Les Maîtres fous

Starting in the early 1950s, the legendary French documentarian Jean Rouch became famous for filming the rites and traditions of indigenous peoples in Central Africa. Along the way, he filmed a traditional tribe's hunt for tigers and all the accompanying preparations, rituals and religious interpretations. His films were quite the rage in Paris, where such anthropologists as Claude Lévi-Strauss had paved the way for unprejudiced scientific interest in foreign cultures. The Mad Masters is a short documentary made in 1955 about a group of young men who withdraw from modern city life in Accra, the capital of present-day Ghana, by means of mystical and physically exhausting rituals: they eat a dog raw, drink the blood of a slaughtered chicken directly from its throat, and act as if they were possessed by the devil, foaming at the mouth and convulsing wildly. Rouch not only captures this all in a gripping manner, but he also provides commentary in a way that gets the viewer involved in the goings on. He always attempted to introduce the viewer into the foreign culture and let him look at Africa through the eyes of the African - an innovative experiment at the time, to say the least. (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)