If Bastien Lambert is a documentary filmmaker today, it is partly thanks to Yann Paranthoën. If he produces podcasts for France Culture, it's a bit because he followed in the footsteps of this little boy from L'Île-Grande (Côtes-d'Armor), “inventor of a language, a syntax, a genre”and became a radio icon.
Absent but “listening”
It's difficult to imagine such a destiny when you were born in the 1930s on this small rock on the Pink Granite Coast. At that time, people became sailors or stonemasons, like their fathers. So as it is bad form to “stay there doing nothing”Yann Paranthoën left to join the French Navy, and served five years as a radar operator in the Var: “He was already listening”underlines his daughter, Gwenola. But this job is not made for him. “He’s seasick.” And the desire for elsewhere.
He arrives in Paris, “aimless”and met, by happy coincidence, a native of L'Île-Grande: “You should check out the TV or radio”he suggests. Here again, he follows the noise of the sound, and goes to push open the door of the Maison de la Radio, at the end of the 1950s.
Yann Paranthoën climbs the floors of the “round house” one by one. At the very beginning, “at the limit, he swept the studios”. Then he discovered, on the job, the profession of sound engineer. The Breton has just found…
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