JAGUAR

Year: 1967 Classification: Exempt - Ronin Recommends: G Runtime: 89 min Produced In: France Directed By: Jean Rouch Produced By: Pierre Braunberger Language: French dialogue, English subtitles
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A legendary classic from Jean Rouch, one of the pivotal figures in the history of ethnographic film.

An innovative blend of documentary and fiction, telling the story of three young men who leave their rural homeland and trek to the coast to seek adventure and fortune in the cities of Ghana.

Jean Rouch often experimented with what he called “ethno-fiction”, a blend of fiction and documentary, and JAGUAR is perhaps the prime example of his idiosyncratic style. In the film, three young men from Ghana – Lam, the cowherd, Illo the fisherman, and Damoure, the ladies’ man - set out from their Savannah homeland to trek to the cities on the coast in search of adventure and work. Shot in the mid-1950s, the film was made largely without synchronised sound. Several years later, Rouch recorded a narration track and an improvised commentary by the participants, reflecting on the action on the screen. This final version of the film was released in 1967 and attracted wide-spread attention for its inventiveness, its rich vein of humour, ethnographic detail and political implications.

Through both its improvisation and careful structure, the film is an eloquent insight into social dislocation and social change in West Africa. The aspirations, fears and frustrations of the film’s characters are expressed directly, giving authentic voice to the young generation searching for excitement and success, and a meaning in their lives.

JAGUAR is part of a collection of six films by Jean Rouch available exclusively through Ronin Films in Australia and New Zealand. The other titles in the collection are LES MAITRES FOUS, LA CHASSE AU LION A L’ARC, MOI UN NOIR, PETIT A PETIT and MAMMY WATER.

Dedicated to the memory of French actor, Gerard Philipe.
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ETHNOGRAPHIC FILMMAKER, DAVID MACDOUGALL, ON JEAN ROUCH AND JAGUAR:

“Rouch [has] expressed a belief in the power of film to communicate across cultural frontiers. To Rouch this power is elusive, and his references to it are elliptical:

There are a few rare moments when the filmgoer suddenly understands an unknown language without the help of subtitles, when he participates in strange ceremonies, when he finds himself walking in towns or across terrain that he has never seen before but that he recognises perfectly. (1975)

Rouch's efforts have gone into extending these moments from brief episodes to entire films, cultivating a gift which, as he has remarked, sometimes comes to “masters, fools, and children” (1975: 90)." - David MacDougall, Ethnographic Film: Failure and Promise, in Transcultural Cinema (1998).

"For Jaguar (1967), filmed in 1954, Rouch enlisted three young men from the savannah of Niger to make a journey to the cities of the south in search of work and adventure. Their journey in fact followed a well-known labour migration route of the period. In making the film, the three were also living out certain ambitions of their own, and Rouch later added a sound track in which they improvised dialogue, narrated the story, and commented on their own performances. The feeling of subjective experience in the film is vivid because it derives from several different sources: the character development on screen, the narrative flow that sweeps the viewer along as a participant, the redoubling of the actual upon the fictional, the spontaneous voices evoking places, encounters, desires and memories." - David MacDougall, The Subjective Voice in Ethnographic Film, in Transcultural Cinema (1998).

"In Jaguar, Rouch is as much concerned with the mental world of his subjects as with their participation in the objective processes of urbanization and labour migration. For Rouch, anthropology was as much about culture as an interior state as it was about the world of social institutions." - David MacDougall, Anthropology and the Cinematic Imagination, in Photography, Anthropology and History (2009), Christopher Morton and Elizabeth Edwards, editors.

“Jaguar bears out Rouch's belief that human beings, surrounded by social and cultural constraints, achieve true freedom only through the exercise of their imaginations and the living out of legends.” – David MacDougall.

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