François Maze, known as Fabrice Maze, was born on December 5, 1949 in Paris. He is a Sagittarius with a Taurus ascendant.
His mother, Colette Saulnier, a pianist, was born on June 16, 1914 and his father, Hubert Dumas (1920-1969) was a writer and senior Office de Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française (ORTF) official.
He received an average education at schools in the XVIIth arrondissement. He was quite the dreamer, ever escaping into his imagination. An existence elsewhere. He continued his studies in boarding schools and private lessons. He is more interested in literature and art than science and dead languages.
He passed his Baccalaureate at the French School of Press Officers (EFAP) and graduated from the Paris Journalist Training Centre (CFJ) on rue du Louvre, from the class of 1972.
From 1970, he and his close friends made four short films in 16mm Black & White of dreamlike and surreal inspiration.
Journalism responds to his great curiosity in the most of diverse fields: the marvellous, literature, parapsy-chology, jazz, photography, cinema, aviation, athletics, and automobiles. He hence decides to make a career in the world of television because he feels that the future revolution will be audiovisual.
« My childhood was marked by the departure of my father in 1951. My mother, a single mother from a high bourgeoisie family, was outcast by family and society. She would ensure a rather precarious living by becoming a dance lesson instructor for the City of Paris.
My schooling went smoothly, but I was more of a dreamer than a studious one. Being neither gifted at dead languages nor mathematics, my future quickly took shape in private schools. After the post-war school barracks and the Lycée Carnot, boarding schools took over.
These years reinforced my imagination, the only possibility of surviving in these regulated and policed universes. My mother’s marriage to Emile Maze in 1960, 38 years her senior, was an obvious failure. This good yet often angry man, amateur painter, almost blind and born in 1876, could not adapt to Parisian life.
He left to see out the remainder of his life in the small village of Sainte-Agnès in the Mentonnais hinterland. He was, however, generous enough to recognize me and that is how, until then bearing my mother’s maiden name, I chose to take on my stepfather’s name. Fabrice Maze entered the scene in 1960!
In 1966, my mother, thanks to her inheritance, moved from the modest ground floor of 76, Blvd Pereire to an apartment on the 14th floor along the banks of the Seine. When I left boarding school to live in Paris again, I finally tasted freedom and rejoiced in the breath of May 1968’s revolution, which I experienced intensely.
I chose journalism as I could not enter Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies (IDHEC), being over the age of admission. But I dreamt of a Kessel-style, rather romantic kind of journalism, and I realized that the next big revolution would be in the audio–visual industry.
This is how I presented, for the first time at the Paris Journalist Training Centre (CFJ), a report filmed in 16mm film. With a modest 16mm mechanical Paillard Bolex camera, I started making my first short films in 1969 with my friends Henri Cazin, Alain Wieder, Jérôme Sinet and Dominique Noaille.
Dreams, wonders and poetry were my already surrealistic vectors of inspiration. Indeed, reading André Breton and discovering surrealism illuminated my life. But I was eclectic and curious, and I was just as interested in literature, music, cinema, as well as science fiction, esotericism, parapsychology, the history of religions, psychoanalysis, and automobiles!
I questioned myself on my orientation. I wanted to become a director and experience this audio-visual revolution that was underway. I then met Michel Random, writer and television director, who hired me as an assistant.
I entered the television industry through the back door, which at that time offered only two channels, and had just left black and white for colour. »
Fabrice Maze enters television as assistant director to Michel Random and works on documentaries for the Italiques programme on France 2 revolving around Italian cinema and visionary art.
He lived in Rome for two years and met the great directors of the Golden Age of Italian cinema. The aristocratic elegance of Visconti, the humour of Scola and Comencini, as well as the imagination and vividness of Fellini have had a lasting influence on the spirit of his filmmaking.
A documentalist for three years on television, Fabrice Maze was finally certified as a “television director” in 1978. He therefore began his career by making scientific and literary documentaries, programmes and numerous multi-camera variety and classical music productions.
