Jean Rouch – Les maîtres fous AKA The Mad Masters (1955)
Quote:
A man possessed by a Hauka spirit stoops and breaks an egg over the sculpted figure of the governor . . . that presides over the day’s event of Hauka possession. Cracked on the governor’s head, the egg cascades in white and yellow rivulets. Then the film is abruptly cut. We are transported to a big military parade in the colonial city two hours away. The film hurls us at the cascading yellow and white plumes of the white governor’s gorgeous hat as he reviews the black troops passing. . . .
The British authorities in Ghana banned the film. The reason? According to Rouch they “equated the picture of the Governor with an insult to the Queen and to her authority.” But what was the insult? It turns out to be exactly that moment of montaged dynamite I have singled out, where the mimetic power of the film piggy-backs on the mimetic power of African possession ritual. The insult, explains Rouch, “was because the film shows an egg being broken over the head of an image representing the Governor-General, in imitation of the real Governor-General’s plumes cascading over his ceremonial helmet.” The Hauka were jailed in 1935 for mimicking the white man who possessed their very bodies, and Rouch’s film was banned in the 1950s for mimicking that mimicking.
Moreover Rouch himself banned showing it—at least to people in it who had been filmed in trance, for upon its being projected onto a screen they went into trance in an uncontrollable and almost dangerous way. “It is a kind of electroshock, he said, “to show a man a film of himself in trance.”
The.Mad.Masters.1955.1080p.OViD.WEB-DL.AAC.2.0.x264-AAH.mkv
General
Container: Matroska
Runtime: 29 min 24 s
Size: 1.12 GiB
Video
Codec: x264
Resolution: 1920x1080
Aspect ratio: 16:9
Frame rate: 23.976 fps
Bit rate: 5 181 kb/s
BPP: 0.104
Audio
#1: 2.0ch AAC LC @ 253 kb/s
Language(s):English
Subtitles:English
![Ingmar Bergman - The Serpent's Egg [+ commentary / extras] (1977)](https://imagizer.imageshack.com/v2/xq90/922/rz8MoL.jpg "Ingmar Bergman - The Serpent's Egg [+ commentary / extras] (1977)")
A few minutes in, I thought the performers of this ritual must be insane. At halfway, it becomes clear that it’s the subjects of the ritual, the Governor and his regime, that are deranged. By the end, I thought that the Hauka might just be the sanest people on Earth for coming up with such a crushing portrayal of their tyrants. Performance artists, Actionists and Pentecostals look so wet after this.