Un Hommage à Jean Rouch

New York University in France,
l'Université Paris X-Nanterre, and the
Cinéma & Sciences Humaines Seminar
present:
Un Hommage à Jean Rouch
Friday, October 7, 2005
Musée de l’Homme
Palais de Chaillot
17, place du Trocadéro, Paris 16°
Following the devastation of World War II, scientists, artists and filmmakers sought new ways to apprehend the
world. Jean Rouch in France, Richard Leacock in the United States, and other pioneers opened the way to
direct cinema, generating new forms of contact between observer and observed.
Produced over half a century of contact and collaboration in West Africa, Jean Rouch’s prodigious work opens
new vistas on questions regarding relations between colonizer and colonized, the modern and the traditional,
and identity and representation. Storyteller, surrealist, metteur en scène, Jean Rouch fuses fiction, the real,
and the imaginary, influencing in his wake the French New Wave, anthropology, and the world of ideas.
10h00 Introduction
Beth Epstein, NYU in France
Jean-Pierre Touati, NYU in France
Hedwige Trouard Riolle, Université Paris X
10h30 Film screening : Petit à Petit by Jean Rouch (1971, 92 min.)
Coming to Paris from Niger to learn about life in modern cities, Damouré describes, much like
Montesquieu in his Lettres persanes, the strange customs of the Parisian tribe…
12h00 Round-table : Cinéma vérité, anthropology & fiction, presented by Hedwige Trouard Riolle
Marceline Loridan-Ivens, filmmaker, Fondation Joris Ivens
Marc-Henri Piault, Comité du film ethnographique, CNRS
Hedwige Trouard Riolle, Université Paris X
Elena von Kassel, Université Paris X
Brice Ahounou, Comité du film ethnographique
Richard Leacock, filmmaker, Academia of Arts & Science
13h30 Lunch
15h00 Film screening: Conversations with Jean Rouch by Ann McIntosh (2004, 40 min.)
presented by Françoise Foucault, Comité du film ethnographique, Philippe Lourdou, Université Paris X,
and Nadine Wanono, CNRS (tentative)
16h00 Round-table : Jean Rouch and the French New Wave, presented by Jean-Pierre Touati
Jean-Pierre Touati, NYU in France
Laurence Braunberger, Les Films du Jeudi
Raymond Depardon, filmmaker
Bernard Surugue, Institut de Recherche et du Développement
17h00 Film screening : Moi, un Noir by Jean Rouch (1959, 70 min.)
Three young Nigerian émigrés to a suburb of Abidjan in the Ivory Coast seek their livelihoods and their
identity in this landmark film.
19h00 Cocktail reception at New York University in France, 56 rue de Passy, Paris 16°
With thanks to the Musée de l’Homme, Films du Jeudi, Ministère des affaires étrangères, Comité du film
Ethnographique, CNRS, Mme J.Rouch, Ann MacIntosh, and participants.