Film Forum · THE MAD MASTERS & MAMMY WATER introduced by Faye Ginsburg

THE MAD MASTERS & MAMMY WATER introduced by Faye Ginsburg

1:00

Sunday, January 21

Anthropologist Faye Ginsburg will introduce Jean Rouch’s The Mad Masters and Mammy Water on Sunday, January 21 at 1:00.

THE MAD MASTERS

(1955, Jean Rouch) Annual ceremonies of the Hauka cult in Ghana, with initiates in a state of possession; role players as colonialist; the sacrifice and consumption of a dog. DCP. Approx. 28 min.

MAMMY WATER

(1955, Jean Rouch) The Fanti ritualistically open the fishing season in Ghana. DCP. Approx. 19 min.

Faye Ginsburg is Director of the Center for Media, Culture and History at NYU where she is also the David Kriser Professor of Anthropology.

Author/editor of four books, including Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, she has been the recipient of multiple awards and grants including a MacArthur "genius" award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and grants from Ford, Rockefeller, the NEH and more.

She studied with Jean Rouch in the late 1970s when he was teaching in the US, and organized three retrospectives of his work at NYU in 1988 (in conjunction with a Dogon exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum), in 1993 (in conjunction with the Margaret Mead Film Festival) and his last visit to the US in 2000 for a retrospective of the ethno-fiction work, entitled Chronicles of African Modernity.