As this new season begins in 2020, I am proud. Proud as a peacock, proud as an Amazon in the saddle, proud as the president of the Union des Chefs Opérateurs. I founded, and belong to, a colourful and vibrant collective. How could I not be swelling with pride?
The day after our General Assembly last January, Olivier Bertrand, a friend and co-founder of the Union, sent me an excerpt from Durkheim’s essay on suicide. Olivier’s intention in sending it was not to point out that the meeting had been unbearably long (though he could have!), but to thank me for the work accomplished in “firmly holding the tiller of this association.” In this book, which lays the foundations of modern sociology, Durkheim describes suicide as a social phenomenon and seeks solutions to its sharp rise in turn-of-the-20th-century Europe: “… The only way to remedy the ill, therefore, is to give social groups enough substance that they may hold the individual more firmly, and that the individual may in turn hold to them. He must feel more strongly bound to a collective being that preceded him in time, that will outlive him, and that surrounds him on every side. Under this condition, he will cease to seek within himself the sole object of his conduct and, understanding that he is the instrument of an end greater than himself, he will realise that he serves some purpose. Life will regain meaning in his eyes because it will regain its natural aim and direction. But which groups are best suited to perpetually recall man to this beneficial sense of solidarity?” Having ruled out political and religious bodies, and the family, Durkheim answers: “It is the professional group, or the guild.”
It’s true that one of my first great joys, at the time the Union des Chefs Opérateurs was being formed, was seeing, at our first evening discussion, some thirty women and men aged from 20 to over 70, gathered in a circle to talk. I couldn’t stop repeating to anyone who would listen how rare it is to see such a disparate group exchange over a shared passion. A little later, I realised that I had put as much energy into building this collective at a moment in my life when my own family was coming apart — through founding the Union, I had gathered a symbolic family, one that I would later discover could be just as difficult to live with as a family of blood!
We did indeed weather storms, because many of us were haunted by a feeling of illegitimacy. We are all passionate about our craft, and we arrived full of enthusiasm, but raw-nerved, each of us carrying hidden wounds.
Through this experience of building a collective, I was supported and advised by my comrades at the Union, but also by the presidents of other collectives and professional associations: Guillaume Betton, Thaddée Bertrand, Thomas Santucci and Gilles Porte. Thank you!
Because I had recommended he read Bauchau’s Oedipus on the Road (for the traveller Oedipus is blind, but through his daughter, through creation, through stories, Oedipus sees), Gilles in turn recommended to me Henri Laborit’s In Praise of Flight, gifting me at the same time the sailboat named Desire from the author’s foreword. To which I later replied with Anne Dufourmantelle’s In Praise of Risk — a book one must approach without losing sight of the fact that its altruistic philosopher-author died of a heart attack while saving a drowning child. Was that going too far? For my part, moderation is something I too have sometimes forgotten.
A year ago I wrote a piece about the intense way I experience this profession. It’s called “Cette part en nous” (This Part Within Us), and it was the first article ever published on the Union’s website. The piece ends with a poem by Narcís Comadira, in which I compare the vertigo of the falcon hunting for its master to the exaltation we sometimes feel creating for the directors we work for. During lockdown, I came across a haiku by Taïro that echoes this poem, as if seen from the other side:
The falcon returned to my hand
In its eye
The sun
I am one of those who did not see the pandemic coming, who were caught out by lockdown, who lived through it very badly. I was in the countryside, but under personal circumstances that were barely bearable. And it was there, at the bottom of the pit into which shock had plunged me, when I felt useless and wanted to resign, that my friends at the Union patiently came to fish me out. Thomas Lallier, Nina Bernfeld and Isabelle Razavet — I will never forget the hand you held out to me in that moment when everything had come undone. Then, all together, the members of this Union — barely 18 months old — we discovered solidarity at a distance.
Those of us who are people of the field knew nothing of video calls. Once adopted, they let us see each other, talk, and listen to one another regularly, but also meet and hear from colleagues abroad. Thanks to our activity within the association during this troubled time — sometimes frantic — we built the foundations of a united, solid collective. Some of us know that we might not have held on without this work, which gave meaning back to a society suddenly brought to a halt.
That is why, on this eve of the new season for our association’s life, as in a few minutes I send fourteen friends the proposed agenda for our next board meeting — yes, I am proud… and grateful.
Gertrude Baillot
> Cover image: La Matière du Temps (The Matter of Time) – Richard Serra ©Gertrude Baillot
