Folie ordinaire d’une fille de Cham

Jean Rouch has transposed a text by the Martinican author, Julius Amédé Laou. The scene is set in Sainte-Anne psychiatric hospital. The psychiatrist, Charcot, presents a “spectacular case” to his colleagues. This presentation, seen by the psychiatrists and the audience, is a delirious dialogue between an old West Indian woman, who has been held there for fifty years, and a young Martinican nursing aid newly arrived in Paris. “I dreamt of making an impossible film of this play, which would leave the spectators with no respite other than the end of this imaginary journey. From the outset, the idea came to me of using a real-time, sequence shot with two cameras and two director-cameramen who would be ready to take part in this curious choreography, in a ‘multi-risk cinema’, where those filming and those filmed would share, minute after minute, the same emotion or, in other words, the same inspiration.” (Jean Rouch)