Abstract
Jean Rouch (1917–2004) is widely recognized as occupying an important place in the history of cinema as a missing link between postwar Italian neo-realism and the French New Wave, especially for hisChronicle of a Summer(1961), a pioneering experiment in what he called “cinéma-vérité.” Most of his work remains unknown by film scholars, due largely to the continued unavailability of all but a handful of the more than a hundred films he made in over fifty years of filming possession ceremonies of the Songhay of Niger, the subject of his own ethnographic publications, and the Dogon of Mali—