Gilbert Rouget

Gilbert Rouget

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Most Known for...

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Horendi 1972 (8.8)

The title of this film translates literally as 'to put on a hori,' a hori being the Songhay term for ceremony of festival. Here it is used to refer to a ganandi, literally 'to make dance' This film concerns two women whom the zima [priest] had diagnosed some months before as being ill through possession by spirits. In the meantime, their families have gathered together the resources to pay for the musicians, dancers, and the priest himself to put on an initiation dance lasting seven days This is a film of documentation, simply recording various moments in the progress of the ceremony, without any form of explanation, neither in intertitle cards nor in voice-over. (Paul Henley, The Adventure of the Real)
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Dogon Drums, Elements of a Study in Rhythm 1966

The young goat herders from the cliff of Bandiagara practice on the stone drums of their ancestors. An ethnomusicological film experiment describing the subtle plays of the right and left hand of Dogon drummers.
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Une sortie de novices de Sakpata 1958

Sakpata is one of the main deities of the "Vodoun" pantheon in Benin (Dahomey at the time of filming, in 1958). Initiation into the cult of the Vodoun gives rise to a long seclusion in a "convent" where young neophytes learn the sung dances specific to their divinity. The first part of the film shows the dance being performed to thank someone for a donation. The shot was made using a spring-loaded camera stopping after thirty seconds, while the sound recording on a tape recorder was continuous; the editing was done (for the first part only) not from the image but from the sound. The temporal architecture of the music is thus respected as well as that of the dance, linking several figures, and this in spite of the blacks replacing the missing images.