Stéphane Breton: the Frenchman in the Wilds of Papua New Guinea

In 2001 Stéphane Breton, a French ethnologist with a video camera seemingly implanted in his shoulder, recorded his everyday dealings with the Wodani villagers he had come to live with in the Irian Jaya highlands of Papua New Guinea. It had taken a long time for Breton to gain acceptance by this village, first setting up a tent on the outskirts of the settlement, and then winning over local reticence, by learning the local language (called Wolani), and finally building a small home for himself.

In "Eux et Moi" he documents the full development of his relationship with these neighbors. When the film begins, Breton has just returned from an extended absence, and his hand is seen dispensing Indonesian banknotes to young men who have just cleared the overgrowth from his front yard. This monetary negotiation is the first of many throughout the film, and sets the main narrative line of the story. Villagers come and go, checking his array of medicines, buying his plastic bottles of oil and touching the small objects at reach on tables and shelves in his wooden cabin, artifacts from a barely conceivable foreign land.

Conversation consists mainly of monetary transactions: negotiations for the purchase of a pig, for the dowry of a spouse for his "adoptive son" and estimating the value of local currency, shells wrapped meticulously in rolls of cloth and leaves.

The life in this village, which seems to inhabit a blurry territory between isolation from civilization and cultural integration, is very poor, dirty and laborious but not particularly unhappy. There seem to be few conflicts (in this period, at least) either between villagers or with outsiders, and people seem to have a reflexive smile and easy laugh available for every unoccupied moment. However, the obsession with money and negotiation can seem a bit sad and ominous.

All the cautionary tales about the damaging effects of western influence on traditional societies come to mind. When a villager happily invites Breton to bring more people from his faraway "village" to settle in the area, one can only wonder how long it would take for that person to sour on the idea, should any of Breton’s fellow westerners actually take him up on the offer. Breton seems to encourage this speculation on the viewer’s part, saying that the interaction of the outsider and the villagers, the cautious dance of eventual recognition that they are constantly engaging in, is one of the important things that he wished to depict.

The film was shown at Le Latina Cinema, (which has recently acquired the adjective "Nouveau’) on November 25, 2008, with the filmmaker in attendance. In a discussion that followed the screening, Breton made the point that he did not see the money centered activities as signs of decadence or outside interference. The monetary negotiations were part of traditional life, merely integrating the use of banknotes with that of precious shells. He maintained that the western concept of money as somehow "impure" is something that entered Western culture sometime after the Classical period, and it should be seen as a part of our own ethnological baggage. He also discussed how he learned the language of these people. It was a daunting task, since the Wolani language has no written form, and the village no bilingual speakers.

In addition, the adults of the community were loathe to speak to him for a long time, because of his stammering and mistakes, and he was forced to communicate verbally with children in order to gain fluency. He said one of the biggest difficulties that he had was to understand a concept he called dispersion, or the peripheral effects of an action, which are expressed in a particular verbal form. Another difficulty was something called duality, when talking about two people. It is not merely a grammatical form somewhere between singular and plural, but a spiritual and philosophical concept about the interaction of two beings and the bond that they create. Could it have been this concept that gave him the inspiration to use the duality of foreigner versus insider, "them" versus "him" as a theme of his film?

Stéphane Breton seemed uncomfortable with the label of ethnologist and he tried to downplay the specifically ethnological approach of his documentary filmmaking, calling it a narrative, an interplay between the outsider and the villagers. Breton did not like the term "document" either, saying that a document is a cold artifact, one that exists in itself, regardless of whether it is witnessed, studied or understood.

He preferred to talk about his film as an experience, something that exists because it is seen. I don’t really see what the problem is, since his film can be both experience and record, like the artifacts that the visitors pick up curiously in Breton’s wooden cabin. The villagers see a beauty and a usefulness in these strange imported things that is immediately evident to them. However, there is also so much more there than they can grasp.

Perhaps they will understand some more the next time they pick up that object, or perhaps never. And it is an interactive form of learning as well: they learn about themselves, their own interest in grooming, their own need for medicine. The same is true for us, the viewers of this film. Much happens here in these multifaceted interactions that we will not immediately understand. And we, too, learn in a complex way.

When we see a villager pick up a safety razor for the first time, we learn more about his society and more about our own; when we react to the Wodani handling money we learn about them and about ourselves at the same time. The value of ethnography is that it teaches about all of mankind by studying the behaviors of its distinctive groups, and the value of art is the feeling of appreciation that it provokes in the viewer. This film deserves a place among the artistic objects to be seen and enjoyed on our cinema screens, but also as a document to be archived and stored so that future viewers from the Western "village," as well as from the Wodani village can come back and learn something more from it in the future.

The evening was sponsored by ARTE editions, the publishing arm of ARTE France. "Eux et Moi" along with the companion film "Le Ciel dans un jardin" is available on DVD from ARTE Video.