Icarus Films acquires six classic Jean Rouch films for North American Distribution
Icarus Films is excited to announce the acquisition of six classic films by French filmmaker and ethnographer Jean Rouch for North American distribution. A founder of cinéma vérité, Rouch is widely recognized as one of the world’s most significant documentary filmmakers, but much of his filmography has long been unavailable in the United States.
Icarus Films is producing new subtitles for three of the films, and they will be released to theatrical and non-theatrical audiences this fall. The films will appear in New York this fall as part of a two-part, 40-film Rouch retrospective held at French Institute Alliance Française and Anthology Film Archives between November 7-27, which will be accompanied by a one-day symposium at New York University. The retrospective will be followed by a North American tour, stopping at venues including The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Pacific Cinematheque in Vancouver.
The six films are:
LES MAÎTRES FOUS
1955/ color/ 26 minutes
Rouch’s classic and controversial depiction of a spectacular trance ritual of Accra’s Hauka religious sect, made up mostly of migrant workers from rural Niger, that also constitutes a theatrical protest against West Africa’s colonial masters.
MAMMY WATER
1956/ color/ 19 minutes
Along the coast of Ghana, near the old Portuguese slave forts, children play in the ocean and fisherman perform ceremonies to placate the sea gods whose favor determines their catch.
MOI, UN NOIR
1957/ color/ 72 minutes
In Rouch’s landmark ethnofiction, three Nigerien migrant workers in Treichville, outside Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, describe their lives in the city, the difficulties of urbanization, and their dreams, playfully re-enacting their daily routines for the camera, and taking on the names of American movie stars.
THE LION HUNTERS (LE CHASSE AU LION À L’ARC)
1965/ color/ 80 minutes
Recorded over the course of seven years on the border between Niger and Mali, THE LION HUNTERS documents the traditional lion hunt of the Songhay people, taking it as a key to understanding the region’s social organization.
JAGUAR
1967/ color/ 89 minutes
Three young men from Niger travel to Accra to work. Rouch once again collaborates with his subjects, who narrate the film together, recreating dialogue, explaining their motivations, and infusing the documentary footage with fantasy.
LITTLE BY LITTLE (PETIT À PETIT)
1969/ color/ 92 minutes
In LITTLE BY LITTLE, viewers rejoin the three men from JAGUAR, now running an import-export company in Niamey. Business brings them to Paris, where they perform a reverse anthropology of Rouch’s own culture.
Labels: acquisitions, anthropology, cultural anthropology, ethnography, France, Jean Rouch
4 Icarus Films at the American Anthropological Association conference
The 108th AAA annual meeting is taking place in Philadelphia from December 2 to 6. Four of our films will be presented:
- REVUE
- RAPAYAN
- UMBRELLA
- LUCANAMARCA
For more information, please visit the AAA website here.Labels: academic conferences, anthropology, cultural anthropology
2 FRIF Films to be shown at MoMA's Documentary Fortnight Festival
This year's Documentary Fortnight Festival at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City looks to be an interesting program, incorporating films on a wide array of subjects and from a variety of countries.
Included in the programs are
THE PRIZE OF THE POLE on Wednesday February 27th at 6 pm (to be followed by a discussion with the Director of the Margaret Mead Film Festival, Elaine Charnov) and
TEETH in a double-billing with EXPOSED on Friday, February 15th at 6pm.
Labels: cultural anthropology, festival news, MoMA, NYC events
New Cultural Anthropology Subject ListAnthropology is a broad field of study so to help you navigate to appropriate First Run/Icarus Films quickly, we are pleased to launch a new
Cultural Anthropology subject page. Titles from the cultural anthropology collection include
ARAB DIARIES, a five-part series focusing on the milestones of life, like marriage and work, of Arab individuals from various countries and notable for providing perspectives from Arab women; the classic
CHRONICLES OF A SUMMER from filmmaking legends Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin, who explored the lives of Parisians during the summer of 1960 while war raged in Algeria in one of the early cinema verité films; and from our new releases,
EVERYTHING’S FINE, the story of Seydou Konaté, the only doctor for 40,000 people in Southern Mali, offering revealing insights into the challenges of health care in Africa today. Check out the new
Cultural Anthropology section.
Labels: anthropology, cultural anthropology, site updates, subject pages
Prizes and Screenings at the Upcoming
Society for Visual Anthropology Film Festival
LA SIERRA was given the Award of Excellence, the highest honor the SVA bestows on a film.
THE DEVIL'S MINER was given an Award of Commendation, while
COMPADRE won the Fieldwork Prize, “since the problems it depicts are so like those of many anthropologists in the field, and so rarely discussed.”
Tags: anthropologyLabels: academic conferences, anthropology, awards, cultural anthropology
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