"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.

Mammy water: A portrait of a fishing village, Shama, Ghana, on the Gulf of Guinea, as filmed in 1953 and 1954. The success of the fishermen is governed by water spirits ("Mammy water") which are honored with ceremonies and offerings to the sea.

The mad masters: Filmed it Accra, Ghana, in 1954, the film depicts the annual ceremony of the Hauku cult, a social and religious movement which was widespread in French colonial Africa from the 1920s to the 1950s. Participants in the ceremony mimic the elaborate military ceremonies of their colonial occupiers, but in more of a trance than true recreation.

Moi, un noir: One of Rouch's ethnofictions, the film is set in Treichville, an inner suburb of Abidjan, where young, unskilled men gather in search of work. In an opening sequence narrated by Rouch himself, he talks about the flood of unemployed youth as one of the sicknesses of the new African towns. He explains that he spent six months following a group of young immigrant men from Niger, 2,000 km away from their home, making this film in collaboration with them: I proposed that we make a film together. They would play their own role with no restrictions on what they wanted to do or say. Narrated largely by one young man nicknamed Edward G. Robinson (played by Oumarou Ganda) as he watches the edited footage, the film expresses his constant "sadness" as he searches vainly for a decent job, a decent lifestyle and a woman he can love.