These common concerns with technology aside, the American and European

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1 Rouch s documentary approach as compared to the cinema of Richard Leacock and other American filmmakers By Ann McIntosh, Videographer Monkton, MD USA annmac20@aol.com Introduction In the 1970 s, I was as a colleague of Jean Rouch and Richard Leacock for more than a dozen years the latter at M.I.T where he employed me to teach video, and the former at Summer Institutes in New England and while making my documentary about Rouch (Conversations with Jean Rouch, 2004.) In the course my experience, I observed that many cineastes and critics refer to these two gentlemen almost in one breath, as if their cinema verite (or, direct cinema these terms are interchangeably in this paper) styles and methods can be simply differentiated by the terms observational (Americans, e.g. Leacock) or provocative/participatory (e.g. Rouch). Similarities and differences between French and American direct cinema filmmakers. The primary similarity between these filmmakers is that, in the late Fifties and early Sixties, both Leacock (and his American colleagues, D. A. Pennebaker, the Maysles brothers, Robert Drew, et. al.) and Rouch (Chris Marker, et. al.) desperately wanted to be rid of the encumbrances of the heavy cameras, tape recorders, and the wires connecting them. They all puzzled and worked with engineers to create a wireless synchronous sound system. In the early Sixties, synchronous sound came into being. Leacock, the filmmaker who came up with the way to achieve sync sound, tells the story as follows: Synchronicity was achieved by a Bulova Acutron watch. I realized its crystal could be used to synchronize a 16mm camera with a Nagra audio recorder. I was sharing a space with Willard van Dyke and looking over his shoulder. I asked what he was doing. He said he was making a TV commercial for an electronic watch, the first, and explained that it had a tiny tuning fork that gave it a 360-cycle electric pulse that was extremely accurate. A few days later I was walking up Madison Avenue behind St. Patrick s cathedral and it occurred to me that we could use this watch to solve our synch problems. These common concerns with technology aside, the American and European

2 filmmakers employed different approaches to their subjects. Erik Barnouw best stated the essential disparities between the American documentarists of the early 1960s and Rouch: The (American) direct cinema documentarist took his camera to a situation of tension and waited hopefully for a crisis; the Rouch version of cinema verite tried to precipitate one. The direct cinema artist aspired to invisibility; the Rouch cinema verite artist was often an avowed participant. Cinema verite as created by Rouch and Edgar Morin in Chronicle of A Summer (1961) is a somewhat preconceived, structured reality in which the filmmakers and their participants are catalysts to ensuing action. Scenes are partially planned in advance. Rouch and Morin held nightly conferences about what would be filmed the following day. Their primary subjects were involved in discussing past and future scenes, and directions the film might take. The brilliant next-to-last scene of the film, where Marceline walks down the Champs Elysee from the Place de la Concorde, is completely staged, except neither the filmmakers nor Marceline had an idea of what she would say until the words poured out of her. While Rouch and Morin intentionally influenced the behavior of their subjects, Leacock and his colleagues did everything possible to remain invisible to theirs. Interviews were verboten, and the use of lights minimal and unobtrusive. The Americans, in their effort to get away from the droning narration of traditional historical documentaries, limited voice-overs to a minimum permissible only to explain circumstances that could not be understood from the action of the film itself. Voice-overs were simple explanations, usually recorded by the filmmaker himself, to explain the context of a scene. In 1960, Robert Drew, D. A. Pennebaker and Leacock filmed the Wisconsin primary election between John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey. In Primary (Drew Associates for Time, Inc., 1960), there is a scene in which Leacock is in the car with Humphrey. Humphrey has his eyes closed, completely relaxed as he takes a brief nap during the world-wind campaign tour. In this sequence, Leacock can be said to have achieved his ideal: his subject is so used to the camera, so trusts the cameraman, that he never realizes he is being filmed. The filmmaker appears invisible; the fly on the wall has found his spot. Such a scene would never appear in a Rouch film. Leacock s

3 sequence is entirely quiet, private, nothing provocative about it, and yet it gives us an unusually intimate understanding of what a stressful political campaign is like. Leacock himself recently expressed how his filmmaking differs from Rouch s: The first time I saw a Rouch film was at a screening in Lyon of his Chronicle D un Ete, which I liked very much but is in many respects the opposite of what we were trying to do. It made use of a mobile camera and synchronous sound but placed its subject in situations that were designed to change their behavior. They are questioned by the participating filmmakers and Vertov s theories apply here but not to what we were doing. The most impressive scenes such as the Holocaust survivor (Marceline) walking along the street at night, reminiscing, with the camera mounted on the tailgate of Rouch s car, being pushed along the road ahead of her these were traditional set-ups and had no relation to observing what happened. Differences between Rouch and Leacock as illustrated in the making of my Conversations with Jean Rouch As a videomaker who worked with Leacock and saw his films before meeting Jean Rouch in 1978, I was fully trained in and subscribed to Leacock s approach to filmmaking. In making my cine-portrait of Rouch, I had the rare opportunity to turn my camera on the documenter himself. I was constantly struck by the differences between his and Leacock s approaches to their subjects. Enduring my constant shooting, Rouch became increasingly concerned about the structure of my film and what I was trying to accomplish. He had no appreciation at all for the importance of recording the minutia of his everyday life. But for those of us who see ourselves as observers, not provocateurs, daily behavior is what most often reveals a subject and his personality. In a scene at the Café de la Croix Rouge in Paris, Jean grabs my camera to illustrate how he uses a 10mm wide-angle lens. He takes this opportunity -- with me on the other end of the lens -- to ask what I think I will do with all this footage of him. My answer is that I will likely make a film containing a number of short stories about Jean Rouch. (In fact, this is what happened: my portrait of Jean is a series of scenes that illustrate the man and what was important to him.) In one instance of Rouch as my provocateur, Rouch actually directs

