Journées du patrimoine : quand l’histoire nous ouvre ses portes

Since the 1950s, the Huichols, an Indian community living in the western Sierra Madre in central-western Mexico, have developed the art of colourful yarn paintings. This technique consists in coating a piece of plywood with beeswax and then bonding coloured threads to it in patterns. Finallly, this board is entirely covered and the painting very often depicts legends inspired by the culture of this community. This film describes how the myth of the origin of fire is depicted, for example.

Collecting traditional dances : marsh dances, grand dances at the village of Le Mollin and at the Abbey of Orouet.

String figure-making has been observed throughout the twentieth century in various societies, especially those of oral tradition. Such figures are produced from a loop of string using a series of operations performed with the fingers—and sometimes the teeth, the wrists or the feet. Eric Vandendriessche, an ethnomathematician, is currently carrying out research aiming to show that the creation of string figures can be analyzed in mathematical terms. He has carried out field studies among the…

Collecting traditional dances with old timers in the villages of Samatan and Lombez (France).

Collecting traditional dances: rounds, "ridées", "pilées" of Morbihan at Saint-Vincent sur Oust, Allaire, Guillac, Bignan and Lanouée.

The Art of the Healing-Maker shows the medical activities of a Maya shaman. In the second film “A Visit”, a patient consults an healing-maker.

Technological progress has led to the production of machine tools that can manufacture enormous parts with ever increasing precision. For this kind of work, the human hand intervenes only to control the machine that acts according to a computer program. At the beginning of the industrial revolution, manual labor was assisted mechanically for the manufacture of heavy parts; the human hand was directly in charge of operations. From the beginning of time, crafstmen have worked and made objects…

Filmed in Alsace in 1967, an ironsmith readjusts the iron rim of a wheel.

In Sardinia, music, songs and dances are part and parcel of daily life. These different musical and vocal traditions are more particularly expressed during traditional and religious celebrations.

Songs and dances in the cafés of the Franco-Italian border villages of Vievola and Vernante.

Extracts from two folk tales from Aubrac, told in the Occitan language by Maria Girbal, illustrate various principles of the folk tale.

The bourrée is a French regional folk dance. Here we see about ten of them, danced to the accordion or local bagpipes, and hear one song bourrée. Recorded in four villages of Aubrac.

A day in the carnival celebrated with great fervour in the fishermen's village of Equihen, Boulonnais.

The way it used to be done : the different stages in a day of collective threshing, with the participation of villagers from Vieurals, Aveyron.

Act Two of the "Jugement du roi", a melodrama by Fontan and Herbin, written in Paris around 1835 and adapted for string puppets, here handled by Adèle and Louis Valton.