His most notable achievements are the docudramas, À la recherche de la jalousie (In search of jealousy) (TF1), Pardonnez-nous nos enfances (Forgive us our childhoods) (TF1), Le Lys (The Lily) (Antenne 2), his collaboration on shows Temps X (X Time) (TF1), Fantasy (Antenne 2), Les Enfants du rock (Children of rock), La vie à cœur (Life at heart) (FR3), Objectif Tintin (Tintin Objective) (FR3) and the series dedicated to the Centenary of the French automobile Du Teuf-Teuf au Turbo From Jalopy to Turbo) (Antenne 2).
My life in Rome, ten years after the film La Dolce Vita, was comparable with the perspectives that the great Italian directors like Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti, Vittorio de Sica, Roberto Rossellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Luigi Comencini, Francesco Rosi, and Ettore Scola, shared on Italian life.
A day in the abandoned Amarcord sets at the Cinecitta transported me to the wonderful world of Fellini. I remember an interview with Vittorio de Sica in the twilight of his life, who broke down in tears, admitting that he had wasted time making films that were too superficial.
And yet, his works will forever remain classics of Italian cinema. In Rome, everything was technically possible, and we used to work on a Rostrum camera until two in the morning in Trastevere. The Italians had an innate sense of adaptation and improvisation.
This was unfortunately not the case with television in Paris, whose cumbersome administration stemmed from the ORTF. Programs were made at Buttes Chaumont and Cognacq-Jay, premises that have now been replaced by rather trivial buildings. The “Buttes” resembled a large swimming pool, and its studios hosted the most iconic shows of the 1970s.
Navigating around the corridors of Cognacq-Jay was a real initiation for the young director that I was. The credits were handcrafted and any alteration, practically inevitable, was tricky, but a box of chocolates or a bottle of wine sweeten the deal!
I worked, like everyone else, with 16mm film and Cognacq-Jay had its own development lab. But the slightest special effect or credit required a lot of preparation and patience. At that time, production was integrated; once adopted and broken down into production stages, it became easy to work.
It was not uncommon for a director to call me to replace him on a show. Hence, I learned on the job and I remember Georges Barrier, a great director of variety shows, inviting me to his recordings so that I could learn about multi-camera filmmaking.
But everything was laborious and sometimes comical. When I directed scenes of Temps X in its space shuttle set, it was customary to shoot only when all the highly unionized technical staff were present.
The absence of a stagehand blocked the recording. Often you had to look for them at the cafeteria on the top floor! For me, working in television was an opportunity and an honor at a time when the cinema had little regard for the technicians and directors for the two television channels.
Times have indeed changed! While now it is easy to edit on a computer with the right software, in the 1970s it took a lot of patience.
I remember an editor, who looked more like a civil servant than a film enthusiast, putting on his cozy slippers before working at his Atlas spartan editing table!
Since he was selling movie posters, we were often bothered by buyers with whom he enjoyed unveiling his stock!
After the privatization of television during François Mitterrand’s first seven-year term and the launch of new channels, Fabrice Maze continues producing numerous programs for the entire French Broadcasting Landscape (PAF).
He begins working for the private sector, directing for institutions, coordinating conventions, and making video clips.
In fact, Gonzague Saint Bris hired him to direct a series of cultural video clips produced by sponsorship and under the high patronage of the Ministry of Culture and Communication.
He also continues his work on the history of sports cars in France as a writer-director, making several documentaries on the Alpine and Matra Sports brands.
« My meeting with Gonzague Saint Bris allowed me to make beautiful docudramas. A man of the radio and television, a literary critic, journalist, writer, historian, a great media showman, he embodied “absolute romanticism”, longing to encapsulate a generation that rejected mediocrity, seeking an ideal in a sort of impossible chivalry.
He accompanied me with his unfailing friendship and loyalty by soliciting me for his audiovisual adventures. This modernity-enamored Aquarius had the idea of cultural video clips, short formats aimed for the general public.
Though he was open to criticism by his vast media exposure, he was a man of many talents. I remember his ease in writing the texts for documentaries on the corner of a cafe table and finding the sentences chiseled, the phrases seductive and elegant; his witty words in the stroke of a pen.
I miss his generosity and enthusiasm. The beauty of my craft is reflected in the quality of these encounters.
My passion for automobiles and the history of motorsports in France allowed me to meet the important players of the motorsport revival after the war.
Like a childhood dream, I met Jean Rédélé, Jean-Luc Lagardère, the founders of Alpine and Matra-Sports, rally and circuit drivers, technicians, engineers, and mechanics.
