Jean Rouch may not be a household name, but some of the world’s most revered filmmakers — from Jean-Luc Godard to Werner Herzog — are indebted to him. The French filmmaker pioneered the concept of “ethno-fiction,” fictional films built around the lives of everyday people, and developed the bulk of his filmography out of time spent in Africa. His 1958 feature “Moi, un Noir” follows the daily routine of a trio of Nigerian immigrants off the Ivory Coast who imagine themselves as movie stars, and its blend of jump cuts and amateur performances reportedly inspired Godard’s 1960 debut “Breathless.” Rouch’s documentary “Chronicle of a Summer,” co-directed with Edgar Morin, is considered a foundational achievement of the cinéma vérité movement.
Nevertheless, Rouch has remained a cinephile secret for decades, and in the wake of his death in 2004, much of his work has been unavailable in the U.S. — until now.
On November...
Nevertheless, Rouch has remained a cinephile secret for decades, and in the wake of his death in 2004, much of his work has been unavailable in the U.S. — until now.
On November...
- 9/21/2017
- by Indiewire Staff
- Indiewire
The 2014 Art of the Real series, running from April 11th through the 26th at New York's Film Society Lincoln Center, could not have possibly asked for a more appropriate film with which to kick off its exploratory ruminations on documentary filmmaking. Raya Martin and Mark Peranson’s La última película is, among several things, a meta-commentary on its own layered being, a jocular doomsday journey through the collapsed scaffolding of the medium itself. Largely riffing on Dennis Hopper’s 1971 acid anti-Western The Last Movie (as well as its behind-the-scenes companion piece, The American Dreamer), Martin and Peranson employ varying film formats—everything from Super 8mm to HD digital—to weave a postmodern quilt that’s forever ripping at the seams. It’s a purposely paradoxical work, caustic and vulnerable, playful and grave, a flickering montage of photographs and an upside-down tracking shot—and, in its mingling of artifice and raw materials,...
- 4/10/2014
- by Fernando F. Croce
- MUBI
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