Format: VHS from Northern Illinois University Founders Memorial Library on big ol’ television.
I try not to despair sometimes. I do my best to look at each film as it comes to me, regardless of how I found it, where I found it, the format, the year of creation, the director, or even the quality of the transfer. But sometimes I wonder why I do what I do. I don’t mean to imply that Les Maitres Fous (The Mad Masters) is a particularly bad film, because it isn’t. But I do wonder why I was essentially pushed into watching it. This is a very short film, one of the few films under an hour I had left, and while I can’t say for certain that my half hour or so was wasted, I’m still trying to figure out what makes the film so damned important.
Les Maitres Fous is sort of a documentary, but it’s not clear precisely how much of a documentarian Jean Rouch is for this film. The subject is an interesting one, one that would make a great in-depth cultural study from someone with the right qualifications and coming from an academic perspective. Hell, I’d watch that without question. But that’s not what this film is. Instead, there is a near constant voice-over explaining everything that turns what could be simple observation, allowing the viewer to draw conclusions, into a sort of treatise on race and religion.
