/ 19 February 2004

Car crash kills pioneering filmmaker

A car crash in the remote desert of Niger killed French film director Jean Rouch, whose pioneering 1960s work in the documentary-style filming known as cinéma-vérité inspired filmmakers in France and the United States. He was 86.

Rouch, a longtime supporter of African filmmaking, died when the Mercedes in which he was riding hit a truck stopped on a highway 550km northeast of the capital, Niamey, state radio announced on Thursday.

Wednesday’s accident injured his wife, Niger filmmaker Moustapha Alhassane, and Niger actor Damouri Zika.

France’s ambassador to Niger, a former French colony, and Niger’s culture minister were en route to the accident site to escort Rouch’s body back to France.

Rouch helped pioneer cinéma-vérité — called ”direct cinema” in the US — known for blurring boundaries between fiction and reality, director and subject.

In 1961, Rouch released Chronique d’un Ete, or Chronicle of a Summer, which documented the daily lives of ordinary people during one summer in Paris.

Rouch and his partners made their presence and that of their cameras apparent in the film, and included their subjects in its editing.

Among Rouch’s African projects — many of which plumbed the relationship between French colonials and their African subjects — were films on spiritual ceremonies and day labourers.

Rouch arrived in Niger last week to open a film festival.

His work in cinéma-vérité helped inspire the nouvelle vague, or new wave, style of filmmaking in France popularised by Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard.

”There is a truth that the fiction film cannot capture — and that is the authenticity of the real, the lived,” film media quoted Rouch as once saying. — Sapa-AP