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BOOK REVIEWS

Observational Cinema: Anthropology, Film, and the Exploration of Social Life. Anna
Grimshaw and Amanda Ravetz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009,
198 pages.

CATHERINE RUSSELL, Mel Oppenheim School of Cinema, Concordia

University, Montreal

As a category of film practice, observational cinema has long been recognized by

film studies and visual anthropology, but until now, it has not received the kind
of systematic and detailed study offered in this new book. Anna Grimshaw and
Amanda Ravetz have finally brought observational cinema into focus, filling in its
history with analysis of key films and filmmakers, and providing a cogent discussion
of its theoretical bases. Their mission is not only to explain what observational
cinema is and has been, but to counter criticisms that have been leveled at it as
“naı̈ve realism.” They convincingly argue that observational cinema answers to
many of the concerns of postmodern and postcolonial anthropological theory. As
an inherently experimental anthropological form, observational cinema becomes
more clearly situated within the contemporary intellectual and aesthetic climate,
thereby making its history more relevant to current concerns of representation,
anthropology, and aesthetics.

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 26, Issue 1, pp. 143–155. ISSN 0886-7356, online ISSN 1548-1360.  C 2011 by
the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1360.2010.01084.x
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 26:1

Grimshaw and Ravetz’s approach has three main thrusts. For one axis of the
prehistory, they fill in many details of the Ethnographic Film Program at UCLA
in the 1970s, where David and Judith McDougall, among many others, received
their formative training. Two other students of that program, Herb Di Gioia and
David Hancock, played key roles in developing a practice that would subsequently
become known as observational cinema. Roger Sandall may have first used the
term in a 1972 article in Sight and Sound, but it wasn’t until Colin Young’s article
“Observational Cinema” was published that the term took on valence, perhaps
because Young was on faculty at the UCLA program, in a position to put the term
to work. Young provided a brief account of his colleagues and students at UCLA,
linking their work to that of Rouch and the Italian neorealists. He insisted that
observational cinema was an authored, reflexive practice in which the camera and
crew were engaged with, not detached from, their subjects. Young’s seminal article
was published in Paul Hocking’s 1974 anthology Principles of Visual Anthropology,
although Grimshaw and Ravetz date it as 1975 (unfortunately, their bibliographic
details are somewhat vague throughout the book).
The second axis of observational cinema before it became officially known
as such, was the direct cinema movement that emerged in the United States in
the 1960s. Case studies of Robert Drew’s Primary (1960) made with Richard
Leacock and D. A. Pennebaker, the Maysles brothers Salesman (1968) and Fred-
erick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies (1967) provide a selective survey of the filmmak-
ing techniques associated with this movement. The authors’ contribution to this
well-traveled terrain is their detailed attention to the very different methods used
by these filmmakers who are so often grouped together. They carefully pick apart
the various uses of camera, sound and editing to explore the different kinds of
relationships between filmmakers and subjects that are produced. These studies
are, for the most part, convincing arguments that observational cinema is less about
truth claims than about the intersubjective dynamics between filmmakers, subjects,
and viewers.
Grimshaw and Ravetz try to shuttle aside concerns over truthfulness, authen-
ticity, and veracity, and yet they stumble somewhat over questions of audience and
address. Taking up a familiar critique of Charlotte Zwerin’s editing of Salesman in
which she overlays a nonsynchronous sound clip over one of the characters, they
say the device is “unnecessary” as it closes down meaning that would otherwise
be “open” to the viewers’ imagination. For the authors, observational cinema is
a formal construct that preserves a human scale of encounter and understand-
ing. Tropes of spatial unity must be preserved for a very specific construction of
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reality. Although they recognize the intimate involvement of filmmakers in the aes-
thetic choices that are made, a narrative device such as Zwerin’s use of voice-over
monologue is strongly criticized.
The book’s methodology, combining aesthetic analysis with questions of an-
thropological knowledge, is its strength as well as its weakness. The authors discuss
the merits of the long take, deep focus cinematography, and the virtues of preserv-
ing an organic sense of spatial unity as some of the key features of observational
cinema, but the critique of Zwerin is the only time this becomes a prescriptive
formula. Moreover, many other formal questions of composition, color, lighting
