The Four Chambered Heart

In 1959, Jean Rouch directed the film La Pyramide Humaine. Situated between fiction and documentary, Rouch’s work presents his attempts to initiate a debate between two groups of students from the Ivory Coast, a white group and a Black group. A precursor to cinéma vérité, this often forgotten film served as the starting point of The Four Chambered Heart. In response to an invitation to do an artistic residency at the Israeli Center for Digital Art in Holon in 2007, César conceived an approach in which Rouch’s experiment was tailored to the local context. With the help of the ICDAH team, students from three film schools in Israel (Almanar Film School in Taibe, Tel Aviv University and Sapir Academic College in Sderot) came together for a one-day workshop, in order to discuss and actualise Rouch’s premise. After watching La Pyramide Humaine — projected on 16mm film and subtitled in Arabic and Hebrew — the students begin to discuss their viewing experience. They question the role of cinema, the role of themselves as directors and each other’s positions. They even deconstruct the cinematic device they are themselves part of, pointing out the differences between Rouch’s experiment and the one being staged there.