Casts & Crew
Also Directed by Jean Rouch
Dionysos is a 1984 French comedy film directed by Jean Rouch, starring Jean Monod and Hélène Puiseux. It tells the story of an American drama teacher who after writing a thesis on Dionysus tries to combine Dionysian rites with the work at a car factory, in an attempt to create the world's first car built in joyous frenzy.
The title of this film translates literally as 'to put on a hori,' a hori being the Songhay term for ceremony of festival. Here it is used to refer to a ganandi, literally 'to make dance' This film concerns two women whom the zima [priest] had diagnosed some months before as being ill through possession by spirits. In the meantime, their families have gathered together the resources to pay for the musicians, dancers, and the priest himself to put on an initiation dance lasting seven days This is a film of documentation, simply recording various moments in the progress of the ceremony, without any form of explanation, neither in intertitle cards nor in voice-over. (Paul Henley, The Adventure of the Real)
Funeral rituals among the Dogon on the cliggs of Bandiagara, Mali.
One of four film sketches on the problems of adolescents facing the adult world in the 1960s. The three other sketches were directed by Michel Brault, Hiroshi Teshigahara, and Gian Vittorio Baldi.
Three pioneers of documentary filmmaking – Joris Ivens, Henri Storck, and the man behind the camera, Jean Rouch – recall the early days of the documentary genre and speak about their creative methods and sources of inspiration. This lively discussion between the directors is shot in cinéma vérité style and spliced with footage from their older films.
Two parts magical drama and one part straight documentary, this outing from famed ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch is set somewhere in Nigeria near a small village.
A compilation of black and white excerpts from five previous color films by Jean Rouch: Yenendi, the Rainmakers, Cemeteries in the Cliff, The Millet People, The Circumcision, Battle on the Great River.
When the male nurse Damouré Zika talks about AIDS with his two friends Lam and Tallou, under the admiring eye of his own wife Lobo, who is a nurse's aide, it is because he believes that AIDS is a "disease of love that can only be conquered by love." And this right to love has only one passport for the moment: the condom, on whose use he gives an incredible demonstration.
"Enjoying an old port wine together, I was talking with Manoël about the bridges of Douro, and immediately we were of the same opinion: of all these bridges, the great work of art in the capital of modern architecture is the bridge that Gustave Eiffel had done before building his tower of Paris. In less than five minutes, the project was constructed: Manoël was writing a poem that we will film with our friends Bernard, Jérôme, and François. And our dreams of childhood were made in less than a week by going back and forth to the banks of Douro, on foot, then by car, then in a helicopter, back to where we were following these marvelous clouds, with Manoël and me screaming stanzas of a poem inspired by the wind, the water, and friendship." - Jean Rouch
