The prolific French film-maker and ethnologist Jean Rouch was one of the main precursors of the New Wave and one of the most influential directors of the postwar decades. Though he always liked to think of himself as an amateur whose real job was ethnography, he nevertheless made more than 120 films in which he evinced a freedom and gusto that few “professionals” could hope to match. As Jean-Luc Godard, one of many directors to acknowledge him as a model, once put it:

“Researcher for the Museum of Mankind — what finer definition of a filmmaker could there be?” Rouch was born in Paris in 1917. His father was the director of the Oceanographic Museum in Monaco. The young boy discovered Robert Flaherty’s famous film about the Inuits, Nanook of the North, at the age of six, and as a student his passion for film was nourished by the Cercle du Cinéma group set up by Henri Langlois, the founder of the Cinémathèque française.

He studied humanities but also civil engineering at the prestigious École des Ponts et Chaussées, and it was his engineer’s training that took him to Africa. Called up in 1939, he escaped capture after the French collapse in June the following year, and in 1941 he was sent to Niger to build bridges and roads. More missions followed, taking him also to Senegal, Mali and Ghana and heightening his desire to film a reality that he found compelling and impossible to put into words. In the meantime, he had returned to France to fight in the Resistance and in 1945 he had been with the First French Armoured Division as it entered Berlin.

The first result was In the Country of the Black Magicians (Au Pays des Mages noirs), a film shot during a canoe expedition along the Niger. Using a borrowed camera, he shot “whatever interested me, giving no thought to the editing”. When the tripod fell into the water, he was first to improvise the hand-held technique that would prove so influential for the coming generation.

Next came a series of short films about magical rites in Nigeria and Mali, culminating in Initiation à la danse des possèdes, which won him a prize at the Biarritz Film Festival. There he met the young Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol and Rivette. It was one of the crucial moments in the development of the New Wave.

One of his most extraordinary works was The Mad Masters (Les Maîtres Fous, 1953), about the ceremonies of the Hauka possession cult. In this case, the possessed turned into caricatures of their British and other colonial rulers. Rouch was criticised for the savagery that he allowed to show through, which some saw as a debasing objectification of African culture.

Rouch, who had to deal with such criticism all through his career, rejected pressure both from his mentor Marcel Griaule at the Musée de l’Homme and from certain African friends to destroy the film. He refused to “castrate his films,” he said, out of “scientism or ideological shame”. Working directly with Africans, and sharing royalties with his actors through his fictive produc- tion company Dalarouta Rouch had no reason to feel inhibited. His work was all about a direct, open relation to his subject.

He described the state in which he filmed as “cintétranse”. Shots were never cut, since the idea was to capture the truth of the experience whole. The outlook was profoundly humanist, and the underlying belief that the camera could induce real spontaneity and truth of expression without pretending not to be present.

The openness of Rouch’s approach was particularly evident in his first feature film, Me, a Black (Moi, un Noir, 1958), in which he allowed his subjects, in Abidjan, to dictate the contents of the film — using both their everyday experiences and their fantasies. Thus fiction was intimately linked with documentary, arising out of the situation and the subject’s own experience. For anyone prepared to recognise it, too, such films revealed the influence of Western culture and trade.

Rouch’s famous notion of ciné-verité, a direct borrowing from Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Pravda series (and Rouch could just as well have adopted his motto, “I am a camera”) was formulated for one of his first French films, Chronicle of a Summer (Chronique d’un été), which he directed with the sociologist Edgar Morin. In this he pioneered synchronous sound, as well as the hand-held camera.

The film itself was radically new, edited down from 25 hours of film showing people answering the simple but resonant question, “Are you happy?” It is a fascinating portrait of the mood in Paris in 1960, at the height of the Algerian war. And, in a highly influential moment of reflexivity, it ends with the subjects reacting to the sight of themselves on screen.

Rouch’s blending of documentary reality and fiction might involve a lion hunt (La Chasse au lion à l’arc, 1965), or (in Petit à petit) have two men from Niger walking through Paris in a latterday revisiting of Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, asking: “How is it possible to be French?” In the hilarious Cocorico Monsieur Poulet (1974), which some consider his masterpiece, he produced a road movie about three friends travelling around the bush in Niger in a clapped-out Deux Chevaux.

For nearly 60 years Rouch managed to combine his passions for film, ethnography and Africa in a career that was a model of engagement and freedom. In addition to the films that he never stopped making (the last, the significantly titled Le Rêve plus fort que la mort — Dreams are Stronger than Death — came out last year), Rouch was the founder and secretary-general of the film unit at the Musée de l’Homme and an honorary research fellow at the CNRS. He also ran the Cinémathèque Française from 1987 to 1991. Recently, he was among those campaigning against plans to break up the collection of ethnographic works at the Musée de l’Homme in favour of the new Parisian museum of tribal arts on Quai Branly.

Known to his friends in Niger as “the White Witch Doctor”, Jean Rouch lost his life in a car accident near Konni, in northern Niger, where he was a guest at a film festival.

He is survived by his second wife, Jocylene Lamothe.

Jean Rouch, film-maker and ethnographer, was born on May 31, 1917. He died on February 18, 2004, aged 86.