Jean Rouch, Les maîtres fous (1955)
In this groundbreaking work of ethnographic documentary (also characterized as 'ethnofiction'), Rouch portrays an elaborate ritual staged by members of the Hauka religious movement in the Gold Coast (now Ghana). In the ritual, the participants become possessed by the spirits of a variety of personae from the British colonial administration of the Gold Coast (the 'governor general', the 'guard corporal', etc.), and act out a sort of distorted mirror-image version of colonial power, in which the administrators are no longer human functionaries, but crazed and otherworldly demons. The film was of course violently condemned by both the colonialists, who did not like to be mocked, and by the colonized, who did not like being exoticized. Even if much of the interpretation Rouch imposes on the ritual is also a distortion, I suspect in broad outline it is correct: the Hauka movement really did respond to colonial power by transforming its apparatus into otherworldly forces that could then be channeled and to some extent contained through ritual. I think this is a very creative response.
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