Under the Siege of Mistral

Jerome Hill – a philanthropist, composer, painter, and film maker – provided financial support to Jonas Mekas’ avant-garde cinema magazine, and later established a 40 USD stipend for young cinematographers. Mekas’ film Notes for Jerome (1978) stands as a testament to this friendship between two experimental film makers that had started in the 1970s, glowing in the sun of Southern France, bleached by the salt of Mediterranean waters.

I first watched this movie on September 12, 2024, having just arrived in Cassis. I sat on a fake-leather couch in the kitchen, as gusts of Mistral repeatedly forced themselves through the living room window, threatening to shift it from underneath me. Luckily, the fixture proved weighty, and the wind only managed to topple the salt shaker on the table in front and get the Camargo Foundation brochure flying. J. Mekas’ documentary, mentioned above, also starts with a comment on the wind: “I found Cassis under the siege of Mistral.”

I spent two months living an hour away from Marseilles and a stone’s throw away from the sea. I can still see the view from my terrace: the Cassis lighthouse that had once inspired Virginia Woolf, presently drawing lazy tourists, couples, and school kids to the pier – as well as some Frenchmen for an early morning exercise; its stoic indifference to the waves that at times rear their heads so high as to hit its bishop-like cap with a mass of water. This cap breaks upon reflecting sunlight, glinting away across the waters in various shapes – ships, motor boats, row boats, paddle boards, kayaks, yachts, and neat rows of children’s sea sled tied together – little “Optimist” sailboats. Behind the back of the lighthouse lies the rock of Cap Canaille, its outline mimicking an oyster shell, with a hat of its own – albeit separate from the head and autonomously shapeshifting – the moon. The trio of the sun, the sea, and Mistral are constantly working together, casting this landscape in surprising, often dramatic, colours in a subtle reminder that my current place of residence is also marked by a military past: during WWII, this lazy resort served as an outpost for defence and surveillance. The roar of the seas is not exactly soothing – the persistent noise puts me at the centre of acoustic action, a perpetual sonic engine seems to suck in my attention and sleep, leaving me spatially disoriented – perplexed, as if hanging upside-down. 

Identified Flying Objects (IFOs)

A typical afternoon scene: still wearing a bikini in October, I’m on the terrace, reading C. G. Jung’s volume on UFOs in dreams that I happened upon the corner of Camargo library. As the darkness grows, I watch IFOs – little bats – bursting into flight from some corner of the sky.

Where are they when they aren’t hunting?

Do they hang upside-down facing the sea, that endless emerald field?

Do they fall down in mid-dream?

This emerald geography has taken away Antoine de Saint-Exupery, a beloved children’s author and a French military pilot, an aerial spy hunting for German secrets. After years of uncertainty, the remains of his plane have been finally found and identified on the shores between Cassis and Marseilles. The territory is now part of Calanques National Park: rock formations made up of limestone, dolomite, granite, sandstone – boasting steep slopes and valleys, eroded by rain, wind, salt, underground springs, and storms, full of bays, grottos, caves, heritage, and rock climbing routes – are gifts to be discovered, actively explored by tourists, as well as scientists. Calanques National Park, the crown jewel of this ecosystem, was historically held precious in a financial sense (e.g., the famous limestone of this region, referred to as Cassis stone, was used liberally to produce bathroom sinks, and served in megalomaniac projects such as the Suez Canal and the Statue of Liberty gifted to the U.S). Speaking of precious stones, Jerome Hill was so fond of the colour green that in his autobiographical movie Film Portrait (1972) he spoke of a desire to live inside an emerald. Apparently, as a child, his crying would be soothed by the Irish flag (perhaps it was one of its colour segments? – author’s note). Perhaps it was this privilege of deep green spanning the infinite flag of the sea that lured the American Jerome, an artist and philanthropist, to the Southern French resort where his new home bloomed into a residential space hosting creators and thinkers from all over the world – turning eventually into Camargo Foundation.

The emerald idyll follows my gaze through the library window. After dark, the cap of Cap Canaille turns into a lamp – the rising moon illuminates the classic volumes along the French and English language shores: this gives me a chance to go over the legible superstars (O. Wilde, J. Joyce, S. Becett, W. B. Yeats, E. Dickinson…), re-reading the literary gems, occasionally diving into the Zen poetry section, flipping through the region’s nature atlases, bound historical volumes of photography and art, and even pulling some rear treasures from the under-lit corners – such as librettos by G. Stein. The most valuable aspect of this collection, undiluted with contemporary publications, is the prospect of lifting Jerome Hill’s fingerprints from every one of these volumes. I once had a dream about these ridges, the arches and loops that belonged to the owner of these books.

