject of a
film.’’ And the others said ‘‘Oh yes, yes, that’s true.’’ We then dis-
cussed the ways to record the film. Somebody said, ‘‘What are we
going to call the film?’’ And Lam said, ‘‘Cocorico, Monsieur Poulet.’’
‘‘Oh, yes, that’s a wonderful title!’’ Voilà! Cocorico, Monsieur Poulet.
It’s very like the life of Lam when Rouch is not in Niamey.

Moussa told this to us while we had stopped at the roadside after a dusty drive out-
side Niamey, inspecting locations from Moi fatigué debout, moi couché [1997], La vache
merveilleuse [2002], and Madame l’eau [1992]. The three films, like Cocorico, Monsieur
Poulet [1974] and the earliest film, Petit à petit [1969], had all been produced by the joint
film company of Damouré, Lam, and Rouch, Films DALAROU,4 all films belonging
to the genre of film described by Rouch as ethno-fictions.
The way in which these films were created was through collective improviza-
tion, in which the story was based on elements from the lives of the informants or
other Africans. When Moussa explains that Cocorico, Monsieur Poulet was ‘‘very
like the life of Lam’’ he is showing us in what sense the ethno-fictions of the group
possess significant ethnographic clout. Apart from being hugely entertaining nar-
rative stories, they come close to daily life and events that are common in Niger.
Cocorico, Monsieur Poulet is a collective improvization of an African fable and
at the same time a portrayal of Lam’s life as it is when he is not engaged in film-
making. Lam ‘‘plays’’ a poultry dealer (which he actually is) who is trying to
purchase chickens in the rural districts surrounding Niamey (which he really
does) in his old Citroën 2CV. Tallou ‘‘plays’’ his business partner, and the two
of them are joined by Damouré, who turns out to be trouble and, among other
things, attracts a devil. The car, Cocorico, has no brakes, no lights, and no number
plates, and all the hassle—preventing it from falling apart and transporting it
across the Niger River three times—becomes the main plot of the film. Rouch
had anticipated that he would write the story together with the three others
 Filmmaking as Ethnographic Dialogues 63

during the filming, but it almost ended up being written by itself, because the car
really did break down every so often, and every time it happened the story took a
new turn [Rouch, in Fulchignoni 1989: 295]. On the way out of Niamey, for
example, while driving in the bush, Lam exclaimed, ‘‘We’re not stopping here,
the place is inhabited by devils.’’ It was a spontaneous remark that led to a female
devil playing an important—albeit fictitious—role in the film. She turned up and
possessed Damouré several times. He had to be cured, which led the three heroes
to encounters with new people and new places. This mystical narrative level is
only one among several in the film.
Generally speaking, Cocorico, Monsieur Poulet is a portrait of a number of mar-
ginalized people and their entrepreneurship, enabling them to survive in a post-
colonial Niger that is rapidly changing. Personal restlessness and ways to cope
with corruption in society become important forces in their chicken business.
The car becomes a metaphor for how to manage in life and for an ingenious
and pragmatic flexibility that, according to Rouch [Rouch 1978, in Feld 2003:
223], may be regarded as something specifically African.
The protagonists in the film would probably not disagree with this analysis,
but they evidently had other criteria of validity than such retrospective and aca-
demic analysis. As will later become clear, this had much to do with the dissemi-
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nation of the knowledge gained in the process of filming and how this was
shared when screening the films locally. Apart from that, their enthusiastic
demonstrations and numerous tales from the production of Cocorico, Monsieur
Poulet clearly indicated that they felt immense joy when in the process of making
a film. The value of turning anthropological fieldwork into such joyful moments,
clearly, should not be underestimated.

