Square of Great Men
Guest Patrick Glotin.
I don’t really know how I lead my professional life, probably according to my ideas and my desires. And I find myself at 61 making two major films in my career as a documentary filmmaker. The first, all around me will tell the story of the life of a tree, a maritime pine which looks at this place in Cap-Ferret where I received my first lessons in natural sciences, alongside my hunter grandfather and fisherman. It also happens that we are coming with my wife Valérie, to build a small house not far away, on the family land acquired by my great-grandfather in 1940 for a pittance, and that I leave home with a camera, its tripod and a bag full of lenses, water, coffee, beer and chocolatines on your back, every morning and every evening, to fetch on the Mimbeau, an almost desert spit of sand , the most beautiful illustrations. A kind of infinite happiness to work for well over a year on my memories of childhood and adolescence and on the loving gaze given to landscapes. An incredible chance where professional projects agree with your deepest desires.
from Bordeaux, Patrick Glotin lives today on the Cap-Ferret peninsula. Author, director, documentary filmmaker for France 3 New Aquitainee or Seasons, he has traveled the whole world as part of his work but he feels more than ever from here, an eternal Gascon. He tells us about his journey, his vision of the world, his dreams, his relationship to nature, his relationship to hunting and fishing. He is invited on Friday, September 16 as part of the festival Images of Sea in Ares. On this occasion, you will be able to discover the film “All around me” in preview before its broadcast on F3 on October 27th.
All around me
At the end of the Cap Ferret peninsula, there is another, that of Mimbeau, a narrow strip of sand planted with a few pines, yuccas and immortelles which suddenly rises towards the north and encloses a lagoon subject to tides. This results in a sort of very particular ecosystem. This film recounts the 70 years of the life of a maritime pine, of a pinion sprouted by chance in the wind on this micro desert planted between 2 environments, that of the Bassin d’Arcachon and its oyster beds and this lagoon.
Two months alone in Alaska
In September 2021, Patrick Glotin realizes his dream, spending two months alone at the edge of the Pacific on an Alaskan beach. This is his second trip to Alaska since in 2014, he made a documentary on hunting “Impressions of Alaska”. In “An autumn in Alaska“Patrick Glotin comes face to face with himself, his relationship to the world and to animals (in particular brown bears) and to absence. This film will be broadcast on October 27 on the channel Seasons
_About the second film, an autumn in Alaska, the idea of isolating myself from the world dates back more than 50 years. When we set off in the car with my parents and crossed landscapes, the deep furrows of the pine production forest of the Landes, the avalanche corridors and the ridges of the Pyrenees, swept by the high winds, always caught my eye and my spirit. I already wanted to take a backpack and have my parents drop me off, letting them go to the noisy ski resorts where we spent a lot of time queuing amid the crash of metal canes colliding with each other. before throwing yourself off the ground, towards a perilous route where you risked finding yourself at any moment with your nose in the snow and your leg broken. There was no one with me in my dreams, I oriented myself alone, had a snack on a snowfield, contemplative, trying to understand the movement of eagles, vultures and herds over the day and the seasons. The notion of ”cabin in Canada” came very early with these thoughts, a refuge to shelter me from the savagery, a ”balcony in the forest”. Becoming a young teenager, I quickly tasted moments of too short seclusion, returning to sailing alone at sunset in the Lugue du Cap-Ferret, moments of daydreaming in contact with my youthful landscapes, hunting and fishing trips in solitary to be shared only on return. Books accompanied me, from Frison-Roche, from Monfreid, from Kessel and from Jack London. They took me, like my father’s car, to the gates of great adventures, without my being able to throw myself into them completely. No doubt I knew very quickly that I would not go that far; I had only half the courage. I had boundless admiration for these totally free characters, knowing how to risk their lives to exist. And this was confirmed throughout my life. Because indeed, I lived, through my professional and personal activities, only small adventures. I stopped at the base camp, where the real adventurers began to experience, all the way to the top, in their prodigious efforts and their sufferings, mad sensations. I was captivated by the force of nature, its