Stéphane Breton finds subjects for his documentaries “by chance.” The idea for his latest feature Les Premiers Jours (The First Days) came in haphazard fashion after he was invited to the film school in Santiago do Chile.
“I discovered the shore, the ocean and I decided to make a film there,” Breton remembers what led him to start shooting on a remote, rocky, windswept beach where foragers were working hard, collecting straggly brown mounds of seaweed from the shallow water. This seaweed is rich in collagen and calcium. It can be used as a beauty product and for industrial purposes. Chinese importers are ready to pay a generous price for it.
The film, which has its premiere in Locarno’s Semaine de la Critique this weekend, was produced by Serge Lalou and made through Paris-based Les Films d’Ici. It was shot and co-edited, as well as directed, by Breton – a one-man orchestra when it comes to filmmaking. He prefers not to work with a crew partly because of the expense and partly because other crew members would get in the way and threaten the intimacy he was trying to achieve. He prefers to be alone.
Humans have been coming to this remote outpost for hundreds of years and they have always lived off the land in the same way. “I am really interested in the relationship between a place and the people,” the director reflects.
Many of the foragers have dogs. These feature prominently in the film. Breton, who is an anthropologist as well as a filmmaker and photographer, regards them as a link with the past. There is something almost mystical about the way they wait by the water.
“It’s not an ethnographic film. It’s an artistic film…music for the mind. It is not a film about describing places and people. I am not trying to develop a dramaturgy. I am not trying to develop characters. There is no storyline.” Nor does it have any dialogue or voice-over. Instead, it has “music and sound at the forefront.”
The director talks of “emancipating” himself from the traditional documentary approach. He has made movies everywhere from New Guinea to Russia, from Syria to New Mexico. Wherever he goes, he likes to explore “the way the onlooker sees the landscape.” He doesn’t “describe” or “explain” things but instead seeks to capture the spirit and energy of the place where he is filming.
“It [the film] is, in fact, very lyrical. It is just [like] a song or a piece of music,” Breton suggests. “It’s also about what I long for…this life that is devoid of conflict, that is free, that is funny.”
Breton is never in a hurry to complete a project. He’ll spend months with his subjects. “I’ve always loved staying a very, very long time with people, eating with them, sleeping in their houses, just sharing life. My films are not about topics or issues. They are about living somewhere.”
The director relished his time in Chile. “This place was very enjoyable. It was beautiful,” he recalls. “The people were sweet, very calm. We were at a distance from the stress and the aggression of the real world. For me, it was just a matter of being there, hanging around and filming all day long, from morning to night and from night to morning. That’s what I like to do in general.”
For Breton, a film and life itself are “one and the same thing…shooting to me is like breathing.”
No, the director didn’t join in with the arduous work of gathering the vast clumps of seaweed. However, he made sure his subjects realised he was as busy as they were. He didn’t want them to mistake him for a dilettante. “It’s very important that I do not show myself as a lazy voyeuristic tourist. I am very dedicated to what I do.” They trusted him because they could see he was as involved in his work as they were in their own. He told them he was going to film their lives and they accepted that. “Very quickly people don’t care [about the camera being there]. I am very unobtrusive. I never ask questions. I do no interviews. I keep quiet. I follow. I am there. And little by little, I am part of the scene, part of the landscape. It takes months.”
He’ll sometimes have a translator if needed. On The First Days he also used a sound engineer who visited briefly to record “water, rust, rocks, all sorts of sounds that I would use after.”
“I film a lot. I know that a lot of things will be thrown out. The process continues in the post-production…it’s really at the end the whole thing falls into one piece. It’s a very long process and I like it this way. I don’t go shooting a film with a perfect knowledge [in advance] of what I need.”
On many of Breton’s films, a broadcaster (often Arte) will be aboard from an early stage. That wasn’t the case for The First Days which was therefore financed in piecemeal fashion.
“The economics are getting more and more difficult,” the director says of his brand of poetic, deeply personal documentary making. Nonetheless, he is hopeful that the new film will be seen widely following its Locarno premiere. “We expect a theatrical release,” he declares.
