© 2002 by Society for French Studies
Otherwise than Becoming: Jean Rouch and the Ethics of Les Maîtres fous
1 Trinity Hall, Cambridge
This article focuses on Jean Rouch's celebrated documentary Les Maîtres fous. Rouch's commentary to the film encourages us to view the performances we witness as 'le reflet de notre civilisation'. Following Rouch, many critics of this film have focused on the imitative, reflective aspects of the relationship between colonizer and colonized that it lays bare. In its willed conflation of positions, however, I argue that the mimetic relations that Rouch encourages us to see are problematic in a way that the film more generally, when read against the logic he proposes, is not. Gilles Deleuze is one commentator who has sought to move beyond mimesis when discussing Rouch's filmmaking, yet in his analysis Deleuze's non-imitative approach shades into its opposite, requiring us to look elsewhere in order to describe the filmic logic that moves us beyond imitation. In his attention to marking out a space for alterity that lies outside the sphere of the self-same, it is Emmanuel Levinas's work that enables us ultimately to account for a non-imitative ethics in Les Maîtres fous.