Jean Rouch (1917–2004), French film director and anthropologist
Jean-Paul Sartre | Jean-Jacques Rousseau | Jean Cocteau | Jean Genet | Jean-Luc Godard | Wyclef Jean | Jean Racine | Jean Chrétien | Jean Michel Jarre | Jean Paul Gaultier | Jean Nouvel | Jean-Michel Basquiat | Jean Giraud | Jean Sibelius | Jean-Luc Ponty | Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot | Jean-Claude Van Damme | Jean Renoir | Jean-Pierre Rampal | Jean-Léon Gérôme | Jean Harlow | Jean Anouilh | Billie Jean King | Jean Giraudoux | Jean-Bertrand Aristide | Jean Baudrillard | Jean-Pierre Thiollet | Jean-Martin Charcot | Jean Gabin | Jean de Florette |
At the BBC, he founded and commissioned for the Fine Cut series working with such international filmmakers as Jean Rouch, Werner Herzog, DB Pennebaker, Bob Drew, Fred Wiseman and Vikram Jayanti.
Among the retrospectives screened in EDOC there is the work of Jean Rouch, the Maysles brothers, Avi Mograbi, Johan van der Keuken, Ross McElwee, Sergei Loznitsa, Nicolas Philibert, Patricio Guzmán, Joaquim Jordà, and others.
The French school of ethnology was particularly significant for the development of the discipline since the early 1950s with Marcel Griaule, Germaine Dieterlen, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jean Rouch.
He was elected General Secretary in 1981 and has been consistently re-elected since then, working closely with past Presidents, Jean Rouch, Jean-Charles Tacchella, and Claude Berri and with the current President Costa-Gavras.
Smihi has cited the cinéma vérité pioneer Jean Rouch and Henri Langlois of the Cinémathèque Française, whom he met at the Francophone Film Festival, as being among those who imparted to him a sense of the magic of movies.
Jean Rouch allows Alassane’s education and accommodation in Canada, where he meets the famous Norman McLaren, who teaches him the secrets of animation.
In 1970, he created at the University of Paris-VII the first department dedicated to ethnology, anthropology and science of religions, to which participated scholars such as the philosopher Jean-Toussaint Desanti, Pierre Bernard, Bernard Delfendahl, Serge Moscovici, Jean Rouch, Michel de Certeau, etc.
Salvage ethnography started to be applied methodically in visual anthropology as ethnographic film since the fifties by filmmakers such as Jean Rouch in France, Michel Brault and Pierre Perrault in Canada, or António Campos in Portugal (early sixties), followed by others (seventies).