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Cock-a-doodle-doo Mister Rouch!

In Cannes 1961, sixty years ago, the film "Chronique d'un été" (Chronicle of a Summer), co-directed with Edgar Morin, received the Grand Prix of the Critics' Week. On the occasion of the Cannes Film Festival 2021, CNRS Images presents a special Jean Rouch selection.

Jean Rouch and, on the left, his friend and actor Damouré Zika (around 1960)
Jean Rouch and, on the left, his friend and actor Damouré Zika (around 1960)

© Jocelyne Rouch / BNF département des manuscrits

"How do you live?" is the central idea of the 1961 award-winning film. It is about knowing how each person "manages with life", explains Edgar Morin to Marceline Loridan at the beginning of the film. Rouch and Morin - as they call themselves - ask Marceline to go out and meet people to ask them the crucial question "are you happy?" A monument of cinéma vérité ("truthful cinema").

In 1991, the French radio France Culture created a series of 25 episodes during which Jean Rouch, Edgar Morin and the people filmed are interviewed. In 2011, Edgar Morin remade a long version (6 hours) with commentary of the film, as he had originally wanted, from rushes found in a cupboard at the CNRS...

Several films of Jean Rouch were presented at Cannes, and in particular Cocorico! Monsieur Poulet ("Cock-a-doodle-do! Mister Chicken") that we propose you to (re)see here in a new version digitized by the French National Center for cinema (Centre national du cinéma et de l'image animée, CNC). We also present a new long version of Sigui 1967-1973 and one of Moi fatigué debout, moi couché ("Me tired standing, me lying down"). The CNC website gathers other films and notably an extract of Chronique d'un été: https://www.cnc.fr/cinema/actualites/jean-rouch-en-cinq-films_1205709

For the pleasure of listening to Jean Rouch and seeing him work, we also offer you films dedicated to this ethnologist filmmaker.

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More than forty years ago, Jean Rouch developed a practice at the crossroads of human sciences and film making: visual anthropology. On the occasion of the centenary of the birth of the filmmaker and anthropologist, researchers Laetitia Merli, Philippe Lourdou, Nadine Wanono and Boris Petric discuss the legacy left by Jean Rouch in this discipline. Fascinated by technology, Rouch very early on seized upon the technological developments that made cameras increasingly lighter to film the…

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