I followed them like paths, a way I knew to be paved with the barcodes of Jerome’s fingers, winding into a grotto painted with meaty bulls, mountain goats, and penguins. I lit a pocket candle, gazing at the drawings until the waters of an underground river started to flood these ice age designs, reaching up to my mouth. I drowned along with the mammals.

After dying, we moved into a hall where a bunch of English speaking coffee drinkers were enjoying their croissants, chasing wasps away, respectfully tiptoeing around a cannery cage. The bull, the goat, and the penguin – down to a singular – disappeared as soon as they noticed the Americans (betrayed by the accent) and the canneries. I was left alone with the breakfast party, among which I was able to identify Jerome and his cousin – Maud Oakes, an ethnologist and a writer. In 1951, she came along with her ever-more-actively filming cousin to visit C. G. Jung in his Bollingen Tower in Switzerland; she was tremendously impressed with the magic of the stone carved by the patriarch of analytic psychology, and became a loyal student of Jung’s. Here, Maud was acting all silly, complaining about the obtrusive wasps. The birdies were domestic hostages meant to serve as an antidote to those insects, maintaining a balance between tranquility and ingestion. Before I could see the outcome of the scene, I was awakened by the typical red of the rising sun and the Mistral’s turning up of the sea volume – my alarm.

I was able to grasp the following: the wind here blows right through several layers of reality, mixing the impressions of others with my dreams, making them difficult to disentangle. I was also able to recognise the places I saw in the dream: I had visited an episode of J. Hill’s movie Cassis (1950) and the famous local attraction – Grotte Cosquer – a cave filled with palaeolithic paintings, – yesterday, a few of the fellow residents had gone to visit its replica.

Residents

My residency here is part of the collaborative program “Coast, Land and the Sea Interdependent”, initiated by Camargo Foundation and Nida Art Colony on the occasion of Lithuanian season in France. My fellow residents are artists and academics from all over the world. We are all 35-60 years old and mostly meet during working sessions – everyone is otherwise immersed in their personal lives, projects, and spheres of interest. When the latter overlap, the excitement of intellectual stimulation makes it hard to find peace afterwards – the topics of our working sessions range from the search of India’s DNA, anti-psychiatry movement in Morocco, the concept of disability in XVIII century French theatre, to conceptual poetry readings or a dance performace reflecting upon the sensitivities of Uganda’s ecological landscape. This year Lithuanians form the majority here – the architect Indrė Umbrasaitė is researching Mistral’s impact on the landscape, expanding her scrupulous field research On Winterness, while the doctoral student of art Simona Rukuižaitė is delving into the geological layers of Calanques National Park, processing rock samples. As for me – I’m watching and soaking in the unique quotidian connections within and between cultures and ecologies, throwing these insights into a pile, I tell them to compost.

 Interconnectedness

I walk my organic waste to the compost pile filmed by J. Mekas (it lies on the opposite side of the living quarters, the walk takes about a minute. If I stop at the spice garden to pick some sage or thyme for the marinade, it takes seven minutes). I have to close my windows properly – due to the strong winds. The layers of compost are akin to a geological testimony, providing curious insights on the nutritional habits of the local residents: avocado and potato peels, onion skins, egg shells, coffee grounds, leftover rice, fish bones, mango stones, banana peels, mushroom shavings.

I pour out nearly a kilo of mussel and oyster shells, and shrimp tails. On Wednesdays and Fridays, one can get seafood at ridiculously low prices at the local farmers’ market. This bio corner, formed by Jerome in the 1960s, is full of valuable sea protein in fermentation; it faces the Bestouan beach – right in front of a colony of French grannies. Skinny, bold, and tanned, they chatter loudly, with a book and cigarette in hand, perfectly manicured nails, with vintage gold watches or pearls adorning their wrists – these women waste no time taking stock of the damage time has inflicted upon their bodies, dipping their naked breasts (sometimes just a flat torso with scars in their place) right into the cold autumnal waters of the Mediterranean, buoyed by the salty grace. In the evenings, these ladies trek homewards to fry up some shrimp or drink in some oysters, enriching their bones with iron, zinc, phosphorus, and magnesium – sooner or later the land and the seas will take those micronutrients back, sucking them right in.

