Cinéma vérité #2: Moi, un noir 1958

We continue with the summer cycle of Cinéma vérité films on Wednesday at 8:30 pm in the “Kamenko Katić” cinema of the Roof Community Center.

Jean Rouche, the first visual anthropologist to earn a doctorate from the Sorbonne in addition to his research efforts in Niger (where he became their cinematic father with over 50 documentaries in that country), liked to play with fictionalization in ethnographic research with the camera. In addition to trance rituals and many other religious customs, he recorded contemporary and urban subjects in the second half of the 20th century on the African continent. Rusch is credited with introducing the 16mm format that revived ethnographic film. Lightweight portable cameras like Bell & Howell could be found at the Paris flea market in the 1950s, and since then we can say that enthusiasts with audio-visual recorders have gone into denser research, which were not afflicted by the dirty intentions of missionaries and expeditionary expectations.

The film “Moi, un noir” (I, the Black) deals with the lives of young Nigerian emigrants who left their homeland and are trying to find work in the capital of Ivory Coast. The film follows a week in the life of two young men, gradually erasing the border between reality and fiction, their real lives and “scripted” dramatic situations.

Filmed in Abidjan, the capital of the French colony of Ivory Coast, “Moi, un noir” depicts a group of young immigrants from Niger, who mostly played themselves as well as their ego ideals. Ethnofiction, as a subgenre of “Cinema verite” became a significant experiment by Rush in recreating and critically examining the identity of the protagonist.

Using his lightweight Bell & Howell, Rush filmed the daily routines of Abidjan: loading cargo onto ships bound for Europe, getting cheap meals at the market, going out on a Saturday night. The scenes are set to create a view of a week in their lives. Rouche went on to document their inner world, which was shaped to some extent by French and especially American popular culture, as well as their relative freedom from the society into which they were born. (“In a sense, the characters see themselves in a ‘fictional reality’ in Treichville, far from their homes and traditional life in Niger,” wrote British critic Mick Eaton

The discussion and analysis after the film is led by Relja Pekić.

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