ETHNO-DIALOGUE
The fact that Damouré, Tallou, and Lam continued their normal lives when Rouch
was not there provided plenty of material for new films. Damouré and Moussa
explained to us the common procedure for creating a film together. First, every-
body brainstormed, Rouch being relatively quiet and expectant, and Lam often
the originator of the main theme of the film. From one of the upcoming ideas they
then improvized and collectively created a storyline without ever writing a script,
or even a single line of speech. They had an idea about elements and directions the
film would take, but they never knew the ending. Due to the many years of close
collaboration and friendship, Rouch had every reason to remain calm and await
their ideas. He and they had the same kind of ideas about what would be interest-
ing to film and, at the same time, they had developed a unique sense of each other’s
different personalities, potentials, strengths, and weaknesses. This method of col-
lective improvization and narrative openness is an even more profound dialogue
than the feedback method mentioned in the beginning of this article. Rouch usually
asked for the feedback of the people in the film when showing them a finished
version, but with this particular group he developed a much more dynamic,
processual, and particularly well-functioning dialogic collaboration.
Rouch described his positive collaboration with his informants as ethno-
dialogue, by which he referred to a process in which the anthropologist
 64 A. M. Jørgensen

[ . . . ] ethno-looks, ethno-observes, ethno-thinks. And those with whom he deals are simi-
larly modified; in giving their confidence to this habitual foreign visitor, they ethno-show,
ethno-speak, ethno-think. It is this permanent ethno-dialogue that appears to be one of the
most interesting angles in the current progress of ethnography. Knowledge is no longer a
stolen secret, devoured in the Western temples of knowledge; it is the result of an endless
quest where ethnographers and those whom they study meet on a path that some of us
now call ‘‘shared anthropology.’’ [Rouch 1978: 8]

Through their cooperation with us, Damouré, Tallou, and Moussa demon-
strated how they used to enter into such an ethno-dialogue when making ethno-
graphic films. They were never in doubt about whether the camera was on
and, as soon as it was, they would speak with a clearer voice, move around in
ways that fitted the camera position, and focus on saying things that were rel-
evant to our film. Just like the camera, they seemed to have an on=off position
that both they and we could activate. Perle Møhl [2003: 170] wrote that a ‘‘con-
densation of signification’’5 occurs when the camera is on during successful eth-
nographic filming. Subjects seem to act and speak in a more precise manner and
at times even accelerate their activity level. The spatial presence of the camera is
decisive, and this is an aspect that is interesting in the context of general eth-
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nography and not merely ethnographic filming. Some may claim that the camera
disturbs reality and that because of this ethnographic film fails to meet scientific
criteria. Rouch replied that the same happens whenever an anthropologist enters
a society other than his own [Rouch in Rouch, Georgakas, Gupta, and Janda 1978,
in Feld 2003: 220]. Informants are always aware of the anthropologist’s extraordi-
nary presence and always take into consideration what they believe is the reason
for the anthropologist’s presence. Even when knowing the anthropologist very
well, this often leads an informant to act differently. The scholar is thus always
distorting the object of research. According to Rouch, this distortion may be
regarded as potentially constructive if the anthropologist actively exploits its
potential by turning it into a dialogue. It will raise the awareness of both parties
due to the internal conflicting feelings one experiences when entering into a dia-
logue with the other, and it will then lead both parties to learn something about
their respective cultural backgrounds, which have become visible through their
juxtaposition with other backgrounds.
To summarize, the methodology employed by Rouch and the rest of the group
is of a very dialogic nature. Rouch facilitated a space in which they ‘‘acted’’ them-
selves, and they thus collectively improvized an ethnographic narrative that
could be and often was an enacting of their actual lives. As regards the practical
aspects, a division of labor existed in which Rouch took care of the camera work
and Moussa the sound recording, while the logistical matters were taken care of
by the rest of them.

