“Infused by what Italo Calvino called the brilliance of ‘lightness.' ”-Paul Stoller, Visual Anthropology Review

In Jaguar, shot before the advent of portable sync-sound, Damouré Zika (a "bandit" tax collector), Lam Ibrahim Dia (a cattle herder), and Illo Goudel'ize (a fisherman), migrate south from Niger to find their fortunes in Ghana. Conceived initially by Damouré in 1954 when he saw himself on screen for the first time, Jaguar is distinguished by its inventive proto-verité filming and extemporaneous acting. Their playful narration, improvised later on a sound stage of the Ghanaian Film Unit, is an incessant barrage of commentary on their surroundings and themselves, by turns jocular and impertinent-which, without too much pretension, may be characterized as a veritable polyphony of subjectivity, desire, and fantasy, something altogether novel in the history of ethnographic cinema. Rouch described the film as "a series of banal adventures which happened to these people in a world which was perfectly strange to them...a postcard in the service of the imaginary.”