The Human Pyramid (1961 film)

The Human Pyramid (French: La Pyramide humaine) is a 1961 Ivorian docufiction film directed by Jean Rouch.[1][2] Rouch brought together black African and white French students to improvise interactions with each other at an integrated high school in Abidjan.[3]

The Human Pyramid
FrenchLa Pyramide humaine
Directed byJean Rouch
Written byJean Rouch
Produced byPierre Braunberger
CinematographyLouis Miaille
Roger Morillière
Jean Rouch
Edited byGeneviève Bastid
Marie-Josèphe Yoyotte
Production
company
Les Films de la Pléiade
Release date
  • 19 April 1961 (1961-04-19)
Running time
90 minutes
CountryIvory Coast
LanguageFrench

Plot

Rouch took the title of his film from a poem by the Surrealist Paul Eluard.[4] In Abidjan in newly-independent Ivory Coast, the film sees a mixed-race lycée class in which the filmmaker asks why white and black students do not mix together socially after class. They are interviewed separately and together, and are shown in their home environments and meeting together socially. They also improvise scenes of fantasized events.[5] Racial tensions intensify when a new female student from Paris starts dating an African student. The film is both ethnofiction and a documentary account of making ethnofiction:[6] counterposed to the main plot of the relation between the two racial groups is a subplot, which is the effect on the student actors of the making of the film itself.[4]

Production

La Pyramide humaine was made on 16 mm Eastmancolor film in a 1.37:1 aspect ratio.[7][8] The production of La pyramide humaine, between summer 1959 and spring 1960, coincided with the climax of independence movements across French-speaking Africa: fifteen African colonies claimed independence from France between September 1958 and October 1960.[6]

Reception

The film was banned by colonial authorities through most of Francophone Africa.[4]

Richard I. Suchenski notes that by ending the film with the (fictional) suicide of one of the students "Rouch forces the viewers to re-evaluate what they have just seen, drawing attention both to the inevitable presence of fictional tendencies within even the most uncontrolled filmmaking situation."[9]

François Truffaut places La Pyramide humaine among a group of films that "correspond to the new novel and those that aspire to be sociological documents or testimonies."[10]

References
  1. Waugh, Thomas (November 16, 2017). The conscience of cinema: The works of Joris Ivens 1912-1989. Amsterdam University Press. ISBN 9789048525256 – via Google Books.
  2. "THE HUMAN PYRAMID | Cinematheque". www.cia.edu.
  3. Ivone Margulies, The real in-balance in Jean Rouch's La Pyramide Humaine
  4. Dina Sherzer (1996). Cinema, Colonialism, Postcolonialism: Perspectives from the French and Francophone Worlds. University of Texas Press. pp. 73–4. ISBN 978-0-292-77703-3.
  5. Wead, George; Lellis, George (September 11, 1981). Film, Form and Function. Houghton Mifflin Company. ISBN 9780395297407 – via Google Books.
  6. Graham Jones, A Diplomacy of Dreams: Jean Rouch and Decolonization, American Anthropologist, Vol. 107, No. 1 (March 2005), pp.118–120.
  7. "The Human Pyramid (1961) - IMDb" – via www.imdb.com.
  8. "Scheda film".
  9. Suchenski, Richard I. (June 30, 2016). Projections of Memory: Romanticism, Modernism, and the Aesthetics of Film. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780190614089 – via Google Books.
  10. Gillain, Anne (March 6, 2017). Truffaut on Cinema. Indiana University Press. ISBN 9780253026569 – via Google Books.
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