By 1969, Jean Rouch had spent more than two decades documenting West Africa as an ethnographer, and in 1961 had co-directed Chronique d'un été, an anthropological investigation of Parisian life. In Petit à petit, Rouch's Nigerien collaborators Damouré Zika and Lam Ibrahim travel to Paris and end up performing a reverse ethnography of French culture.
When we re-join Zika and Ibrahim in Ayorou, Niger, the 'Petit à petit' company they had formed at the conclusion of Jaguar has become a large import-export company. Hearing that a competitor is building a multistory building in Niamey, the directors of the company decide they must construct their own in Ayorou.
Zika flies to Paris to study the city's skyscrapers and meet with architects for advice. His mission quickly broadens into a full-fledged investigation of French life, the methods of which begin to suspiciously resemble those of imperialist European anthropology, and give a darkly comic charge to the proceedings.
Ibrahim eventually joins Zika in France, and the pair fall into their own version of contemporary European life, along the way picking up a Senegalese clothing designer, a white French typist, and a hobo, all of whom return with them to Niger to work for 'Petit à petit'.
The most cutting of Rouch's collaborative ethno-fictions, Petit à petit playfully satirizes the history of European-African relations.
- Icarus Films -
