Backfeed is a reversed cinematographic feedback, since its addressee is an absent mad master. Feedback is a filmic method introduced by Jean Rouch inviting filmmakers to screen their films back to the people who were filmed and allow them to criticize your representation of them. It is a way for ethnographical cinema to go beyond written texts of the represented cultures. The film moves from a personal analogue archive to the use of AI to generate an imaginary encounter between me and the deceased Rouch, allowing for a speculative feedback on this film.

Backfeed draws on a 1994 audio archive, in which Jean Rouch explains to me, then a film studies student, the feedback technique and other ethnographic film methods. By editing this assertive discourse with superimpositions of his and my own films filmed in West-Africa, I critically question what still resonates or separates our cinethnographic practices.

Production by Polymorfilms

Backfeed