SHARED KNOWLEDGE?
The process of work was thus a collective responsibility of everybody involved
and the methodology employed largely dialogic. May we assume, then, that a
 Filmmaking as Ethnographic Dialogues 65

dialogic methodology leads to a dialogic epistemology? Did Rouch and they

come to share knowledge and, if so, did their ethnographic films then come to
reflect their knowledge, Rouch’s knowledge, or perhaps a completely new kind
of knowledge?
One day we asked Damouré about his role in the first ethno-fiction film, Jaguar
[1967]:

Damouré: We were on the road for six months. We followed the people who go
down to earn money there. [ . . . ] Ghana was acquiring its indepen-
dence. [ . . . ] Accra, that is the CPP,6 Nkrumah, the young people
were well organized, they were dancing in the streets, ‘‘Jaguar,
Jaguar . . . ,’’ they were singing. Jaguar, that is the beautiful young
men and the beautiful girls. Well, everybody was dancing. And we
were dancing with them. Because there are people who don’t like it
when you film them. [ . . . ] When Rouch took his camera, they would
say ‘‘no,’’ so I mingled with them, danced with them. When a guy
said ‘‘no,’’ I said ‘‘don’t worry, he’s just taking my picture.’’ Finally,
people were used to it and we could make Jaguar. [ . . . ]
Anne: In the film, we see you working at the harbor [ . . . ] Did you really
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work there? We also see that at the end of the film you distribute
everything that you have earned to people in Ayorou. Did you really
earn money in Accra?
Damouré: Yes. No. We were working, but that was in order to make the film.
That means that we did what people were doing. We imitated.
[ . . . ] We were not paid by these people at the harbor, but by Rouch.
[ . . . ] I am a public employee in Niger, so though I travel with Rouch,
I get my salary in Niamey. But in order to make the film I did what
everybody there did. The carpentry, carrying luggage, this and that.
I did everything as if I was one of them. But in reality they didn’t pay
me. [ . . . ]
Anne: Would you say that you were playing a role? Is it Damouré that we
see in the film or is it a role?
Damouré: I am the principal actor. I can play anything! I can play any role. I have
the habit. I’ve done this for a very long time, since 1950 that is. Alas, if
he [Rouch] says ‘‘do this,’’ I’ll do it [ . . . ] I know what he wants to
make. So he doesn’t have to tell me ‘‘do this, do that.’’ No, I know in
advance what he wants. Voilà [laughing].
Anne: Does that mean that you create your roles together? They are con-
structed by you and Rouch?
Damouré: Rouch is not in it. He listens. He organizes. For instance [ . . . ] if we
want to go to Ayorou. We want to sail on the river. ‘‘Can’t we enter
a canoe and film from there?’’ ‘‘Yes, we may enter in this canoe!’’
‘‘Where does the canoe come from?’’ ‘‘This village! It’s on the island.’’
‘‘Let’s go there.’’ We will say to the driver of the canoe: ‘‘Can you bring
us along?’’ ‘‘Yes, fine!’’ [ . . . ] And Rouch is behind with his camera, the
driver gives a damn. ‘‘What’s he doing, le monsieur?’’ ‘‘Oh, him, he’s
taking photos,’’ etcetera, etcetera. . . . This is how we make our films.
 66 A. M. Jørgensen

Anne: Can we then say that it’s a fiction, or is it reality?

Damouré: It’s reality! We don’t invent anything! We just watch what people do.
Anne: And even your role, it is reality?
Damouré: It is reality!