4 my camera work. In the first scene of my movie, we are on a train going to the Riviera from Paris. Jean engages me and my part-time cameraman (Philippe Lourdou) in a discussion of what constitutes de la grace. ( La grace is the beauty that occurs when a camera shot feels absolutely right and achieves visual harmony.) The beginning of the sequence scene shows Rouch in a close up on the train with the landscape sliding away in a blur behind him as he comments: What is the grace? This landscape you see there. For example, you are shooting with the train going this way (forward) and the landscape going there (disappearing behind us). Maybe the grace is just there on the other angle this way. (Rouch then directs me to correct my angle by 180 degrees, and I shoot with him in foreground and the landscape outside the train coming at us is clear, almost poetic.) Yes, look here. Look this way, here. Maybe that s the grace, because you are going somewhere and leaving something So here we have an instance of the subject of the film influencing not only the behavior of the filmmaker but also her technique. (The technical point he made was correct.) Rouch always cooperated with me, tolerating my ever-present camera. I followed him over several weeks for three years and he never complained or denied me access or opportunity. However, he could not understand my inability to have a prior idea of the final structure of my film. True, I had no precise vision of the edited product. I knew only that I wanted him to address the issues in his life that made him who he was his experiences in WWII, his father s influence on him, and his life with his wife, Jane. I relied on the force of his personality as observed in everyday life, at work and at play, to reveal the rest. Though Jean was relieved when he knew there were stories I wanted him to tell, he procrastinated for days, putting off travel to the nearby town of Chateau Thierry, the setting where he chose to tell me about his war experiences. And it took weeks for him leave Paris and travel to the Cote d Azur, to show me where his father worked in Monaco, and to visit his first wife, Jane, in their Grimaldi Superiore on the Italian Riviera. It was there, in the apartment, that I finally achieved one of my goals: to film Rouch in an interaction in which he was almost unaware of my camera. Mise en scene, Jean and Jane are on their terrace high above the

5 Mediterranean, breakfasting outside. Jane is holding a running garden hose and teasing a bathing suit-clad Rouch, saying that if he wants action (for the film) he will get it. (She has accused Jean of acting for the camera.) She spurts cold water on his nether-parts, saying, That will calm you down. Jean demurs and requests more tea. Jane says, You are constantly trying to direct everybody. Even though you sign petitions against dictator s. So now I have to go and make stupid tea.(to Jean): Why don t you just drink from the bottom of the pot? Jane then exits and returns with fresh tea. But because she thinks the tea is solely for the purpose of the film, the tea is mostly water. Jane (returning with the pot): Here s your tea Jean, looking at the watery mix, gets up in protest: No that s ridiculous, ridiculous.. Jane: Everyone will see that you are mean and quick-tempered. It s true,. just say what you want us to do. What a joke. That s absolutely disgusting, awful. And this cinema verite! Everybody can see that its just water and they will know the film is a fake Here s your tea, Little Johnny. (One needs to see the film to appreciate their behavior and Jane s puns between cinema verite and te, the French word for tea.) This self-conscious scene shows an interaction between Jane and Jean that astonished the French audience who first saw my film in Paris. I believe their surprise was because they had no idea of how Jean and Jane related together. I found it amusing that Jean was hoisted on his own petard, something that seldom happened to him. Conclusion. In a scene at Café de la Croix Rouge, I finally got Rouch to respond to my question about the differences between himself and Leacock. At first, Jean jokes saying, There s no difference. We are very handsome. We are very young. Very popular with women, we adore women. I tell him that he has not answered my question. He does so: I think that the difference was that Ricky started as an army correspondent filmmaker. He learned to make a film as a newspaperman and they write their features as a scoop. I am not a journalist at all. I am an anthropologist. I am not sure that the most significant distinction between these two great,

6 innovative filmmakers is that of an anthropologist and a journalist. Though Rouch s answer gives one pause to think, I don t believe it provides much insight into their more important differences. As noted Therein lies the difference, In closing, I point out that the basic methodological differences and similarities between Rouch and Leacock transcend their overtly dissimilar approaches to filmmaking. Both cineastes found separate ways to gain the trust of their subjects. Each developed cine-trust, the kind of trust that exists when the filmmaker and his subjects trust or are unaware of the camera. The result of this trust is that each manages to reveal to reveal in truth their films. Both Rouch and Leacock enjoyed filmmaking and its possibility to reveal truth in ways that went beyond simple observation and descriptive writing. Jane Rouch summarized the commonality between them as a passion that she called cine-plaisir. Let s Jane have the last word, as she always did. Characters (with spaces): 12,738 Words: 2,152