The Adventure of the Real: Jean Rouch and the Craft of Ethnographic Cinema, Paul Henley, 2009, Chicago

and London: University of Chicago Press, 507 pp.), ISBN 978-0-226-32715-0, Paperback, US $37.50 When Jean Rouch died in 2004, he left us with a corpus of around 130 films that had established him as the most prolific and pre-eminent ethnographic filmmaker in the world. And yet he is probably best known in anglophone contexts for one of the many non-ethnographic films he made: Chronicle of a Summer (1961), one of the earliest and most influential instances of cinma vrit. The 2007 volume, Building Bridges: The Cinema of Jean Rouch, edited by Joram ten Brink, went some way in redressing the dearth of Anglo-American scholarship on Rouch. However, Paul Henleys The Adventure of the Real is the comprehensive study of Rouchs cinema that Anglo-American academics have needed for some time. Thoroughly researched, cogently organized, richly illustrated, and crisply written, The Adventure of the Real is an exceptional book. At over five hundred pages, it may appear long, but the page count includes a comprehensive annotated filmographyan invaluable resource. The rest of the book comprises two introductory chapters and three main parts of several chapters each. The introductory chapters, Initiation and The Surrealist Encounter, establish the biographical and socio-historical contexts in which Rouchs cinema needs to be understood. Initiation concisely summarizes Rouchs training in Maussian anthropology as a student of Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, and it describes some of his early fieldwork among the Songhay peoples in West Africa. In Chapter Two, Henley persuasively argues that the other major influence upon Rouchs cinema, in addition to Maussian anthropology, was his encounter with the Surrealist movement in 1920s and 1930s Paris. In fact, as Henley documents, there were, in this context, important links between anthropologists and Surrealist artists

perhaps most notably, the journals Documents and Minotaure, whose juxtaposition of anthropological work and Surrealist art struck Rouch like a lightening bolt and in many ways set the course of his lifes work (20). Having established this background context, Henley proceeds to examine, in Part I, Rouchs filmmaking in Africa from around 1946 to 1960. Over five chapters, Henley combines an informative chronological, biographical account of Rouchs experiences along with sustained analyses of individual works and the overall development of his filmmaking practice during this period. Of particular interest is the way in which Henley traces the evolution of Rouchs notion of shared anthropology from early films Bataille sur le grande fleuve (1952) through to later films like The Lion Hunters (1965). Rouchs better known ethnofictions, including Moi, un Noir (1960) and La Pyramide humaine (1961), are also astutely analysed in this section, and Henley details the influence of Rouchs filmmaking practice of this period upon key figures of French New Wave. This discussion would have offered a nice segue to Part II, which largely focuses upon Rouchs work back in France over the following few years. However, Part I concludes, in Chapter Seven, with an extended analysis of Rouchs most controversial film, Les Matres fous (1955). Although Henley is explicit throughout the book that his goal is to analyze Rouchs work in terms of filmmaking praxis rather than ethnographic research, this chapter delves into a detailed anthropological discussion of Songhay religion in order to argue against the standard interpretation of the film as parodic counterhegemonic theatrical burlesque (132). While I find Henleys argument convincing, this was one of the few parts of the book I felt could have been improved. This chapter interrupts the natural flow of the books progression and, in its depth of anthropological detail, also seemed somewhat out of

place amongst all the other chapters. The chapter was originally published as an essay, and my sense is that it could have been more radically reconceived to fit the purposes of the book. In any case, Part II picks up where Chapter Six leaves off, following Rouch back to Paris in late 1959 to begin work on what became Chronicle of a Summer (1961). This part of the book breaks down into two further foci: Chapters Eight and Nine examine Rouchs early 1960s New Wave films in the context of changes in filmmaking technologies, Rouchs own practice, and contemporaneous New Wave activity. Chapters Ten and Eleven look at Rouchs later 1960s and early 1970s films most notably, The Lion Hunters (1965), Petit a Petit (1969), and a series of films documenting the seven year long Sigui ritual of the Dogon people (1966-1974). Henley makes a good case for ending the chronological/biographical portion of his study here, in the mid-1970s, when Rouch began to make ethnographic films with less and less frequency and when his capabilities as a filmmaker reached a plateau. The third and final part of the book returns to films that have already been covered, but does so in order to offer a closer analysis of the specific elements of Rouchs filmmaking practiceor, to use the term Henley favors, praxis. Here we get a detailed and compelling discussion of what makes Rouchs cinema original and important. Part III supplies a much-needed clarification of Rouchs links to Dziga Vertov and Robert Flaherty, as well as detailed analyses that further elucidate the influence of Mauss and Griaule as well as the Surrealists upon particular elements of Rouchs filmmaking ranging from improvisation to editing. The book concludes with an important assessment of some of the criticisms that have been lodged against Rouch, and a compelling suggestion that while we ought to recognize the limits of Rouchs shared anthropology, its spirit offers an example on which to build an

appropriate ethical and political posture for [ ethnographic] filmmaking praxis in a contemporary, postcolonial world (357-358). In sum, The Adventure of the Real is a superb work of scholarshipone of the best academic books I have read in the past ten years. I am sure it will prove to be the definitive work on Jean Rouchs filmmaking practice for many more.

Ted Nannicelli University of Waikato tedn@waikato.ac.nz