While Cocorico, Monsieur Poulet closely resembled the life that Lam lived in
Niger, Jaguar was based on the way Nigerien immigrants lived in Ghana. Other
films were based on a dream—often one of Tallou’s—or a myth. The common
feature of these different ethno-fictions is the way in which they express their
social and cultural contexts, and not just the personal lives of the protagonists.
It is the interaction between these contexts and the actual lives of the persons
in the film that forms the temporal and spatial basis of the films and makes them
valid ethnographic documents.
With no hesitancy whatsoever, Damouré claims that he is a professional actor
while, at the same time, their films show reality. He does not consider it a self-
contradiction that the film is reality while he is an actor who plays a role. The film
meets his criteria of validity because he acts ‘‘himself’’ as a personal individual,
as a Songhay man, a citizen of Niger in West Africa, and a number of other char-
acteristics of his personality. He plays all these roles at the same time and thus
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conveys to Rouch and, in the last instance, the audience the stories that he finds
relevant to tell about his reality. His self-perception and understanding of con-
temporary society form the framework of the story, and as he is building his
knowledge on other systems of thought than most of the spectators, our knowl-
edge about Africa is challenged and expanded. Damouré’s knowledge about his
own world defines what he considers as relevant knowledge; and through
Rouch’s filtering in the process of both filming and editing this becomes our
anthropological knowledge.
Damouré and the other Nigeriens in such ways contributed to the shared
anthropology and with their actual stories even made an impact on Rouch’s epis-
temology. The secret behind their successful cooperation may be described, as
does Piault, more precisely as an ‘‘open-ended interaction’’ [Piault, 2006], in
which the knowledge of the Nigerien friends about the world around them
strongly influenced the way in which Rouch acted. Their mythology became
an integral element of his way of perceiving reality, as did their stories and their
very ways of telling them. Most ambitiously, Rouch started a project ‘‘to establish
a Songhay theory of the ‘self’ of the filmmaker’’ [Rouch 1978: 8], in which he built
on the Songhay perception of the ‘‘self’’ as it comes to expression in possession
sessions. Unfortunately, this was never completed. At times, Rouch’s friends
were the ones who defined the narrative structure if, for example, it was based
on a dream or a myth. Otherwise, it was not their role to structure or impose lim-
its on a film project, and in this sense, there was a clear differentiation in work
tasks. Whereas they were the ones to define the kind of knowledge that was rel-
evant to them, it was his responsibility to make this knowledge comprehensible
for an audience in Niger or abroad. While they delivered knowledge about places
and people, about politics, beliefs, ancestors, possessions, sacrifices, plants, and
animals, about mountains and rivers and dreams and so many other things
necessary for them in order to experience, understand, and act on reality, Rouch
 Filmmaking as Ethnographic Dialogues 67

delivered knowledge about filmmaking in practice, about film conventions, and

about their use in comparative, phenomenological, and cross-cultural communi-
cation. Being extremely faithful toward the empirical background, he put his
friends’ knowledge into a narrative framework, revealing an exceptionally keen
eye for the elements and contexts of their reality that reached beyond the specific
situation. Empirical elements often became metaphors for wider social contexts,
such as the Citroën 2CV in Cocorico, Monsieur Poulet, which may be seen as a
metaphor for a creative and pragmatic adaptability in a rapidly changing,
postcolonial society. Traveling and movement, which run as a narrative thread
through Jaguar and Cocorico, Monsieur Poulet, form another example that
symbolizes the lifelong journey of mankind toward knowledge, a universal
and humanist issue.
The crucial point here is that just as a successful dialogic collaboration may
positively engage people with differing points of view, it may profit from an
exchange of knowledge between people with differing systems of thought and
differing criteria of validity. While the anthropologist bases his acts on subjective
criteria valid in a scientific endeavor, the informant most often bases his acts on
other criteria. Therefore, even in the collaboration between Rouch and Damouré,
Moussa, Tallou, and Lam, in which everybody was enlightened, the one who was
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taught the deepest epistemological lessons was the one who was looking most
eagerly for it—namely, Rouch, the anthropologist. Seen from the perspective of
the others, one of the more important things was that Rouch intervened in their
lives with his ethnographic gaze. He disturbed their ordinary activities and intro-
duced a new space, an ethno-dialogue for him and them to talk about and reflect on
their experiences, aims, and dreams. Here they profited from their ethno-acting
and ethno-thinking at a personal level. As observed by the Head of la Direction
de la Cinematographie in Niamey:7 ‘‘They have been shaped by working together
with Rouch and each other . . . they will never grow old, they have a spirit of free-
dom and anarchy and an ability to look beyond themselves as individuals, reflect-
ing and creating their own lives. This is a very rare thing in Niger.’’

