“‘Are you happy?' That's the question posed by the interviewer-sociologist Edgar Morin to passers-by in Paris in the summer of 1960. The result is perhaps the most sophisticated anthropological film yet made--involving psychodrama, self-presentations by the director and sociologist, comments on the film by the subjects themselves. Jean Rouch calls upon ethnographic filmmakers to climb down from their ivory tripods, to free themselves from the ‘observation post' stance of the zoom, to take their cameras into their hands and enter into a ballet improvised to the movements of their subjects. As an alternative to the metaphor of the hunter-cameraman, Rouch sees in this dance a transformation of the cameraman, with his mechanical eye and electronic ear, into a state which he calls, ‘by analogy with phenomena of possession, the “cine-trance".' For Rouch, the audience is the subject: ‘Film is the only method I have to show another just how I see him.'” William Nestrick