and timing, are not addressed at all. These are all critical components of film
practice, along with sound–image relations, with which filmmakers can transform
reality into images that may or may not be attractive, appealing, or even amusing.
Observational filmmakers are seen to construct reality; and yet in the terms set out
here, they are expected to assume a passive role, as if they were not constructing
reality after all. The reflexivity at the heart of observational cinema is for me,
the key intellectual tension that can strike a balance between anthropological and
aesthetic modes. Zwerin’s contribution to Salesman is partially responsible for its
narrative flow, and thus its appeal to a wider audience than that of anthropologists.
If the Maysles were anthropologists, maybe they would have edited their own
films, but they’re not, so Grimshaw and Ravetz’s critique stands out in the book
the kind of prescriptive formalism that has tended to bog down the discussion of
ethnographic film into a restrictive set of techniques.
The vast array of techniques of shooting and editing that are available to
filmmakers enable them to articulate their own relationship to their documentary
subjects but also to involve the viewer. Questions of address extend to questions
of exhibition and reception, questions that the authors get to, finally, at the end
of the book with a discussion of the art gallery, where ethnographic filmmakers
are increasingly inclined to show their work. For Grimshaw and Ravetz, this is
not because their work looks and feels like art, but because viewer’s in the gallery
are more pensive and contemplative. The Maysles films however, need to be
recognized as having had theatrical releases, and to have deep thematic links to
U.S. literature and the independent cinema of the 1960s. The Zwerin issue simply
displaces the question of anthropology-as-entertainment with the declaration of a
formal aesthetic principle. This is the point where the anthropologist–artists need
to step back and apply the same principles of phenomenological observation to film
history and acknowledge the extensive overlap between media culture, the arts,
and trends in visual epistemologies.
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Grimshaw and Ravetz’s theoretical backbone for this book, film theorist
Andre Bazin, was himself concerned primarily with narrative feature filmmaking,
and wrote very little about documentary ethics and aesthetics. The neorealist
project, especially as it was theorized by Bazin and by Cesare Zavattini, constitutes
the book’s third axis. Young, Di Gioia, Hancock, and McDougall, were very
familiar with Bazin’s writing and were directly influenced by Italian neorealism.
The authors position a set of films made by Di Gioia and Hancock in the 1970s
in Vermont as quintessential forerunners of the observational modality, arguing
that their films Duwayne Masure (1971), Chester Grimes (1972), and Peter Murray
(1975) appear to exhibit many of the key tenets of neorealism. Bazin understood
neorealism as a very humble and ethical approach to humanity. Grimshaw and
Ravetz see a parallel tendency in the Vermont films: “Running through the work
there is respect for the fundamental connection between human beings and the
sensible world, a connection characterized by both continuity and ambiguity”
(p. 75).
Cesare Zavattini’s manifesto on neorealism also presages key tenets of ob-
servational cinema, particularly its emphasis on the ordinary, everyday and banal,
from which meaning is extracted—or revealed—by the filmmaker. Grimshaw and
Ravetz call for a return to Bazinian theory because of its modernist aesthetics. For
Bazin, if not for Zavattini, realism was not akin to transparency but to a fundamental
ambiguity. By positioning Bazin as the unacknowledged grandfather of observa-
tional cinema, Grimshaw and Ravetz endorse this openness as its central tenet, and
Bazin’s humanist ethic as its epistemological value. In fact, Italian neorealism never
entirely dispensed with drama and narrative; its language was inevitably multiply
coded in terms of gender, architecture, and dialect. Nor was it a passive, observa-
tional mode; films such as Paisà (Rossellini, 1946) were activist commemorations
of the Italian resistance movement, and were addressed to a politically charged
national postwar scene. Nevertheless, Italian neorealism had a profound influence
on global cinema, even if its antifascist agenda faded into a more diluted form of
postwar humanism, via the writings of Bazin and Zavattini among others.
By explicitly thinking of observational cinema in terms of an epistemological
history, rather than a technological history, Grimshaw and Ravetz attempt to
explain how observational cinema is a form of knowledge, and moreover, how that
process of knowing has itself changed since the 1960s. They claim in the preface
to have been influenced by a history of science discourse in which observation
is understood as a “special training of the senses.” This rigorous discipline of
observation seems to be a practice taken on by filmmakers, but it is unclear
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whether the aesthetics of observational cinema are designed to “train” viewers to