unpredictability, the dangers lurking. But I was just as fascinated by these men and women who roamed forests and mountains, swamps and deserts, crossing countries at war. Some lived with monkeys, others searched for gold veins and fought with knives, yet another spent the night in a kind of hammock that he had just screwed into a vertical prey at 4000m altitude with, below him, 1000 meters of vacuum. Eager for experiences, knowledge, landscapes and freedom, they left me there. Undoubtedly the system and the comfort in which I had settled in harmed my temerity and forbade me the total adventure, the commitment. A committed adventure, when we speak of nature, is, like mountaineering or surfing in the big waves, a moment, an itinerary, a trip, an exercise where the error is only very little tolerated. We quickly find ourselves in a perilous situation. This is not really the project of an autumn in Alaska. I don’t want to put my life in danger and make a film out of it. But this time I want to go a little further in an adventure that is a little more disturbing, more uncertain. I want to flirt with the sensations of an expensive freedom, experienced by those I have always admired. And freedom is not the guarantee of a happy life (see Jo and Jean, 2011). The emancipated being must ignore what he leaves behind and support the new rules of the free world because he too has his limits, his constraints, his laws. Will I have enough knowledge and will I be careful enough to see this project through to the end? And of this very personal adventure, I want to leave a trace as the travel writers did._
Joe and John
Patrick Glotin has only made one short film, a marvelous fiction that takes root in the life of Jean Cocteau
Discover Joe and John
How not to embark on such a project without thinking of Sylvain Tesson. I have already used, in the introduction to a film devoted to hunters’ cabins (Seasons 2012), this sentence from him: ”to win, his cabin, is to disappear from the control screens”. And yes, I saw a few years ago ”6 months on the shore of Lake Baikal”. This film had reinforced my idea of proposing in 2015, ”Haméka, a house in the land of doves” at the Seasons chain. But, unlike Sylvain Tesson’s intention, the subject was not to live a uniquely solitary experience. I was, of course, withdrawn from the city and the constraints linked to life in society. Immense pleasure in living to the rhythm of one’s desires and of nature. But the Basque Country is not this uninhabited place of Lake Baikal. Nature is here maintained by man. He contributes to its beauty, maintains the forest, flowers the valley with herds, makes war on ferns, brambles and nettles. The Basque Country has this additional wealth of inhabited nature, cherished nature. Because I believe that the prayers that the Quechua Indian dedicates to the volcanoes of the cordillera are much more beautiful than the intrinsic beauty of the mountains, however perfectly isosceles they may be. We know the attachment of the Basques to nature, to their home and to their ancestors. Their gaze on the country gives the landscapes a primordial interest, a depth. And while on the banks of Baikal, one can only talk about oneself, the wolf or the debacle, one could not in this deep valley of the Basque Country where blows often and strong haize egoa, the south wind, help feeling around you, a living culture to be cut with a knife. In this film, partially secluded, I therefore also met characters who came to visit me in this house where I observed the migration of wood pigeons.
In this film An autumn in Alaska, I will have no contact with anyone, for 2 months, a priori. Without any possibility of communicating, the man deprived of his social ties, without congener, then undoubtedly concentrates on himself, on his existence and, to save himself from dementia or only from boredom, he must also s cling to something. The tasks in the cabin take part in this occupation, are almost enough but it is in nature when one must throw oneself to find the riches and one’s own fulfillment. Withdrawn from my conventional (conventional) life, I want to taste another life, the one in which I have often imagined myself, of which I have often felt the smells, the humidity and the heat, the loneliness, through the stories others. Intellectually in a closed circuit, finding myself alone boiling the pot of my thoughts, sheltered from all constraint and all entertainment linked to our modern life, far from others and at the level of all my senses invaded by nature, c t is indeed an experience in question, a journey into the unknown. But also a film to make, a logbook to keep, in a nature to discover. And books to read. One thing is certain, I am not afraid of boredom. But, deep inside me, unconsciously, what am I really looking for?