"Building Bridges: The Cinema of Jean Rouch" is the first title to fully explore the work and legacy of French documentary-maker Jean Rouch. A figure as comfortable in front of the camera as behind it, Rouch created some of the most enduring sociological films about French and francophone African culture, and his playful documentaries make him the spiritual ancestor of filmmakers such as Nick Broomfield and Michael Moore, and a precursor to the world of Big Brother and reality TV. Based on a major inter-national conference, this study contains over twenty new essays from a global cast of filmmakers, film critics, academics and actors, including a number of Rouch's African-based collaborators, and discusses his massive contribution to ethnographic filmmaking with films such as "Les Maitres fous" (1955), "Le Pyramide humaine" (1961) and "Chronique d'un ?t?" (1961). This collection is set to become a benchmark study of one of the most influential documentary presences of the last century.

Cinema has long shaped not only how mass violence is perceived but also how it is performed. Today, when media coverage is central to the execution of terror campaigns and news anchormen serve as embedded journalists, a critical understanding of how the moving image is implicated in the imaginations and actions of perpetrators and survivors of violence is all the more urgent. If the cinematic image and mass violence are among the defining features of modernity, the former is significantly implicated in the latter, and the nature of this implication is the book's central focus. This book brings together a range of newly commissioned essays and interviews from the world's leading academics and documentary filmmakers, including Ben Anderson, Errol Morris, Harun Farocki, Rithy Phan, Avi Mograbi, Brian Winston, and Michael Chanan. Contributors explore such topics as the tension between remembrance and performance, the function of moving images in the execution of political violence, and nonfiction filmmaking methods that facilitate communities of survivors to respond to, recover, and redeem a history that sought to physically and symbolically annihilate them

"Building Bridges: The Cinema of Jean Rouch" is the first title to fully explore the work and legacy of French documentary-maker Jean Rouch. A figure as comfortable in front of the camera as behind it, Rouch created some of the most enduring sociological films about French and francophone African culture, and his playful documentaries make him the spiritual ancestor of filmmakers such as Nick Broomfield and Michael Moore, and a precursor to the world of Big Brother and reality TV. Based on a major inter-national conference, this study contains over twenty new essays from a global cast of filmmakers, film critics, academics and actors, including a number of Rouch's African-based collaborators, and discusses his massive contribution to ethnographic filmmaking with films such as "Les Maitres fous" (1955), "Le Pyramide humaine" (1961) and "Chronique d'un ?t?" (1961). This collection is set to become a benchmark study of one of the most influential documentary presences of the last century.