ANTHROPOLOGY FOR WHOM?

Damouré, Moussa, and Tallou have learned to reflect on their own lives but also
on their societies, their scarce material resources and rich cultural potentialities.
Through their jobs as interpreters, photographers, research assistants, and sound
recordist for Rouch, Damouré and Moussa have built up a considerable knowl-
edge about culture and customs of many different ethnic groups all over West
Africa. If Rouch awoke this interest in them, the incentive to know more soon
became Moussa’s and Damouré’s own, and through the years they grew into
well-informed experts. Even when Rouch has not been in Niamey, Moussa has
been working, and continues to work, for other scholars just as he goes out to
record oral traditions, songs, and music of his own accord in all parts of Niger.
He started doing this back in 1959, when working with Rouch in the Ivory Coast.
When Rouch later helped him become a functionary in the IRSH, he established a
sound archive, which has through the years grown into an impressive collection
 68 A. M. Jørgensen

of music, songs, and narrations from a huge area of Niger, Burkina Faso, and
Mali. For Moussa, this has become a life project with manifold purposes. Above
anything else, he has come to see it as an important preservation for the future of
an enormous cultural heritage in the process of disappearing: ‘‘It’s such a shame
that we let these old sages die with their knowledge. [ . . . ] Because right now, in
your place, you have things aging I-don’t-know-how-many centuries on paper.
[ . . . ] If we don’t do it now, then, who will? We, we, we . . . I am sixty-something
now. [ . . . ] As a child I knew many things about traditions. They are now lost,
and I cannot even tell myself why. It’s a shame. A shame.’’ Moussa’s satisfaction
with resisting this negative development by maintaining and expanding the
sound archive was as obvious as his concerns for its survival on very scarce
resources. Despite the hot and dry climate being relatively friendly to audiotapes,
time works on the hundreds of rolls in the steel drawers, which covered the walls
of the sound archive.
Moussa and Damouré expressed another deeply satisfying outcome of the col-
laboration with Rouch: they had been able to show images of their world to
people in Europe. They and Lam and Tallou had joined Rouch on numerous vis-
its to record and screen films in France, Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy, and sev-
eral African countries, too.
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Sometimes we have gone to screen the films abroad. Sometimes we have been ambas-
sadors for the Republic of Niger. There are many countries where . . . for example in
the Netherlands . . . we were there in order to make a film with Rouch. During the
day we were filming, in the evenings films from Niger were presented in two cinema
halls, and the Nigerien flag was waving over Amsterdam, in our names. After the
screenings we were obliged to stay there and answer questions. There were classes
of pupils, people came, the halls were full. Sometimes we discussed until two o’clock
in the morning. You see? We felt like ambassadors for Niger. Because they asked
questions about the lion hunters, about the hippo hunters, about the koli koli, the pos-
session dance, they didn’t know anything about that. So we really felt like . . . like
ambassadors.

The dissemination of knowledge works in multiple ways. The anthropologists

screen the films and disseminate their knowledge to an academic audience; to a
European audience; to the people in the films, in Africa and in Europe. The Afri-
cans screen the films and disseminate their knowledge to fellow Africans, to
Dutch school-kids, and to European scholars. Audiences are manifold, and
knowledge exchanged in very different situations. Even though Damouré light-
heartedly stated that the object of their films was to ‘‘catch peoples’ interest
and make them laugh,’’ both he and the other Nigeriens left us with a clear
impression that they had much more serious agendas for their collaboration as
well. So had Rouch. Answering the question, For whom, and why? he [Rouch
1974: 4l–42] stated that he recognized himself as his first audience, the people
in the film as his second, and the third should then be the largest viewing public
possible. The interaction certainly has stayed open-ended [Piault, 2006], and
multidirectional as well, as the dialogues have criss-crossed all kinds of
geographical and conceptual borders.
 Filmmaking as Ethnographic Dialogues 69

