This paper analyses the icon of the documental cinema Les maîtres fous, by Jean Rouch, from the theoretical questioning discussed by Foucault in What is an author, having as reference the typology of analysis of documentaries proposed by Bill Nichols. We aim at understanding the film primarily as a discourse on the world and not as a film of Jean Rouch. This forces the scholar to take some epistemological deviation, which consists in not performing the analysis based on its evident information, the "description" of a ritual, but by the search of the fundamental concepts of the filmic narrative, dialectical unity of form and content. The paper proposes an analysis in which the film emerges as the least one of a conservative tradition, whose repercussions were decisive for the essential filmic and epistemological rupture towards the rich and meaningful unfoldings the works of Rouch unveiled afterwards.
Documental cinema; Ethnographical film; Epistemology of the image; Colonization; Civilization