Whose voice? Who's Film?: Jean Rouch, Oumarou Ganda and Moi, un noir
Becoming another?
Can one put the West to flight? Can one flee oneself? In Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985), Gilles Delueze describes the problems faced by the filmmaker in Africa among peoples colonised by those who impose their stories from elsewhere and appropriate local myths to their own ends. In answer to this question, Deleuze cites the trance sequences in Jean Rouch's film, Les Maitres fous (1955), in which characters on screen become others by storytelling, while the filmmaker becomes another by fashioning characters drawn from real life. He conceptualizes this reciprocal interaction as a double-becoming and concludes: 'It may be objected that Jean Rouch can only with difficulty be considered a third world author, but no one has done so much to put the West to flight, to flee himself, to break with a cinema of ethnology and say Moi, un noir [1958]' (1985: 223).
Can one put the West to flight? Can one flee oneself? In Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985), Gilles Delueze describes the problems faced by the filmmaker in Africa among peoples colonised by those who impose their stories from elsewhere and appropriate local myths to their own ends. In answer to this question, Deleuze cites the trance sequences in Jean Rouch's film, Les Maitres fous (1955), in which characters on screen become others by storytelling, while the filmmaker becomes another by fashioning characters drawn from real life. He conceptualizes this reciprocal interaction as a double-becoming and concludes: 'It may be objected that Jean Rouch can only with difficulty be considered a third world author, but no one has done so much to put the West to flight, to flee himself, to break with a cinema of ethnology and say Moi, un noir [1958]' (1985: 223).
