I, a Negro

I, a Negro (1959)

Moi, un noir

Winner of the prestigious Prix Louis Delluc in 1958, "Moi, un noir" marked Jean Rouch's break with traditional ethnography, and his embrace of the collaborative and improvisatory strategies he called "shared ethnography" and "ethnofiction". The film depicts an ordinary week in the lives of men and women from Niger who have migrated to Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire for work.

Date of release
1959-03-12
TMDB
7.4 / 10 (38)
Runtime
1h 10m
Genres
Documentary
Director
Jean Rouch

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Awards: 1 · Nominations: 0. Including: Louis Delluc Prize

Moi, un noir is a 1958 French ethnofiction film directed by Jean Rouch. The film is set in Abidjan, Ivory Coast.

Filming

The filming process for Moi, un noir was rather idiosyncratic: Jean Rouch spent nine months amongst his ethnographic subjects and allowed them to tell their own story in a very personal way, inherently challenging the rules of the field.

Jean Rouch did not go into this film with any particular idea, preferring to capture as much footage as possible in order to structure a narrative with his subjects. Many sequences in the film were captured by chance during long continuous shots.

In making the movie, Jean Rouch was surprised as to how much his subjects were willing to disclose about their life’s dreams and aspirations, finding that his nimble camera offered him a passport into freedom, allowing him to navigate circles he hadn’t dreamt of integrating. Consequently, he brought his lightweight 16mm Kodachrome camera into every social setting.

After Jean Rouch and his subjects agreed that they had captured enough footage, they recorded the dialog in a studio in the Musée de l'Homme in Paris, France which he superimposed over ambient street noise recorded around Abidjan. These asynchronous sound effects born out of practical limitations helped contribute to the "dream-like" atmosphere of many sequences in the film.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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