The main purpose of the symposium will be to identify Jean Rouch’s innovative trends, which will be confronted with the contemporary context. The questions arising from Jean Rouch’s proposals, embodied in his research and films, will be reviewed by today’s researchers and film directors, who will endeavor to summarize his achievements and deviations, as well as possible deadlocks and further developments.

- The imaginary is real, fiction tells the story of the world: Dionysos – la Pyramide Humaine (The Human Pyramid)
Rouch, like Homer, stages men and gods interacting with one another. Greek mythology expresses circumstances, phases, events, productions of dialogue between people and their environment: for a long time, Jean Rouch contemplated doing a film that would borrow its characters from the Pantheon. Despite the masks, this is probably the film that he has put the most of himself into. It will always be one of those strange, elusive, unclassifiable, unfinished, hybrid objects, through which the surrealists hoped that the clarity and order of the world would be endlessly questioned. Dionysos, remarkable and thumbing its nose at all known forms of film-making, demonstrates undying loyalty to the marvelous adventure of the gods from his childhood, which was illuminated by this solar story.
If, as Pasolini said, cinema is a language that expresses reality with reality, it is not a simple matter of reproduction, but a transfer of meaning, a profound transformation, during which a certain vision emerges. It involves a specific elaboration of the real, particularly taking into account the expression and interpretation of feelings. Even if la Pyramide humaine stages an organized sociodrama, it is also a film where Rouch directs his gaze, chooses the speakers, and invents a scenario that could easily be a game of truth. The encounters shown are played out in front of the spectators, but primarily through the eyes of Rouch.    

 - A shared anthropology: Moi un noir – Petit à petit (Little by Little)
In filming and observing, Rouch is demonstrating his approach, both to the people he was working with, whose commentary, remarks, and questioning he included, and to us, the spectators-questioners of otherness. This attitude leads to what I would call a phenomenological support, an effort constantly underway and called into question in order to understand the difference by approaching so close to the Other that one can feel him living.  
This "shared anthropology" is not a mere method of emotional participation; it creates awareness of the insurmountable paradox of otherness that anthropology assumes : how to show and grasp the difference without rendering it irreductible nor reduce it to the identical.
The "ethnologized" Other is henceforth recognized as a subject and is given the possibility of addressing those who are watching him!  We will even have to answer his questions, and not only arrogate the preeminent right of asking the questions and interpreting the answers for ourselves! This is one of the strongest proposals that the film Moi un Noir 4 has to offer : the actors tell their lives and their dreams themselves, but they also look beyond the screen toward the future viewer.  When the main character, Oumarou Ganda alias Edward G. Robinson, presents Abidjan and its suburb of Treichville at the very beginning of the film, it is a warning to us that our knowledge is not independent of its conditions of investigation and reconstitution. In one move, with feigned innocence, Rouch gives his characters the chance to speak. These words abruptly cross the space-time continuum of colonization, and a revolution is underway. Images are no longer flowing in one direction only.

- A new anthropology, an anthropology of the living: Bataille sur le grand fleuve (Hippopotamus Hunt) – Cimetière dans la falaise
“Rouchian” anthropology teaches us a double lesson: proximity and continuity allow us not only to see, but also to explore the meaning of difference, to exchange points of view, and as such, to possibly change and most of all decenter the analysis. Shared anthropology puts into perspective the anthropologist whose method is included in the questioning. The interviewer and his subject are both incorporated in a situation that eludes them as they define it.
From his very first films, Rouch presented his images to the people that they were showing. In Bataille sur le grand fleuve, 7 Rouch overlayed music onto images of a hippopotamus hunt. This music, authentic and recorded on the spot, was indeed intended for fisher-hunters.  What more could one wish for? However, when the film was shown to the actors, they protested: music is never played during a hunt, it would make the prey run away! This lesson in ethnography was immediately accepted by Jean Rouch. From then on, sound and image would be precisely matched, and the films would become collective productions involving the participation of actor-subjects, some of whom would progressively become co-authors. 
Anthropological investigation becomes a concrete situation: it is the meeting of people who openly question their belonging, their desires, their pleasures and their obligations. The description that is the foundation of anthropology is thus narration, avoiding the risks of hasty explanations that Marcel Mauss proscribed by enjoining anthropologists to first observe without drawing any conclusions.  The Rouchian lesson follows in the same direction as that of Dziga Vertov, the “armed gaze”, that of the director and to an even greater extent, that of the ethnologist: it is important to overcome the prior organization of seeing, which leads only to cursory examination, if not reducing it to a mere resemblance of itself.    
Rouch suggests increasing the number of observation paths and locations. He directs his anthropological questioning toward putting the approach itself into perspective. Perceptive attention must rediscover its capacity for surprise, astonishment, and thus intimate questioning, which questions itself before questioning the legitimacy the other.
On the paths covered by Jean Rouch, the urgent lesson that he leaves behind is to always find new paths to endlessly question accepted truths and “continue the fight!” In Jean Rouch et Germaine Dieterlen "l'Avenir du Souvenir," a film directed by Philippe Costantini, Jean Rouch bids an emotional farewell to a young Dogon and says to him: “I am going to tell you a beautiful French phrase: what is the future of memory?” 
Constantly renewing our questions, intriguing our imaginations, escaping our rules and our classifications, impertinent, always ahead of us despite all the delays, Jean Rouch is simply present!

1 Jean Rouch, une rétrospective, 1981 : 31.
2 Jean Rouch, Les Maîtres Fous, Paris, Films de la Pléiade, 16mm, 33mn. 1954.
3 J.R., Dyonisos, Paris, Les Films de la Pléiade, 1984.
4 J.R., Moi un Noir, Paris, Films de La Pléiade, 16mm, 80 mn, 1959.
5 J.R., E.M., Chronique d’un été, Paris, Argos Films, 16mm, 90mn. 1960.
6 A more comprehensive film approach would show an impressive foreshadowing of today’s questions and lines of questioning on work, the appearance of the first cracks in the grand ideologies which were so successful then, and the emerging identity crises and uncertainties of individuals.
7 J.R., Bataille sur le Grand Fleuve, Paris, CFE/CNRS, 16mm, couleur, 25mn, 1951.