Jean Rouch, 86; Documentarian’s Style Influenced Cinema Verite

Jean Rouch, a French film director whose pioneering documentary-style work helped define cinema verite, died Wednesday in a car crash in Niamey, the capital of Niger. He was 86.

Rouch, a longtime supporter of African filmmaking, was in Niger to open a film festival.

A native of Paris, Rouch lived in West Africa during World War II, working as an engineer and supervising road- and bridge-building projects. He became interested in African customs after witnessing a burial ceremony.

After the war, he began documenting West African life using a lightweight Bell & Howell 16-millimeter camera. While working on his first film, “In the Country of Black Magicians” (“Au Pays des Mages Noirs”), he lost the tripod for his camera in a boating accident. He was forced to do his filming holding the camera by hand, which was then an unorthodox method.

His West African ethnography includes films produced in Niger, Ghana, Mali and Upper Volta and range from straightforward portrayals of life to extraordinary ritual events. His work helped expand the boundaries of cinema verite, the genre known for blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality, director and subject.

In 1960, he made what is perhaps his best-known work, “Chronicle of a Summer,” which probed the inner thoughts and feelings of Parisians at the end of the civil war in Algeria. Again using the hand-held camera, Roach and his colleagues approached people on the street and asked if they were happy and other similar questions.

His films helped inspire the new-wave style of filmmaking in France that was popularized by Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Goddard.

In 2001, he received the Los Angeles-based International Documentary Assn.’s Career Achievement Award.