Poetry inspired by the breakfast scene of the Cassis movie

1.
The canaries are called
To chase off the wasps:
Swarming the coffee and croissants, they threaten
To nest.
(Two and you,
Four.
Four, two, and you,
Eight.
Sixteen,
Thirty-two and
You.
The age of
Father
Yours and mine
When they died.
Traces of wasps in every fig –
An elegant box of sweets
A coffin to energise a windy day.
Three and two – make five.
Five years harnessed by a different kind of wind
Having harnessed all that
Time of five years
Sugar broke
Their Kidneys
Apart:
Exploding
In limestones.)
2.
The canaries are called
To chase off the wasps:
The wind gets there first
Chasing everyone away.
3.
I’m hiding away in my room
From the storm.
The oyster had also closed up.
I open the door to her quarters:
The host of the shell changes their gender, depending on
The direction of the wind.
Presently, it’s a her.
We are both frightened,
And I eat
Her.
4.
The canaries are called
To chase off the wasps:
Cap Canaille is roaring – an oyster so big could only be found in a dream.
Only a dream like this will never fit into my mouth,
Nor into the compost pile.
5.
The canaries are called
To chase off the wasps:
But the birdies chase the cousin away
32 wasps stay in her stead.
6.
Bees – the cousins of wasps –
Gather nectar from the Aleppo pine
Undisturbed.

The Lumière brothers – Auguste and Louis – have used their Cinématographe to document dozens of scenes, each under a minute long. This predecessor of a movie camera has captured its contemporary – Auguste’s daughter – as she tried to catch a goldfish in a glass bowl using her fingers, as well as the inventor himself feeding the aforementioned offspring, against the backdrop of fancy breakfast set. The brothers have also recorded a gardener comically spraying himself with a hose, a rider trying to jump a horse, and other moments of life unfolding around them. The steam locomotive arriving at the train station of La Ciotat in 1895 gave the first viewers quite a fright and famously entered the cinematic history. Another notable short film was that of the workers exiting the Lumière factory – mostly women and children, and a few lads riding bicycles or  horses.

I ride from Cassis to La Ciotat thrice; each time I am driven along the back of a giant oyster – Cap Canaille, the eastern part of Calanques National Park. Here I find the majestic Cinema Le Lumière – and a weekend flee market next to its boarded-up doors; I also find a memorial room dedicated to the Lumière brothers at one of the most bizarre museums of this city – La Ciotaden (the exhibits here are seemingly arranged so that the mold could colonise the vast expanse of the random assortment – ranging from the shards of Roman vases or buttons to dolls depicting scenes of 20th century urban realities); I finally come across a fleet of fancy yachts cramming the harbour, as well as the docs that offer insight into shipbuilding and the shipping industry. I try to imagine: had the brothers inventors, emerging from their 36-room-large summer house (the number of their rooms exceeds the number of wasps I came up with for my poem!), chosen to ascend the hills with their cinematograph, we could enjoy more dramatic testaments to the industrial history than an approaching locomotive: the present territory of the national park would be replete with smoking chimneys and dynamite forcing the relief open – disheveled beds of limestone or metallurgical quarries. We would see workers sweating through the dangers of producing sodium, glass, or sulphur. The landscape shaped by nature over millions of years, and industrial human activities, is now left in peace, well protected. Calanques National Park, officially established in 2012, proscribes damaging economic activity; their impact would be magnified by Mistral – the architect of relief and climate: any chemicals would be promptly carried towards the densely populated port of Marseilles or dispersed through the sea currents, maximising the suffering of marine life.

My third visit to La Ciotat under the auspices of the “Coast, Land and the Sea Interdependent” program includes a motor boat tour for the residents, led by a park ranger and a marine biologist – the researchers speak of the underwater mountains looming beneath us, the lush posidonia, and the previously active pipelines of aluminium oxide. My phone is out of range. As we return to the shore and I get back online, I find out that the name of Auguste Lumière’s daughter was Andrea. I also figure out that the Aleppo pines sprouting abundantly from the park’s rock formations got their name by accident, an oversight of the Scottish botanist Philip Miller.

Oyster Leg and Aleppo Pines

Gosh!

This paragraph is gone with the wind, I hadn’t closed the window properly…

Credits, Conclusions

1. Based on Notes for Jerome and a visit to my terrace at Cassis (to see the angle of the lighthouse), A. Zdančiūtė – the Lithuanian cultural attaché in France – confirmed that I had spent my residency in the same apartment that J. Mekas was staying at. J. Hill was very generous indeed. Thanks to his generosity, I brush shoulders with Jonas.
2. Having consulted Google and several natural scientists, I found no proof of canneries having any particular competence in catching vicious sweet toothed wasps – seems like the playful experiments of J. Hill’s films are brimming with auto-irony.
3. The sea and the shore are interdependent.
4. May the wind keep what it takes.