Pierre Dominique Gaisseau

French documentary film-maker Pierre Dominique Gaisseau is best known for his documentary "The Sky Above, The Mud Below", which was awarded the first Oscar for a documentary. The film is an account of an expedition into the previously unexplored wilds of the Netherlands New Guinea accomplished in 1959 by a small team of French and Dutch explorers under Gaisseau's leadership, in the area where young Michael Rockefeller later disappeared. The film's images of stone age life and mock birth rituals made indelible imprints on the Western mind, repeated in various art and theater forms.

Biography

During World War II, Gaisseau, as a saboteur, parachuted behind German lines. He utilized this skill years later when he returned to the stone age tribes of New Guinea by parachuting into a village located on a high narrow ridge, filming as he left the plane, with his son behind him. His ability to put people at ease was tested with this abrupt approach to fellow humans who had never had outside contact, except in wars with neighbors. He did this by means of a frisbie, a Polaroid camera and an inflatable plastic woman in a bikini, which shocked some anthropologist critics, such as Margaret Mead, but greatly pleased his new friends. Gaisseau would often take long expeditions and live with peoples for some time before beginning to film, and, in doing so, would achieve greater rapport and understanding.

Once, while traversing Latin America from the headwaters of the Amazon, an expedition member fell ill, when his life was saved by a traveling traditional healer, a curandero. Gaisseau later traveled to southern Colombia to film a curandero in his travels, but instead found the healer intent on learning all he could from a medical text book, while Swedish hippies searched for new highs with the curandero's trance inducing herbal mixtures. This was not the film Gaisseau sought, so he made a film instead on the abandoned street boys of Bogotá.

From there he lived with his wife for a year on islands with the Kuna Indians of Panama, making a film on their unique matrilineal society: "God is a Woman".

During the "American war" in Vietnam, Gaisseau made a documentary on the lives of young patients at a plastic surgery hospital established to treat war injured children, and then stayed on to film freelance. It was then that he hitched a helicopter ride to one of the last U.S. combat units, which distinguished itself, after suffering high casualties, by refusing to go on patrol and be among the last to die. He faced death again when he traveled to Africa to make a film with artist Larry Rivers during the war in Biafra. Captured and sentenced to death by a drunk officer because he was French, he managed to convince the officer of his innocence while up against a tree in the headlights with rifles aimed at his heart.

Gaisseau's films were not limited to remote areas. "Only One New York" contained intimate glimpses of New York City's Roma subculture. After completing a best selling autobiography, Gaisseau died in Paris in 1997 of a heart attack while preparing to paraglide from the Alps.

Gaisseau's interest in anthropology was first sparked when the young boys who discovered Lascaux took him the next day to see its marvelous pre-historic paintings. He had them seal the entrance to await the arrival of the specialist sent by the French Government, Professor L'Abee Breuill of the Musee de l'Homme, who engaged Gaisseau as his assistant to explore and document the wonders of the cave.

External links

*imdb name|id=0301422 |name=Pierre-Dominique Gaisseau