Jaguar
Little by Little
Saturday, November 9 at 5pm DIRECTORS IN FOCUS: JEAN ROUCH Jaguar
Saturday, November 9 at 8pm DIRECTORS IN FOCUS: JEAN ROUCH Little by Little (Petit à petit)
dir. Jean Rouch, France, 1967, digital, French with English subtitles, 110 min.
dir. Jean Rouch, France, 1970, digital, French with English subtitles, 92 min.
One of Jean Rouch’s classic ethnofictions, Jaguar follows three young Songhay men from Niger—Lam Ibrahim, Illo Goudel’ize, and the legendary performer Damouré Zika—on a journey to the Gold Coast (modern day Ghana). Drawing from his own fieldwork on intra-African migration, the results of which he published in the 1956 book Migrations au Ghana, Rouch collaborated with his three subjects on an improvisational narrative. The four filmed the trip in mid-1950s, and reunited a few years later to record the sound, the participants remembering dialogue and making up commentary. The result is a playful film that finds three African men performing ethnography of their own culture.
By 1969, Jean Rouch had spent more than two decades documenting West Africa as an ethnographer, and in 1961 had co-directed Chronicle of a Summer, an anthropological investigation of Parisian life. In Little by Little, Rouch’s Nigerien collaborators Damouré Zika and Lam Ibrahim travel to Paris and end up performing a reverse ethnography of French culture.
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When we re-join Zika and Ibrahim in Ayorou, Niger, the Little By Little company they had formed at the conclusion of Jaguar has become a large import-export company. Hearing that a competitor is building a multistory building in Niamey, the directors of the company decide they must construct their own in Ayorou. The most cutting of Rouch’s collaborative ethno-fictions, Little by Little playfully satirizes the history of European-African relations.