Jean Roach's legacy

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 subjects he was studying as closely as possible. Gradually, motion pictures, which had become a real tool of ethnographic investigation, served as a medium for an exchange between the anthropologist and his subject. This is how the concept of “shared anthropology” emerged.