"Jean Rouch was an inspiration for the French New Wave, and a revolutionary force in ethnography and the study of Africa. Beginning in 1955 with his most controversial film The Mad Masters, through 1969's darkly comic Little by Little, these films represent the most sustained flourishing of Rouch's practice of "shared anthropology," a process of collaboration with his subjects. Astonishing on their own terms, now restored and released for the first time, Eight films by Jean Rouch is essential for anyone interested in better understanding the development of ethnography and the cross-currents of colonialism and post-colonial social change in Africa, as well as documentary film practice, film history, and world cinema as a whole. Included in this box set are eight newly restored films on four discs, a 24-page booklet with two essays about Rouch and his methodology, and a new documentary about Rouch, his films, and his influence on African cinema, Jean Rouch, "the Adventurous filmmaker"--Icarus Films website.

The human pyramid: Filmed in 1958 and 1959 with a mixed group of final year students in a lycée in Abidjan (the capital of the Ivory Coast), this loosely improvised narrative on the subject of race relations is framed by Rouch's voice on the soundtrack justifying the film because of the real friendships formed among the participants, both black and white, and the fact that for them racism no longer made any sense.

The lion hunters: Shot over a period of seven years (1958-1965), the film is a documentation of lion hunting, using bows and arrows, among the Fula and Songhay people of Niger, and the social structure that underlies it.