DIALOGICAL DISSEMINATION AND ITS LIMITS

In spite of this dynamic picture, it will not be fair simply to conclude that the
dissemination of knowledge has been highly dialogical. Rouch and his friends
have reached larger audiences in their research areas than perhaps any anthro-
pologists have in theirs, but their impressive work surely had its limits. We dis-
appointedly had to realize that the aim of passing knowledge about Songhay and
other ethnic groups in Niger to future generations is—so far—very far from
fulfilled. Browsing the shelves and drawers at the IRSH with Moussa revealed
to us that copies of only three8 of the about 60 films that Rouch and his friends
made in Niger were to be found here. Neither the Centre Culturel Franco-
Nigérien, nor the Direction de la Cinématographie in the Ministry of Culture
(Ministère de la Culture, de la Jeunesse et des Sports), nor any of the persons
we talked to could add to this unfortunate situation. When we visited Ayorou,
the provincial chief urged us to pass a request to Rouch for VHS copies of the
classics, La chasse au lion à l’arc [1964] and La chasse à l’hippopotame=Bataille sur
le grand fleuve [1951]. Both are films that have a huge significance for the self-
identification of people in Ayorou. I am not in a position to point out who are
the ones responsible for this failure to offer the Nigeriens these films that they
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seem to be so naturally entitled to hold a copy of. Possibly, Jean Rouch is not
to blame the most, as copyrights are most often a matter of the producer, not
the director, and he rarely held copyrights on the films. My obligation though
is to make this imbalance known, on the chance that somebody should read this
and be in a position to influence the concrete case, and yet even more to suggest
that all of us reflect on our ways of disseminating our anthropological knowl-
edge. If this has so far been particularly a concern for ethnographic filmmakers,
the issue is now increasingly becoming crucial to anthropologists everywhere,
who are disseminating knowledge by way of any media.

AN AFRICAN ‘‘PAPA’’
The collaboration of Rouch and his little family of ‘‘soundrels’’ may also
provoke us to reflect on the personal relationships without which we would
never obtain any knowledge in our fieldwork. Damouré, Tallou, and Moussa
repeatedly emphasized their love and respect for Rouch, conveying the feeling
that their main reason for taking part in our research project was to honor
Rouch. Their admiration for Rouch almost provoked me since, prior to our
arrival in Niger, I somewhat naively believed that dialogue, apart from a
degree of reciprocity, was based on a principle of equality. We asked Damouré
about this:

Anne: We have noticed that when you mention Rouch, you always say ‘‘the
old papa.’’ Do you really consider him an old African ‘‘papa’’?
Damouré: Yes. All my children are his. We have grown together. I have children
and grandchildren, and they believe that Rouch is my father, because
it’s by his grace that I have made it. [ . . . ]
 70 A. M. Jørgensen

Anne: That’s really nice. But in Europe [ . . . ] we do have the idea that col-
laboration is something that rests on equality . . . that there shouldn’t
be money involved or any differences between people . . . .
Damouré: Well, it’s very rare to see a European who comes to a country and
takes a young man who’s got nothing and tries to help him and find
him a job. That’s very rare. The European comes, he stays in his hotel,
he takes his photos, etcetera etcetera. Rouch didn’t. He took a poor
lad, and he used all his means to help this guy to make it. I consider
him as more than a president. What can a president do for me? Noth-
ing! Rouch has done more for me than anybody else—including my
own father—because he is richer. He has invested everything to help
me. That is not just to give your money away to somebody, in order
to do him a service. Rouch never gives money away just like that. He
provides you with the means that enable you to find work on your
own. This is what interests me about Jean Rouch. [ . . . ] This is what
really matters!

