Les Autres hommes

The primitive arts have long been relegated to exoticism. On the occasion of the opening of the Musée du Quai de Branly in Paris dedicated to these arts, this film retraces the major stages in the Western perspective. From its beginnings, photography and cinema have been passionate about the way of life and rites of men belonging to traditional cultures, trying to capture through images a kind of essence of the way of life of other men. Anthropologists capture these cultures out of fascination in order to bear witness to other realities but also to defend their existence. Looking at these images today necessarily implies a knowledge of the conditions in which they were made in order to measure their subjective dimension. Based on popular iconography, archive images and ethnographic films, this film questions the representations of the other and the evolution of our view of the so-called first peoples through the centuries.