Fejos Postdoctoral Fellow: Fabien Clouette

Ever since the Basques hunted them, whales have been the bearers of fire: their oil was used for lighting and was a fundamental resource for coastal areas and, later, for nascent industrialization. Nowadays, this fire has become above all symbolic and emotional: the whale is a protected, “charismatic” animal. Its presence as much as its absence moves and brings people together. From the magisterial bodies seen or heard at sea, to the dramatic corpses found stranded on the beach, to the reconstructed bodies exhibited in museums, this film tells the story of the common history we share with these animals of such special status in our physical, imaginary and social worlds.

Recent events in Finistère have put this film on our agenda. In September 2022, three large cetacean strandings occurred on the Breton coast: Île de Sein, Tréguennec in Audierne Bay, and Ploeven in Douarnenez Bay. The fellowship helped to finalize the film’s editing and find a good structure for the documentary story. This structure mainly revolves around the three Breton stranding episodes of 2022. These situations create tension between people with different statuses and interest, biologists, official state agents, activists.

As the third stranding involved a live, juvenile animal, these tensions were exacerbated, to the point of problematizing an essential question in the political anthropology of the environment today: how do environmental and animal causes fit together? Are the moral imperatives of rescuing the individual cumulative with the imperatives of conserving the species? And is scientific work opposed to affects?

The film’s story also relies on a large number of very difficult-to-direct, graphic rushes: humans work around the corpses of highly charismatic animals, cutting them up and making them disappear from the landscape. These gestures had to be mediatized, and narrated so as to be perceived by an audience as actual care, an often invisibilized part of wilderness care (despite the very close proximity of these flesh-cutting gestures to those, familiar to our imaginations, of whale hunters).

Since three strandings took place in quick succession and in a limited space, we had an obvious chronology for the film, but we had to find a narrative that went beyond the specific case. We found a solution by working on the sound We wanted to work on this narrative based on extensive sound work. The Foundation’s help made this possible. We assembled a team of sound technicians with whom we created a strong identity for the film.

In the creation of the film’s soundtrack, the songs of the various beached animals, their calls, were an element that had to have a share of presence, outside the moments of human speech (interviews).

We decided to create a kind of music, or soundtrack, exclusively using the species that the film showed or evoked through the words of the interviewees. And we wanted this work to be relational: to create a musical dialogue between humans and whales, rather than just play whale songs.

In the field, we had met a strong character, a local historian of the relationship with whales in the Basque country. This man, Mikel Epalza, is chaplain to the sailors in Ciboure. In the film, he recalls a moment of communion with the cetaceans, during which he played the txirula, a Basque flute. His story takes place in the middle of the St. Lawrence on a foggy morning, during a memorial voyage in the footsteps of modern-day Basque whalers. Mikel Epalza, inspired by the landscape and the passage of time, began playing on the bow of the boat. Then one, then two, then three whales came to dance, in his words, around the boat. We went to see him in Ciboure to recreate this call, and we recorded a flute piece with him, “offered to the ocean” in his words.

Our sound design for the film was constructed from Mikel’s Basque flute sounds for the film, and from research into the sound archives of the species concerned (we had recorded different vocalizations during fieldwork). As the frequency ranges of all different whales are far apart, the txirula had to slow down to a quarter of its initial speed, making itself a little more cello-like than it is, while the cetaceans, in some cases, accelerated to reach the “realm of the audible”, then found themselves in the same harmonic zones as the human-made instrument that had slowed down to join them.

In this temporal mix, the clicking sounds of some of these animals punctuate, almost electrically or electronically, the long notes of the others, as if to remind us, in a sense, that it is only through the prism of the technical tool that we gain access to their underwater songs.

Thomas Fourel finally produced a work on long acoustics after the phase of entangled vocalizations, to bring them all together in a large common sound space Then, Romain Ozanne wizardly created a sound mix for the film.

The Wenner-Gren Fejos Fellowship also helped finishing the design of the film, poster and film submission process, which is a huge step in post-production.

Film Website: https://lesplansdupelican.com/Le-feu-de-la-baleine