I had thus been thoroughly mistaken in my ethnocentric idealization of equal-

ity and in my reasoning that existing power relations are suspended in cases of
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dialogic cooperation. What I had failed to recognize was that one cannot build up
new relationships without taking already existing differences into account. The
ideal is firmly embedded in our Western minds, just like the ideal about avoiding
money matters between friends. Damouré Tallou, and Moussa, through their fre-
quent use of the family metaphor, all implied that they saw no problems in the
superiority of Rouch. On the one hand, they were used to the fact that most rela-
tionships were hierarchically structured; on the other, like many other Africans,
they knew that economic dependency formed, rather than disturbed, the basis of
most social relationships. No matter how thought-provoking this may seem to
someone from the West, it has the obvious advantage that differences in status
are neither taboo nor a hindrance to social life and cooperation.
Rouch has through the years taken on the same responsibilities as any African
father, who had the means to do so, would do. When Damouré was a young
man, Rouch made sure he received training as a nurse. Due to his education,
Damouré has become one of Niger’s most respected healers within traditional
as well as modern medicine. He showed us around all his houses, one for each
wife, and explained that his film work, combined with his healing and rice fields,
have provided a living for his large family and ensured he could live comfortably
when reaching old age. Also, the house of Moussa had been paid for with money
from work on a film, Petit à petit, in 1968–69. Further, while Moussa supplemented
his income from the crops he grew on parcels of land he owned on the outskirts of
Niamey, his most stable source of income was his job as a civil servant at the IRSH,
a position granted to him by Rouch. Tallou is considerably poorer, living in the
northern province of Ayorou, which has repeatedly been affected by disastrous
periods of drought. To make a living, his small family engaged in trade at the
enormous cattle market of Ayorou; but, during our visit, his herd had dwindled
due to the latest drought. The financial support we provided him for working
with us was thus more than welcome, and we realized that Rouch had helped
 Filmmaking as Ethnographic Dialogues 71

Tallou many times during periods of hardship in the same manner. The first time
was when Tallou, still a young boy, was sent by Rouch to be treated for his lep-
rosy. Later, Rouch supported the affiliation between Tallou and the chief’s family
in Ayorou, providing him with a security net during the periods of starvation that
repeatedly affect the area. In such ways Rouch supported his friends, helped
them, and ‘‘made their lives,’’ we might even say. We might also say that they
definitely also ‘‘made him’’ as an anthropologist and filmmaker.
We may be pleased to learn from Rouch and his family of ‘‘scoundrels’’ in Niger
that although we, as anthropologists, most often may feel that our and our infor-
mants’ agendas differ considerably, collaboration exists as a most fruitful option.
Their shared anthropology stands out as perhaps the most comprehensively dialogic
informant-anthropologist relationship in the history of anthropology. If the third
leg of this shared anthropology, the aspect of dialogic dissemination of knowledge,
is slightly limping behind the other two (the aspects of methodology and of epis-
temology), these informants described their almost lifelong engagement with each
other as a collaboration from which everybody profited and which evolved in
numerous and various respects. Rouch and his friends based their shared anthro-
pology on dialogue, in itself a dialogue; and through it they entered into an
ongoing dialogue with contemporary societies in which they were filming. It is
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impossible to replicate this form of collaboration, which relied on the personalities

that created it. However, we may learn from their enthusiasm, creativity, and
responsibility, as well as from the epistemological openness of Rouch, and be
inspired to establish dialogical forms of collaboration at all levels. This is desirable
not only due to its ethical implications but also because it helps us in a direction
that to a higher degree is defined by the informants, potentially bringing
completely new types of knowledge into the realm of anthropology.9

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank the Danish Research Council for the Humanities for its financial support to this project. All
points of view are, of course, my own. I am also grateful to a number of individuals and institutions for their assist-
ance in the research process, of which this article is one result. In Niamey they are Dr. Damouré Zika, Moussa Hami-
dou, Tallou Mouzourane, Abdoulrazak Maman=Direction de la Cinématographie Nationale, Direction de la
Recherche Scientifique et de l’Innovation Technologique, Institut de la Recherche en Sciences Humaines in Niamey
(IRSH), and Mai Moussa Latifa from the office of the Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA). In Paris
they are Philippe Lourdou and the late Jean Rouch; and, in Denmark, Professor Ton Otto, Mette Bovin, Peter Ian
Crawford, and, of course, my colleague, Berit Madsen, with whom I conducted this project and who gave me many
constructive comments during the course of writing this article.

