Vincent Blanchet
Vincent Blanchet (16 April 1945 – 13 March 2011) was a French filmmaker, documentary teacher, and inventor of microphones. He was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, near Paris, to Dutch-born artist Bernarda Vleming Blanchet and French poet Jean Auguste Blanchet.
From 1962 to 1967, Blanchet made 16mm amateur shorts in a Paris Ciné-Club while watching screenings at the Cinémathèque Française. He was inspired by Robert Flaherty and the Direct Cinema filmmakers such as Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker, Michel Brault, and Pierre Perrault.
He taught cinema practice at Paris X Nanterre with Jean Rouch from 1969 to 1978 and taught documentary filmmaking at IDHEC, while also working as a cameraman and sound engineer. He won the Sadoul Prize for Histoire de Wahari in 1974 and served on the prize jury until 1989.
In 1978, he helped co-found Ateliers Varan, an international film school, with Jean Rouch, J-P Beauviala, Jacques D'Arthuys, his brother Severin Blanchet, and other Nanterre alumni. He became one of the main developers of the school's teaching approach and taught there until his death.
In the mid-1980s, using royalties from his latest fiction, he bought nearly every microphone on the market, disassembled them to understand how they worked, and designed new microphones for better sound. He often used these on his own films, mounted on small video cameras. The resulting sound was very clear and depthful, making them popular for one-person film crews. The microphones were patented but never mass-produced. Some filmmakers, including Richard Leacock, adopted them. Blanchet also made sound recordings for artists such as Randy Weston, Richard Leacock & Sarah Caldwell, Jean-Louis Aubert, and Alain Roudier.
Blanchet appeared in several films, including Les Favoris de la Lune (Otar Iosseliani, 1984), La Petite Minute de Bonheur (Laurence Attali, 1991), and Zuneigung—Die Filmemacherin Gisela Tuchtenhagen (Quinka F. Stoehr).
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 13:54 (CET).