Yann Le Masson

Yann Le Masson is a French documentary filmmaker and director of photography, born on June 27, 1930 in Brest (Finistère), died on January 20, 2012 in Avignon (Vaucluse).

Yann Le Masson, born into a traditionalist Catholic family of six children, a Basque mother and a Breton father, grew up in Brest, Vannes, Toulon and then Dakar. After solid studies in mathematics and then electrical engineering, he entered the Ecole de cinéma de la rue de Vaugirard, before IDHEC where he belonged to the cell of filmmakers campaigning against the Indochina War, then for the independence of Morocco and Tunisia and against the war in Algeria. A graduate of IDHEC in 1955, he began working as an assistant operator but, as a convinced anti-colonialist, he worked to extend his deferment of military service until he was twenty-five and considered slipping away to Italy. He received his military summons to join the Pau paratrooper base in the Pyrenees. He then consulted the PC hierarchy up to the Political Bureau, which opposed insubordination considered to be "individualistic".

Despite his police file, the young paratrooper was able to follow the training of the Reserve Officer Cadets of Saint-Maixent (EOR). Leaving as an aspirant, he became a section leader in a shock parachute regiment on the Moroccan border in southern Algeria. In his testimony, he wrote: "I will not dwell on this period which lasted twenty-seven months and during which, as everywhere else, prisoners that the gendarmerie came to pick up by helicopter were dropped into the void, wood work was organized, mechtas or nomads' tents were set on fire. Nor on the role of a section leader... who found himself trapped... Sometimes it was necessary to refuse to obey and I was demoted, to become 'second reserve pump'".

A filmmaker friend, also a communist, Michèle Firk brought him to the FLN support network. "I put myself at the disposal of those I had fought against against my will and this complicity with the Algerians cured me of the after-effects of a war waged against them in contradiction with my ideas. I thus worked with them from 1959 to 1962". He gave military training courses to Algerian activists from the Nanterre shantytown… carrying a suitcase for the FLN, he filmed in Tunisia with Olga Poliakof, J'ai 8 ans which was banned for ten years on the national territory… French colonialism was again one of his targets, this time in Reunion: Sucre Amer (1962), also banned for ten years in France.

After filming the burial of the dead of the Charonne metro in 1962, he recorded that of the young activist Gilles Tautin in 1968 with a camera lent by Marin Karmitz. In 1971, in Japan, Yann Le Masson directed Kashima Paradise with Bénie Deswarte (on a commentary by Chris Marker) what some consider to be his masterpiece. He then passed his certificates as a captain and professional mechanic for river transport. Between 1980 and 1993, on the boat Nistader, Yann Le Masson worked as a river transporter in Europe.

Yann Le Masson died quietly in January 2012. A boatman, cameraman and author of a rare body of work, he left behind five films, all closely linked to his personal journey and his commitments.