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| Les maîtres fous |
 Les maîtres fous (28’)Directed by: Jean Rouch Production: Films de la Pleïade, 1956 Les maîtres fous the film by well-known French documentary film author/maker – Jean Rouch was shot in 1954. This documentary has had an impact in our own culture: Jean Genet’s The Blacks (1958) was modeled upon the Hauka inversion in which blacks assume the role of masters, and Peter Brook’s Marat/Sade (1964), was influenced by the theatricality and invented language of Hauka possession. Les maîtres fous is about the ceremony of a religious sect, the Hauka, which was widespread in West Africa from the 1920s to the 1950s. Hauka participants were usually rural migrants from Niger who came to cities such as Accra in Ghana (then Gold Coast), where they found work as laborers in the city’s lumber yards, as stevedores at the docks, or in the mines. Rouch’s film introduces its viewers into the world of Hauka possession ceremonies, based on the trance cults, which were modified in relation with colonial influences Jerzy Grotowski used this film as an ilustration to one of his lectures given at the“La Sapienza” University in Rome in 1982, when he took up the issue of transition/passage from the ritual to the theatre. |