Dark Stars: on the Trail of the unseen, discovering the surreal, the magical and political.

Tracking the Pale Fox: Studies on the Dogon (1984)
Director: Luc De Heusch
Presents the history of research on the Dogon since the famous 1931 expedition of Marcel Griaule, establishing the original expedition in the context of French anthropology at the time. Jean Rouch, celebrated film-maker and less known as an anthropologist on the Dogon, narrates part of the story, and interviews Dogon elders and veteran expedition member Germaine Dieterlan.*

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The background and context of the film. Tracking the Pale Fox: Studies on the Dogon
In Paris, in 1930, Ahost of luminaries gathered to attend a boxing match showcasing “Panama” Al Brown—an Afro-Panamanian bantamweight and the sport’s first Latino world champion. Boxing was just one of his talents, he had been a jazz singer in Paris and tap-danced in Josephine Baker’s Revue Nègre. He enlisted Bakers support of this important mission as well.

The bout was a fund-raiser, and a successful one, yielding more than 100,000 francs for a notable cause: Brown announced that he was fighting “to increase the knowledge about and understanding of Africa.” In particular, the event was in support of an expedition across French Africa, stretching more than five thousand miles from Dakar, Senegal, capital of French West Africa, to Djibouti, capital of French Somaliland. Subvention had already arrived from the French parliament, various other French ministries and institutions, and the Rockefeller Foundation, but this mission—at its core a shopping trip that was to last more than a year and a half—would not be cheap. Every franc counted.

The Mission ethnographique et linguistique Dakar–Djibouti was led by the entrepreneurial anthropologist Marcel Griaule and included a couple of trained linguists, a botanist, an ethnomusicologist, an official artist, a fellow with expertise in transportation as well as in film and photography, and a handyman who also served as a nurse, mechanic, cobbler, and barber.