| Date | Time | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Friday, January 27, 2017 | 3:00PM - 5:00PM | Seminar Room 108N, Munk School of Global Affairs 1 Devonshire Place M5S 3K7 |
Seminaire conjoint d'histoire de la France / Joint French History Seminar
In a 1951 article series for Franc-Tireur, Jean Rouch described his fears as an ethnographic filmmaker. One must, he wrote, navigate between the detached observation of the ‘dry-eyed savant’ and the myopic immersion of a new ‘Robinson Crusoe’ bereft of his perspective-glass. If Rouch’s anxiety touched on a familiar cliché of both ethnographic fieldwork and documentary filmmaking, it would nonetheless operate idiosyncratically in Rouch’s work as a recurrent preoccupation with the possibilities of visual witnessing and the cooperation of human and camera eyes. In this talk, I explore the genealogies of Jean Rouch’s vision of témoignage, his experiments with the camera-as-witness, and the contribution of his filmmaking to a culture of visual witnessing prior to what Annette Wieviorka has called the ‘era of the witness’ in the 1960s.
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