observe in similar fashion. Key questions of communication are left unanswered;
discourses of power and subjugation, voyeurism and pleasure remain lingering in
the background of this study.
A key figure in this history is David MacDougall. From the early 1970s, he
has been engaged with observational cinema as a filmmaker and a theoretician. The
authors examine five of his works, including his first film To Live with Herds (1972),
his most recent one Schoolscapes (2007), and three installments of the Doon School
Project in the 1990s. MacDougall has always been very self-conscious about the way
his film projects contribute to anthropological discourse. From the outset, film was
a method of social and cultural encounter; the time of filmmaking is one of shared
space, while the time of editing is reflective of the relationships forged during the
filmmaking process. In his canonical essay “Beyond Observational Cinema” (1975),
MacDougall advocates a participatory modality in which cinema is less about the
“aesthetic or scientific performance; it can become the arena of inquiry.”
It is the emphasis on process and practice that governs Grimshaw and Ravetz’s
approach, and MacDougall’s theory and practice are at the vanguard of such an
orientation. MacDougall’s Doon School Project consists of a cycle of films made in the
late nineties. Its various parts constitute a kind of prism of multiple perspectives in
which the detailed material of life in an Indian boarding school is crisscrossed with
questions about anthropological knowledge and representation. Grimshaw and
Ravetz don’t actually have much to say about MacDougall’s monumental project,
except to recognize the way that he has continued to explore the parameters of the
observational mode. Cinema and anthropology are potentially aligned as practices
and methods of engagement with social reality, but with no discussion of the
screening contexts and reception of this work, it remains curiously incomplete.
Perhaps this is one of the fundamental traits of observational cinema, to resist the
status of the final film as object. And yet, historically, this has not been the case.
Many examples of visual anthropology exist as well-known texts to be picked apart
by generations of anthropologists and film critics.
The authors include MacDougall’s Schoolscapes in a final chapter of three
case studies that demonstrate the ongoing practice of observational cinema in the
contemporary media environment. In a series of one-shot minute-long scenes,
MacDougall appears to return to the cinema of the Lumière brothers. Grimshaw
and Ravetz argue that he has rendered knowledge a form of experience, and it
is this phenomenological construction of perception that makes observation into
an epistemology. The other two examples are Lucien Castaing Taylor and Ilisa
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Barbash’s Sheep Rushes (2007) and Eva Stephani’s The Box (2004), which they argue,
also exhibit a “commitment to the real” and a coextensive commitment to the
problem of representation and aesthetics—how to communicate the experience
of the real. Observational cinema emerges from these studies more clearly as an
authored, aesthetic practice. These are reflexive films that indubitably embrace the
Bazinian notion of a realist aesthetic. Their contribution to anthropology, however,
remains a little sketchy.
Grimshaw and Ravetz want to position observational cinema within the re-
visionist mode of anthropology. They are absolutely right to do this, as the ex-
perimental techniques that they trace through the history of the practice are very
much in line with the critique initiated by James Clifford and George Marcus in
the 1980s. Observational cinema is grounded in practice and process, rather than
objects; and it is deeply reflexive and consistently experimental, committed to
an openness of meaning and signification. One has to wonder why, despite these
credentials, it has been so systematically marginalized by mainstream anthropol-
ogy, and by the postmodern critique. In fact, I overlooked it myself in my book
Experimental Ethnography, perhaps because it appeared to be too canonical despite
its experimental impetus; and yet as this book demonstrates, there has been far too
little discussion of its history and theoretical precepts.
Grimshaw and Ravetz certainly provide a much needed overview and history
of observational cinema, but it is hardly comprehensive. They proceed by select
case studies to emphasize specific techniques and their effects (a methodology that
I would describe as textual analysis, if we accept that audiovisual works are texts).
By limiting themselves to textual objects, they overlook the way that observational
cinema spills out and over into a great range of film practices that cannot, them-
selves, be accommodated within the sphere of anthropology. Observational cinema
is, finally, a mode of documentary cinema, and my own omission of it was in fact
consistent with my emphasis on experimental and avant-garde practices.
Putting boxes around the vast possibilities of cinematic practices, marking off
boundaries and identifying genres will always be somewhat unrewarding. Grimshaw
and Ravetz have tended to focus on U.S. exemplars of the mode, with their own film
practices being among the very few European examples in the book. Where is Jean
Rouch in this study? He is a key link between the neorealist project and cinema
verité, and uses sound and narrative in highly ironic ways. Parallel movements
in Canada and France emerged a little earlier than Drew Associates and should
also be acknowledged as precursors to the observational mode. But to be fair,
this inquiry does not pretend to be a comprehensive survey but to examine the
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epistemological features of an important, but oddly enough, little-understood body