NOTES
1. A range of the most important among these texts is compiled in Feld [2003].
2. Rouch, in the ways he described his informants and filmed subjects, revealed his pro-
cessual approach to the production of anthropological knowledge by calling them ‘‘the
ethnographied’’ (‘‘les ethnographiés’’) [Rouch 1989 [1960]: 349], just as he described eth-
nography as a process in which we ‘‘ethnography.’’ I find these ways of putting it
appealing, but will nevertheless use the term ‘‘informant’’ in the manner commonly
employed in anthropology.
 72 A. M. Jørgensen

3. Others have made interesting and amusing films looking more or less deeply into
the relationship between Rouch and this group before we decided to do so [Bregstein
1978; Fieschi 1998; Meyknecht et al. 1998]. Anyhow, in all these films Rouch is in front,
and the appearance of Damouré, Lam, Tallou, and other Nigeriens always somehow
secondary.
4. The company was renamed DALAROUTA when Tallou Mouzourane joined. The
formation of it, toward the end of the 1960s, underlined that there was joint authorship.
In this, it resembled some of the polyphonic monographs [such as Bahr et al. 1974;
Bulmer and Majnep 1977] which other anthropologists later experimented with to
avoid some of the representational problems of anthropology.
5. My translation from the Danish.
6. The pan-Africanist Convention Peoples Party (CPP) led Ghana (the former Gold Coast)
to independence from Britain in 1957 and become the first black African nation, with
Dr. Kwame Nkrumah as its first president.
7. Abdoulrazak Maman, March 2003, personal communication.
8. These are Cocorico, Monsieur Poulet, Yenendi and Bataille sur le grand fleuve.
9. Translated from Danish by Peter I. Crawford.

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Bulmer, Ralph, and Ian Majnep
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2003 Ciné-Ethnography, Jean Rouch. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
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1989 Conversation between Jean Rouch and Professor Enrico Fulchignoni. Visual Anthropology,
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 Filmmaking as Ethnographic Dialogues 73

FILMOGRAPHY
Bregstein, Philo
1978 Jean Rouch and His Camera in the Heart of Africa. Amsterdam: Dutch Television production;
74 min.
Fieschi, Jean André
1998 Mosso Mosso: Jean Rouch comme si. Paris: ARTE. Institut National de 1’Audiovisuel; 73 min.
Madsen, Berit, and Anne Mette Jørgensen
2005 Friends, Fools, Family. Aarhus: Manche Film; 83 min.
Meyknecht, Steef, Dirk Nijland, and Joost Verhey
1998 Rouch’s Gang. Amsterdam: MM Produkties; 70 min.
Rouch, Jean
1951 La chasse à l’hippopotame=Bataille sur le grand fleuve. With Roger Rosfelder. Paris: CNRS;
33 min.
1964 La chasse àu lion à l’arc. Paris: Films de la Pléiade; 90 min.
1968 Yenendi de Ganghel. Paris: CNRS=CFE; 35 min.
1967 Jaguar. Paris: Films de la Pléiade; 100 min.
1969 Petit à petit. Paris: Films de la Pléiade; 92 min.
1974 Cocorico, Monsieur Poulet. Niamey: Films Dalarou. CNRSH. Paris: CFE, CNRS, Musée de
l’Homme, SCC; 90 min.
1992 Madame l’eau. Paris: CFE and NFI=Sodaperaga=BBC TV; 120 min.
1997 Moi fatigué debout, moi couché. Paris: CFE; 81 min.
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2002 La vache merveilleuse. Paris: CFE; 77 min.