Jean Rouch

Jean Rouch (31 May 1917 - 18 February 2004) was a French motion-picture director and ethnologist.

He began his long attachment to African subjects in 1941 after working as civil engineer supervising a construction project in Niger. However, shortly afterwards he returned to France to participate in the Resistance. After the war, he did a brief stint as a journalist with Agence France-Presse before returning to Africa where he become an influential ethnologist.

His films mostly belonged to the cinéma vérité school – a label that Rouch himself coined. His best known film, one of the central works of the Nouvelle Vague, is Chronique d'un été (1961) which he filmed with sociologist Edgar Morin and in which he portrays the social life of contemporary France. In it the scientific analysis meets the immediacy of life and one's subjective view of it in a perfect equivalence. And "Ciné-portrait de Margaret Mead". Throughout his career, he used his camera to report on life in Africa. Over the course of five decades, he made almost 120 films.

He was killed in an automobile accident in February 2004, some 16 kilometres from the town of Birnin N'Konni in central Niger.