of work.
In the end, though, I cannot say that I am convinced that the “enskilled practice”
that the authors finally end up describing observational cinema as, is a convincing
anthropological method. Although I would fully endorse the idea of a “sensuous
scholarship,” of experience as knowledge, and I recognize the cinematic discourse
of revelation—of the power of realism as mimetic recognition—I am still unclear
about how it constitutes a form of anthropology. From a film studies perspective,
the anthropological discourse has always been hard to grasp. Filmmaking is so
far from science, that any attempts to render the documentary “scientific” seem
doomed to fail. With their emphasis on aesthetics and technique, the authors pay
little attention to the social actors and cultural settings that observational filmmakers
have chosen to film. Why is it that a disproportionate number of examples in the
book are Americans filming other Americans?
Perhaps the value of Grimshaw and Ravetz’s work is in their careful exploration
of the rich dynamics of this cinema—its variety and its history. If anyone might
have equated it with a form of surveillance, as a matter of “just looking,” they
convincingly demonstrate that it is much more than this. Observational cinema is
an embodied and constructed practice, in which the camera is merely a means to
an end which is, finally, an intersubjective experience. Their method is really one
of evaluation and selection; the “good” forms of observational cinema are those that
bring the viewer into a sensuous relationship with the subjects being filmed. The
filmmaker is an intermediary, whose “humanity” becomes a conduit, with the aid
of technology, between other people’s experiences. As a documentary modality,
observational cinema is inherently conservative and passive; as an art form, it can
be a radically intense engagement with social reality; as anthropology, it is a tool
for the documentation of everyday life. Observational cinema slips easily between
these different modes, depending on its viewer and its exhibition context, and in
this sense it remains a fascinating example of interdisciplinary media culture.

The Adventure of the Real: Jean Rouch and the Craft of Ethnographic Cinema. Paul Henley.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010, 536 pages.
BRIAN KARL, Center for Ethnomusicology, Columbia University.

Exuberant, extemporaneous, determined, playful, and far-flung in his trajectories

both as a filmmaker and as an anthropologist, Jean Rouch is one of those figures
whose work can be maddeningly elusive to categorize in terms of practice. Paul
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Henley’s substantial new examination of what he calls Rouch’s “praxis” is far

