Old age, he seized it head-on through laughter, eroticism and hope. From his trilogy on aging of the 2010s, filmmaker Fernand Dansereau made a personal quest, but he offered an important legacy to a society that cowardly averts its eyes in the face of this both inevitable and unexpected event. We condemn old age out of fear, lack of understanding, time and humility.
In a recent text, the inspiring nonagenarian with the decaying frame emphasizes that this experience of learning to die is the most incredible and the most fascinating of his entire existence. Coming from an artist who meditates and has been interested in Soto Zen for 40 years, it is worth pausing. I wanted to listen to him, a meeting punctuated by deep silences, inhabited philosophically and spiritually, in his living room in Saint-Bruno.
Dansereau, from the silent generation, nevertheless measures the scope of words well, he who has made them his foundation of creation. But you have to know how to hear the silences of the patriarchs; this is their ultimate advice.
At 94, the body tyrannizes the old man, a year of plural suffering, the COVID recently. “I’m on the home stretch, I don’t have much time left. ” Not even afraid. The testaments of the spirit are multiplying, to which are added seven children (the last is 29 years old), 12 grandchildren, 4 great-grandchildren… and a work, a common thread, an ability to circumvent obstacles. Or not.
My great-grandson’s laughter will greet this rising sun that drives away my anxieties. All that remains is to say thank you to the evening of life!
Journalist in charge of labor relations To have to, he was fired in 1955 for refusing to cross the picket line during the typographers’ strike, a profession weighed down by technology. Never mind, he became the father of the French NFB team in the 1960s, producing the biggest names of the time (Carle, Brault, Lamothe, Jutra, etc.), sometimes director, sometimes director of photography, scriptwriter of several Quebec series, including Caleb’s Daughters and The Brave Park. He went back to painting five years ago, published his first novel at the age of 75, considers himself lucky never to have “worked”. “Karma summoned me to live on business. My life is made of summons. »
Commitment and hope
The word “convocation”, Dansereau cherishes it. “You have to listen to the call of karma. It is a demanding morality. We must submit to this summons. Even if the cane is sometimes necessary, old age makes us more free internally while we wobble our ego despite the numerous honors (in particular, the Governor General’s Award this year).
“Suffering educates us, it is inevitable”, notes the man who will be 95 years old next April while finding the necessary death. “Life carries death! »
The filmmaker is preparing another documentary for the spring – the last? — another will. For his documentary trilogy, he wanted to make a film on the essential political commitment of old people: “The elderly must wake up, take care of their business, remain mobilized. We are in a deadly culture. RPAs are prisons, we want to secure everything. We cannot deprive people of the risk of living. Life is a risk. »
He failed to sell this idea and he went through eroticism to continue defending the skin of old people. Sex passes better than indignation.
Old age properly understood is the age of hope
Dansereau is at the age when there are many bereavements, which hurt him less because of their accumulation. “The artist that I would have been finds himself summoned to a final and very demanding creation: learning to bow out with grace,” he writes.
Despite the collective and global downturn, Dansereau remains in hope, struck by the devotion and kindness of the natural people. “Optimism is not a reading that we make of what is happening. It’s a decision we make. This allows you to take action. »
Optimists or not, those who are modestly called “seniors” will have to be part of the solution and be heard, among other things because they will make up 25% of the population in 2031 in Quebec. At the end of his documentary old age and laughter, Dansereau confides: “Above all, I will have learned to bow with reverence before the immense mystery of life and the challenges it offers us. »
Consciousness of the hours ticking away
Fernand Dansereau could have written this sentence of Victor Hugo: “There is who knows what dawn in a blooming old age. »
“I understand so many things that I didn’t understand. It is not disable. It would be scandalous. It is not negotiated socially, ”he advances mysteriously. Silence. It will be all in the chapter of confessions. Energy also wavers in the dark. “We are not saints, lucky you! »
Aging, an act of life
Throughout our exchange, the word “conscience” emerges, stubbornly, like a sharpened lucidity, straddling a superior intelligence, Love in capital letters and a modest spirituality. “Consciousness seems to have a direction in its evolution that religions have attributed to God, but that unbelievers like me can only give up elucidating. He explains to me that it has taken on dimensions in the hominid such as morality, science, philosophy.
And the asceticism of old age allows, when it is lived in full consciousness, to descend into oneself, vertically, to add layers of consciousness.
Between his perception of the infinite brutality of life and the poetry of the repercussions of the beating of the butterfly’s wings, the old man contemplates the world while integrating a truth difficult to express in words. It is the great loneliness to which the elder, clairvoyant in the land of the blind, is sometimes condemned.
Before leaving us, he offers me the book of his paintings and poems tell the hours, which he has just self-published. Under a naive canvas, Yesterday my garden was cryingthese words :
“We will never have had time,
to murmur the ineffable!
Remains to be cultivated in
a secret columbarium
a mourning without a future. »