Jean Rouch first took up the movie camera as a tool to aid in his ethnographic studies of African natives; but, like Flaherty, he knew the value of shaping his raw data along strong dramatic lines. His movies, at their best, bear witness to the melancholy mission of the anthropologist as laid out by Susan Sontag, apropos of another anthropologist, in her essay "The Anthropologist As Hero," who seeks to memorialize a vanishing culture before it's too late, but who hastens the day by his very presence (and, in Rouch's case, by the presence of the movie camera). This half-hour short, about an ancient religious ritual given contemporary political overtones and carried on in the jungle outside a modern African city, offers a beautifully ironic juxtaposition of the mundane and the mystical. It is something of a shocker, too — indeed it comes in for a mention, in a different Sontag essay, as a "cornerstone of the poetic cinema of shock" and is recommended for strong stomachs only. (1955) — Duncan Shepherd
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