[Linganth] News.com.au - Filmmaker Rouch dies in car crash (From correspondents in Niamey, Niger, )

[P. Kerim Friedman]

<http://www.news.com.au/common/printpage/0,6093,8737417,00.html>

Filmmaker Rouch dies in car crash
  From correspondents in Niamey, Niger

  20Feb04

FRENCH film director Jean Rouch, whose pioneering 1960s work in the
documentary-style work known as "cinema verite" inspired filmmakers in
France and the United States, was killed in a car crash in the remote
desert of Niger. 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 reported today.

  The crash yesterday 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 cinema verite - called "direct cinema" in the
United States - 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 cinema verite helped inspire the nouvelle vague, or new
wave, style of filmmaking in France popularized 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.

  This report appears on NEWS.com.au.