Welcome to the fifth installment of OVID’s Author Selects series, where we invite an author to pick a film in OVID’s collection and tell you all about why they think you should watch it.

This month, Laure Astourian, author of The Ethnographic Optic, Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and the Turn Inward in 1960s French Cinema, (Indiana University Press) and Associate Professor in Modern Languages at Bentley University, discusses Jean Rouch’s 1961 Ivorian docufiction film The Human Pyramid (French: La Pyramide Humaine), wherein Rouch cast black African and white French students to improvise interactions with each other at an integrated high school in Abidjan. The video text is adapted from the second chapter of The Ethnographic Optic, and accompanied by clips from The Human Pyramid; The Mad Masters (Les maîtres fous); Me, a Black [person] (Moi, un Noir); and Little by Little (Petit à Petit).