In addition to seven documentaries on Alpine’s history and two on Matra-Sports, I was also interested in revolutionary and atypical vehicles such as the Espace minivan, invented by a spirited, original, aesthete and innovative man named Philippe Guédon.
I also have a strong admiration for the Citroën brand which has offered us revolutionary cars like the Traction, the 2CV and the DS. However, I have not forgotten outstanding brands like Bugatti, Voisin, Hispano-Suiza and Delage.
For me, the automobile was an instrument of freedom, the object of the most advanced technical developments, a reflection of trends of social and economic evolution, as well as an object of art akin to sculpture. Yes, we have too quickly forgotten all that the automobile has brought to the 20th century.»
From 1997 to 2004, Fabrice Maze directed four documentaries on Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. This spiritual figure who left a mark on several generations both in France as well as abroad, and whose life was exceptionally short, was a mystery he attempted to unravel.
In 1999, the young Grenoble-based company Seven Doc headed by Séverine Gauci launched its first collection, La voiture de leur vie (The car of their lives), based on a simple observation: French car brands were losing interest in their history and it was crucial to remember the important role models in this saga. More than the technical aspect, it showcased the intense life experiences that these men shared in the car of their choice.
On the other hand, Aube Breton-Élléouët, the daughter of André Breton and Jacqueline Lamba, proposed in 1993, that he shoot a film on her father’s studio at 42 rue Fontaine. Following the dispersal of this magical and historic place in Drouot in 2003, she decided to launch the Phares collection dedicated to artists of surrealist movement.
The film about the studio, L’oeil à l’état sauvage, l’atelier d’André Breton (The eye in its wild state, the studio of André Breton) accompanied by a short biography, André Breton, malgré tout (André Breton, despite everything), constituted the first box set of the collection containing a DVD and an 88-page biographical guide.
From 2005 to 2020, Fabrice Maze directed the following films for the Phares collection: Robert Desnos, Yves Tanguy, Marcel Duchamp, Wifredo Lam, André Masson, Jacques Hérold, Victor Brauner, Claude Cahun and Kay Sage. More biographical documentaries are in production.
« You could say that I was compelled by little Thérèse. I quickly realized that the image the Catholic Church gave of her was not the one I had encountered.
The hagiographers highlighted her suffering, her sacrifices, and a sense of naivety due to her youth. The slightly “silly” statues, representing her with a bouquet of roses in her hands, seemed to me a long way from what she is.
I wanted to show her sense of art and beauty, her love of nature and animals, the simplicity and modernity of her message, her sense of humor, her joy, her enthusiasm, and her extreme sensitivity.
Little Thérèse is not an inaccessible, severe, doctoral, or stiff spiritual figure, no, she is a loving friend who speaks in simple words understandable by everyone. She has a universal calling. As she so aptly wrote, “I have never looked for anything but the truth.”
If some may have been surprised by this great gap between Saint Thérèse and surrealism, I would respond that I am free to live my passions as I please, without belonging to any schools of thought, without locking myself in dogmas, without excluding or judging. I see the beauty and the light where it may be, in all its forms.
Surrealism, like astrology, is another one of my many passions. Since my adolescence, I have been interested in this emancipatory and revolutionary movement. Freeing man, changing life, transforming the world are mottos that suit me.
“Dear imagination,” wrote André Breton, “what I love most about you is that you do not forgive. The mere word “freedom” is the only one that still excites me.” Poetry, love and the marvelous unfold fields of exploration that meet my deepest aspirations.
The tremendous unfurling of the unconscious in the art field represents a vital step in the history of art in the 20th century. André Breton, bearer of the great key to open its mysterious doors, watchman of starry castles, endowed with a visionary outlook, had knew to surrounded himself with exceptional creatives.
The Phares collection, initiated thanks to the generosity of Aube Breton-Élléouët, offers present and future generations portraits of these remarkable artists, of which the least known are not at all the least interesting. These encounters beyond the mirror grant me unspeakable joy.
These men and women whom I have chosen, have become my friends and I am happy to be able to carry on their memory. I realized, over the course of these encounters, that I am a transmitter of memory and I fully embrace this role. What I have done, what I have not, I give it to you. »