from the first book-length work devoted to Rouch and his work, but it manages
well on many accounts while addressing much of the significance of Rouch’s
accomplishments.
Among those accomplishments include Rouch’s use of nonactors in his eth-
nofictive films, his highlighting of ordinary individuals as individuals in his ethno-
graphic filmwork more generally, and the commitment by Rouch to a high degree
of improvisation, often in collaboration with those many individuals he recruited
from the locales of his shooting. This latter attribute is part of a larger theme of his
lifelong filmic project of trying to produce a kind of “shared anthropology,” which
Henley appropriately stresses as one particularly significant achievement in both
anthropological and filmic terms.
Less thoroughly examined in Henley’s book, although mentioned in passing, is
the idea of “reverse anthropology,” which for Rouch entailed the less-than-rigorous
“study” of French society by some of his African collaborators reflected in his
film Petit à Petit, as well as portions in the one-off experiment of Chronicle of a
Summer with French Edgar Morin. Henley also touches on the issue of cinema as
a representational medium for ethnographic work, although he does not dwell at
any length on the failures of cinema in representing cultural others overall, nor
ultimately on the limits of Rouch’s attempts in this direction, where for instance,
Rouch eschewed the use of subtitles almost entirely, and often apparently lacked
fluency in local languages of his subjects.
Overall, Henley’s volume is well organized, and it is quite thorough in
investigating a number of topics. Besides its main narratives of how, when, where,
of what and with whom Rouch made his various projects, two appendices offer
a useful compilation describing all of Rouch’s films, as well as a separate list
of the films both by year and by theme. Although other volumes dealing with
Rouch’s work have included similar compendia (see, e.g., Steven Feld’s 2002
edited collection of writings by and interviews with Rouch), Henley has taken
advantage of these prior efforts, while also rescouring archives of Rouch’s stored
work to clarify much of the breadth of that oeuvre. Henley is also careful to state
up front that he makes no claim to his list as comprehensive. In the main body of
the text itself, he provides a marked contrast from other writings on Rouch by
not focusing only on the most famous and major works by Rouch. Henley gives
space for consideration of Rouch’s unseen, seldom seen and undercommented-on
film projects, and he puts each piece in relevant context with larger categories of
Rouch’s work historically, thematically, and methodologically.
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One larger body of ethnographic work by Rouch that has been underdiscussed
historically is his work on the Dogon, following the ethnographic attention long
paid to the group by his thesis adviser, Marcel Griaule, as well as by Germaine
Dieterlin, a later collaborator of Rouch. It is notable that Henley gives attention
to Rouch’s apparently ambivalent but still substantial involvement in a long-term
project of documenting some of the extreme long-cycle ritual practices in the Dogon
community (even going so far longitudinally as to plan for filmic documentation to
follow in the generation after Rouch’s own demise, given the extended gaps in the
recurrence of those events among the Dogon). Henley’s attention is noteworthy
not simply in that Rouch’s work among the Dogon represents a significant effort
on the part of Rouch over an extended period of time that yielded a large amount
of data, but also because the filmic results by many accounts were lacking in the
qualities that so distinguished other ethnographic film work by Rouch.
As the subtitle of the book suggests, its emphasis is on film and the crafting
of it above all else. Most of the book’s biographical considerations are oriented
toward how events and choices in Rouch’s life affected that question of craft.
Henley identifies early on a sort of avocational dyad that made up a formative
part of Rouch’s approach as a filmmaker. In keeping with this idea of craft, more
attention is focused in the book on aspects of Rouch that follow the lines of his early
vocation as an engineer than any of his tendencies as a filmmaker whose reference
points were poetic. There does feel missing here some more sense of Rouch as an
individual himself: although there is plenty of summary description of activities by
Rouch, and some speculation on Rouch’s motivations relating to particular works
and his position in relation to various cultural formations and greater theoretical
debates, there is next to no sense of Rouch’s life choices after an early age, and,
perhaps most tellingly, little sense of Rouch’s own voice coming through, even in
the handful of direct quotations offered in passing in Henley’s text.
Henley does very quickly but effectively sketch some of the early background
in Rouch’s history as a young man that led to his eventual pursuit of both filmmaking
