Jean Rouch taught a summer production workshop for the USC Ethnographic Film (aka Visual Anthropology) program and I was one of his students. As part of the program we made a cinema verite film. As befit a summer in Southern California, we went with the local flow of things and created playful, colorful short films. We made and edited them in about 48 hours, as I recall, and then showed them in a mini-festival. One film spoofed the classic undergrad anthro class film, using the class itself as a subject, in a brilliant self-parody.

I turned my camera on the relationship between Rouch and Tim Asch, the founder of our little MA program and co-instructor in the workshop. On an afternoon at Venice Beach, the two men took a break to fly kites over the sands fronting the Pacific. I used the exercise to work on the rhythms that the editor and the soundtrack impart to a story, setting the short film to the Hot Club of France’s “Them There Eyes.” I cut the piece in a marathon editing session through the night, energized by the music, the spirit of the two creative spirits I was profiling, and the brilliant images of kites climbing, climbing…