Films with: Braunberger, Pierre

Chasse au lion l'arc

Shot over a period of seven years (1958-1965), the film is a documentation of lion hunting, using bows and arrows, among the Fula and Songhay people of Niger, and the social structure that underlies it.

DVD 9895

Jaguar

One of Jean Rouch's classic ethnofictions, the film follows three young Songhay men from Niger-- Lam Ibrahim, Illo Goudel'ize, and the legendary performer Damouré Zika-- on a journey to the Gold Coast (modern day Ghana). Drawing from his own fieldwork on intra-African migration, the results of which he published in the 1956 book Migrations au Ghana, Rouch collaborated with his three subjects on an improvisational narrative. The four filmed the trip in mid-1950s, and reunited a few years later to record the sound, the participants remembering dialogue and making up commentary. The result is a playful film that finds three African men performing an ethnography of their own culture.

DVD 9898

Jean Renoir

Whirlpool of fate: after the suspicious death of her father a young girl runs away from her brutal uncle and joins a gypsy camp. Nana: A women rises from poverty to become a dance hall queen and courtesan in 1860s Paris, destroying the lives of the men who fall in love with her. Charleston parade: shows the journey of a man in blackface to a post-Apocalyptic Paris, where he meets a girl who teaches him the Charleston, and they leave together in his spaceship. The little match girl: the visions seen by a poor match seller as she lights her matches one by one to keep from freezing to death. La Marseillaise: a dramatization of the French Revolution, from the period immediately preceding it in 1789 up to the first bloody confrontation. The doctor's horrible experiment: experimental fantasy about a Jekyll/Hyde-type psychiatrist/lunatic creating havoc in 1950s Paris. The elusive corporal: set in a German P.O.W. camp in 1940, this is the story of a French corporal who is determined to escape to return to Paris and fight once more.

DVD 8642

Maîtres fous

Filmed it Accra, Ghana, in 1954, the film depicts the annual ceremony of the Hauku cult, a social and religious movement which was widespread in French colonial Africa from the 1920's to the 1950's. Participants in the ceremony mimic the elaborate military ceremonies of their colonial occupiers, but in more of a trance than true recreation.

DVD 9896

Mammy water

A portrait of a fishing village, Shama, Ghana, on the Gulf of Guinea, as filmed in 1953 and 1954. The success of the fishermen is governed by water spirits ("Mammy water") which are honored with ceremonies and offerings to the sea.

DVD 9899

Moi, un noir (Treichville) /

"Moi, un noir marked Jean Rouch's break with traditional ethnography and his embrace of the collaborative and improvisatory strategies he called 'shared ethnography' and 'ethnofiction.' The film depicts an ordinary week in the lives of men and women from Niger who have migrated to Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, for work. After a short introduction by Rouch, 'Edward G. Robinson'--Omarou Ganda, who like the film's other subject-collaborators plays himself under the name of a Western movie star--takes over the film's narration, recreating dialogue and providing freewheeling commentary on his experiences. Robinson describes the bitter reality of life in Treichville, a poor inner suburb populated largely by migrants, and his work as a day laborer (bozori) in the ports ... Rouch's stylistic innovations here exerted a profound influence on the French New Wave, and his collaborative process helped bolster the national cinemas of West Africa"--Container.

DVD 9866

Petit à petit Little by little /

A classic ethnofiction by Jean Rouch, one of the pivotal figures in the French New Wave and in the history of ethnographic cinema. An innovative semi-improvised feature film about young men from Niger exploring life in Paris and learning to appreciate traditional values back home. Like Jaguar, and starring the three main actors from that film, Petit à Petit is an exercise in what Rouch called ethno-fiction, an idiosyncratic blend of fiction and observational documentary.

DVD 9897

Silence de la mer The silence of the sea /

1941. An idealistic, naive German officer in Nazi occupied France is assigned to the home of a middle-aged man and his grown niece. Their response to his presence - their only form of resistance - is complete silence.

DVD 11061

Terre sans pain

"Luis Buñuel's only documentary, Land without bread (Las Hurdes) is a subversive exploration of an isolated region of Spain too barren to sustain life and the backward struggle of its inhabitants to survive. Shot as a travelogue, what surfaces is an unflinching attack on any establishment that would turn a blind eye to such a pocket of misery. Mixing cold scientific examination with absurdity and tragedy, Land without bread answers the mystifying question of whether one can make a Surrealist documentary, and with Buñuel the anser is yes"--Container.

DVD 12569

Tirez sur le pianiste Shoot the piano player /

A timid cafe pianist has given up his career as a concert pianist, a career which had destroyed his marriage. Events force his involvement with gangsters who once again cause him to be responsible for the destruction of his life.

DVD 698

Tirez sur le pianiste Shoot the piano player /

Charlie Kohler is a piano player in a bar. Lena, a waitress at the bar, is in love with him. One of Charlie's brothers, Chico, a crook, takes refuge in the bar because he is being chased by two gangsters, Momo and Ernest. But Charlie's real name is Edouard Saroyan, who was once a virtuoso who gave up playing after his wife's suicide. Charlie now has to deal wih Chico, Ernest, Momo, Fido (his youngest brother who lives with him), and Lena. Charlie ends up stumbling into the criminal underworld and a whirlwind love affair.

DVD 4694