The film gymnastics of Jean Rouch

Abstract

In the early 1960s, French filmmaker and anthropologist Jean Rouch, in collaboration with Maria Mallet, the wife of the famous mime Marcel Marceau, invented a series of “body techniques for handheld camera filming” which he called film gymnastics (Guéronnet 1988). This set of techniques, inspired by various disciplines such as yoga, martial arts, and mime, was conceived with the primary purpose of providing greater physical endurance and fluidity to the movements of the filmmaker-camera operator during the filming experience. Film gymnastics began to be taught regularly by Rouch himself starting in 1962, as part of Visual Anthropology studies at the University of Paris X Nanterre. While within the field of Visual Anthropology, particularly from the origin environment of this unique gymnastic discipline, there have been a few brief publications dedicated to its emergence and teaching (Ehrhard 1975; Sherman 2018; Buob 2020), there is hardly any mention or appreciation of it in film studies. This issue, as the subsequent analysis will address, would symptomatically reflect how film theory, despite often being interested in the study of the filmed body, has scarcely considered the potential interrelation between bodily practice and filmmaking creativity. Through the study of the interconnections between body techniques and artistic practice that led to the birth of film gymnastics, this work proposes to bring to the humanistic field of Physical Activity and Sports Sciences a new area of reflection. This would help to understand the enriching interdependence between body training techniques, technology and art when the filmmaker's body itself is presented as a tool and vehicle for cinematic experimentation and dialogue with the filmed subjects.