"Embara Dama (To Enchant Death) is Rouch's most recent film dealing with the Dogon people of Mali. The spectacular masked dance that he records is performed every four years. It was the subject of an earlier Rouch film, Funerailles du vieil Anai, and of two ethnographic shorts made in the late Thirties by Rouch's teacher, Marcel Griaule. The voice-over narration spoken by Rouch is in part written by Griaule. "The Dogon masked ceremony is performed to charm death into leaving the village. Rouch says that during its course the dancers are charmed as well. Towards the end of the film, there is a brief slow motion passage, used not so much to analyse the dancers' movements, as to allow us a sense of their altered perception of time. When death is charmed, time stops; this is the enchantment of film as well." --Amy Taubin (Amy Taubin is a film critic and programmer for The Kitchen, New York.)