Le Monde extérieur

Le Monde extérieur continues the cinematic analysis of the gaze that began with Eux et Moi, Le Ciel dans un jardin and Redescendre in Nouvelle-Guinée where any observer is an outsider. Le Monde extérieur doesn't take place in a distant land. It isn't the continuation of the previous films. But it reprises their subjective point of view and takes it to its conclusion by applying it to the closest setting possible: at home.
The man with the camera returns home, to his town. He knows it too well and has known it for too long. But he is back and has to be there again, in a new way. The ethnographic methodology that he has now acquired requires him to set things at a distance and to be surprised by them. He has to act naïve and be curious in a reckless and childish way. Perhaps he will have to invent interpretative myths, like those that the ethnologist occasionally makes up in the field, without realizing it, through excessive finesse and the desire to understand.
He has to find wonder and perplexity in familiar things, invent a town that doesn't exist but which explains and sheds light on the one before his eyes every day. In short: become an outsider and, in other words, watch and listen.