Of Mimicry and White Man: A Psychoanalysis of Jean Rouch's Les maitres fous

Abstract

Of all the recent findings on Jean Rouch's Les maîtres fous (1956), 1 an ethnological cause célèbre in film, the mimicry talk seems to gain more and more momentum, all spawning from Michael Taussig's celebrated Mimesis and Alterity (1993). 2 Les maîtres fous is a documentary on the possession rite of the Hauka movement practiced by the Songhay migrant workers from Niger, who resided in Accra, Ghana, during the colonial fifties. 3 Rouch was invited by them to make the film (Rouch 1978, 1006; 1995, 224), with a glaring surrealist ciné-transe as its result (Young 1995, 198-99, 203-5), but what becomes even more glaring is the trance of the subjects in the film as possessed by the British colonial authority, bearing weird demeanor and "abundant salivation" that makes their "faces look very ferocious" (Muller 1971, 1472). Driven by the white men's spirits, they go on to kill a dog and eat it. Taussig writes: "they so clearly are and are not Europeans" in their "mimetic faculty," unwittingly carrying a critique of modern Europe (1993, 241-42). Leaving aside more questions this claim may beg, we know that one thing is certain: the film brings a positive message. The visual crisis stirred up by the film may now find a good cause to make peace with itself.

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