My task as an ethnologist consists of meticulously observing what is in front of my eyes.Whatever is at hand is of use. Every detail deserves attention. What possessed me, then, to sink into the mire of television? Because it shows images that seem to be the product of no gaze whatsoever, I began to observe it. In the history of images, this is something new, even something mysterious beneath seeming banality: we are supposed to believe that things appear spontaneously as images, and that these images have a natural significance before they are even seen, just as a bone is there already inside the leg. A Renaissance painter saw the world according to a certain perspective. Television, on the contrary, adopts an impersonal, plural, omnipotent point of view-that of a God whose face does not resemble ours. It is opposite to any possible narrative, and it is as far from documentary cinema as one can imagine.
