- Born
- Stéphane Breton was born in 1959. Stéphane is a director and cinematographer, known for Les Premiers Jours (2023), Ascent to the Sky (2010) and Les forêts sombres (2015).
- Curated the anthropological exhibition "What Is a Body?" that will open at the new Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, in June 2006.
- Is a French ethnologist, specializing in Melanesia.
- Member of the Center of Anthropology of the Contemporary World, School for Advanced Study in Social Sciences (E.H.E.S.S, Paris), where he teaches social anthropology and the semiotics of film.
- My task as an ethnologist consists of meticulously observing what is in front of my eyes.Whatever is at hand is of use. Every detail deserves attention. What possessed me, then, to sink into the mire of television? Because it shows images that seem to be the product of no gaze whatsoever, I began to observe it. In the history of images, this is something new, even something mysterious beneath seeming banality: we are supposed to believe that things appear spontaneously as images, and that these images have a natural significance before they are even seen, just as a bone is there already inside the leg. A Renaissance painter saw the world according to a certain perspective. Television, on the contrary, adopts an impersonal, plural, omnipotent point of view-that of a God whose face does not resemble ours. It is opposite to any possible narrative, and it is as far from documentary cinema as one can imagine.
- The world around us does not simply offer itself to view; it is mutilated by our attention.There is something like the slash of a knife in a glance. To look is first of all to refuse to see all that you want to leave out. The idea of documentary filmmaking that I defend in my films is that one must, on the contrary, grant an even greater importance to what is most familiar, to what is happening between the instant you turn the key in the lock and the moment you take the elevator. What use would documentary films be if they were made only to preserve the illusion that things are just as they are? Things are not as they are, but as we do not want to see them. We hardly ever look at the insignificant, but when we let ourselves notice it, we are surprised to see that it was there, waiting for us, and that it was seeking the light. That is how when I was "in the field" I set about filming the gazes of the people who were looking at me, their questions, their amusement.
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