and anthropology. Even more surprisingly effective, given the by-now many-well-
rehearsed histories of that narrative from different sources already, is how Henley
traces much nuance in the shifting positions of the Surrealist movement in the first
half of the 20th century, and of its relation to early social scientific practice in France,
along with its long-term impact for Rouch as an individual filmmaker. Perhaps most
significantly as a marked achievement in studies of Rouch, Henley’s awareness of
and familiarity with filmmaking methods generally and historically provide solid
foundations for considering the technical aspects in Rouch’s filmmaking and its
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impact on the growth of his practice. There is something not just worthwhile but
winning about providing this sort of long-term contextualization for the vagaries of
Rouch’s development in realms that are not only technical but ultimately aesthetic
and methodological as well.
In noting one of the larger anthropological concerns of Rouch’s time into
which Rouch delved deeply both as an anthropologist and filmmaker, Henley
points to Rouch’s tracking of the large-scale migrations of rural Africans to various
metropolises on the continent during the second half of the 1950s, as African nations
moved toward political independence. Although he mentions the extensive series
of ethnographic data that Rouch collected separately on this topic and some of the
written published accounts that came out of that data, Henley’s own focus is on the
film documents that Rouch produced during this period. These were part of Rouch’s
deliberate attempt at providing a channel for Africans themselves to address more
directly their own experiences in displacement. Rouch’s decision to foreground
these native perspectives was a bold and striking move for the time, and one that
was not limited to a single gesture. At least three of Rouch’s most well-known film
works—Maı̂tres Fous, Jaguar, and Moi, Un Nègre—were fundamentally caught up
with the question of what the impact of such movements entailed for rural-to-urban
African migrants. Disappointingly, Henley provides next to no contextualizaion
for another, related concern for anthropology: that colonial milieu that Rouch was
working out of, and to whose former subjects he most often attended in his work,
and that impelled much of the factors leading to accelerated migration, as well as
the Hauka possession ritual, which Rouch so famously documented in Maı̂tres Fous.
It is in his chapter focused on the interpretation of Maı̂tres Fous, one of Rouch’s
most notable films, that Henley’s ambition perhaps most noticeably exceeds the
scope of what he attempts to address, setting up a bit of an argumentative straw
man by overdeterminedly insisting on too exclusive interpretation of the possession
ceremonies of the Hauka by Rouch and others. In the course of his own argument,
Henley covers some interesting, worthwhile, and relevant theoretical points about
the possible interpretation of such possession in colonial and postcolonial contexts,
but in trying to critique the overstated claims of other interpreters, he seems to
err himself in overgeneralizing those various arguments, and disallow the same
conclusion he comes to himself: that is, that any singular read of the causes and
significance of the Hauka ceremonies would be too narrow.
In terms of the more theoretical approaches to how possession in such contexts
might be interpreted, there are some lacunae in his review. For instance, although he
mentions Michael Taussig’s elaborate theorizing on cross-cultural mimesis between
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Western culture and natives of distant lands, he only does so more secondarily, in
passing, without delving into how that notion of mimesis purportedly works, not
only from Taussig’s perspective, but also that of Janice Boddy (whose extensive
work on possession Henley references, but without deeply delving into), not to
mention those of Homi Bhabha, Franz Fanon, and Fritz Kramer, all of whom have
produced work pertaining in one way or another to manifestations of these issues
in Africa.
Henley is fairly good about noting weaknesses and limits in many of Rouch’s
own more theoretical graspings. Rouch’s late-blooming claim of the capacity to
enter into a sort of “ciné-transe” is ultimately taken by Henley as metaphorical,
rather than as a literal shift in consciousness by Rouch himself during his periods
of filmmaking, which he proposed were somehow parallel to those changes in
physiological and psychic state undergone by his ethnographic subjects during
possession and trance. Henley does good work in presenting some of the competing
claims and ultimate divergence among U.S. and French filmmakers’ use of the
categories of “cinema verité” and “direct cinema,” although this is one area where
he alludes a few too many times to an issue and some of its principle actors
before giving sufficient detail on, in this case, what some of the very public
resolution of these conceptual debates were among the filmmakers themselves. His
