French anthropologist (student of Marcel Griaule) and film-maker, considered to be the father of cinéma vérité tradition in documentary film. Many of his films are from West Africa, especially Niger.

"Rouch is perhaps best known as the instigator of the term cinéma-verité, a direct translation of [the pioneering Soviet film maker] Dziga Vertov's Kino-Pravda. Though this term was anglicised as 'direct cinema', Rouch’s practice was never content with simplistic notions of 'fly-on-the-wall' filming. Decades before post-modernism recognised that ethnography was a form of writing, Rouch was always aware that the observer could never absent (in this case) himself from the pro-filmic action, that he was a defining part of that action."
(Michael Eaton: http://www.rouge.com.au/3/rouch_valediction.html)