unwavering focus on Rouch is made clear in this account since the information he
provides on other filmmakers involved in this conversation, and on their work,
are sketchy. Henley does offer a helpful concluding suggestion regarding this issue
that perhaps differentiating between methodology and epistemology in Rouch’s
praxis might be productive for tracking the genealogy of his more intellectual
claims.
Not shy about calling Rouch on some of Rouch’s self-contradictions, he neither
mythologizes nor overly berates but happily is not invested in making Rouch a sort
of punching bag in pursuit of his failings. He does give a pass on Rouch’s poor
representation of differences across gender throughout his oeuvre, sidestepping
also the question of how Rouch’s uneven ethnographic research overall fed into his
films. Even just a bit more attention to these lacks would yield some insight into
the motivations and context of Rouch’s times.
The appreciation by Rouch of earlier filmmakers Robert Flaherty and Dziga
Vertov, and his continuing references to them as crucial visual anthropology pre-
cursors is examined well, in more than summary fashion. Regarding a later period,
Henley also weaves in and out of an account of the cultural force of France’s filmic
Nouvelle Vague, giving a good sense of how Rouch was influential on several
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filmmakers considered part of that group (incl. notably Godard), without getting
carried away with the significance of that influence. Henley points out that, how-
ever much methodological commonalities resulted between Rouch’s practice and
the Rouch-inspired wake of Godard, Truffaut, Rivette, and others, Rouch very
much approached filmmaking from crucially different sets of creative interests.
Although he does mention some of the incidental moments of effect on practice
among French filmmakers of fiction, a more interesting focus could have examined
the legacy of Rouch’s work in its impact (or lack) on other ethnographic filmmakers
that followed.
Looking again at Henley’s address to a more cultural anthropological realm, he
also provides substantial, ongoing references to West African cultural ethnographic
information, highly relevant as Niger, and to a lesser degree, Ghana and the Ivory
Coast were primary field areas for Rouch’s fieldwork. This is pleasantly surprising
given that the milieus of West Africa are self-avowedly not areas of specialty for
Henley. Somewhat lacking, however, it is too often unclear what his own sources
are for this information, because he usually eschews the citation of references in
these sections. (In general, although Henley cites a good number and wide range
of sources, the choices about what to cite and what not are overall unpredictable
and sometimes erratic.)
Henley overstates a bit perhaps the still very significant achievement of Chronicle
of a Summer, Rouch’s and Edgar Morin’s early experiment in cinema-verité as a
seminal ethnographic document of reflexivity, when he suggests that it “anticipates
by the best part of twenty years similar approaches by textual anthropology”
(pp. 169–170). Although it is perhaps true that the most noted “classics” of reflexive
ethnographic work such as Paul Rabinow’s Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco were
published decades later, there were, nonetheless, other, much earlier ethnographic
work, such as Jean Briggs’ Never in Anger (1965), which integrated a substantial
aspect of the author’s presence as integral to the portrait of the “Others” she was
trying to portray.
Some moments of repetitiveness that might have been edited out include
the debates of cinema verité and direct cinema already alluded to, and the effects
of developing sound equipment portability on Rouch’s work, as well as the too-
frequent recurrence of the sort of founding “Rosebud”-like story of Rouch’s initial
exposure to images of West Africa. Also repeated several times, and without the
corroborating support of evidentiary details is Rouch’s purportedly ambivalent
relationship with his anthropological mentor Marcel Griaule, owing to the latter’s
wartime role as a Vichy collaborator.
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In sum, Henley’s book provides a detailed look at the film work particularly
with which Rouch provided rare glimpses of his subjects’ lives, beliefs, and points of
view. As lacking in rigor as the documents he produced sometimes prove themselves
to be, they are nonetheless often brilliant for providing rare insight into what some
humans at least culturally made of their world around them. “Experimental” is
a word that is sometimes offered up too readily as one attribute or at least goal
in contemporary social scientific practice. Rouch, for all his sometimes willful,
sometimes-fuzzy approaches to his subjects, offers a rare example of a scholar of
cultural activity who was also extraordinarily inventive and risk taking in his own
representations of that activity of others.

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