In an exceptional series rebroadcast this summer, Aline Pénitot explores this “meteoric experience” of which Romain Rolland spoke, with at the microphone Isabelle Autissier.
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Close your eyes. To listen. And let the miracle operate. It is the sea that invites itself to us. Seagulls, surge, it shocks, it brews, it split and it slides. To believe it and believe it, remember and plan it, Aline Pénitot, who signed this remarkable series of programs for France Culture, released in full confinement and rebroadcast, is aimed at everyone. And first of all to this auditor that she decided to baptize Josiane and anchor in the Creuse, this woman who has no chance of seeing the sea and may never have the means to go there .
Born in Burgundy in a modest environment, Aline Pénitot does not forget that she had the chance to learn to navigate thanks to the summer camps. It was therefore first for “Josiane” that she imagined this series, born three years ago during a discussion with a friend, the surfer and choreographer Laurie Peschier-Pimont. They discuss what (re) links them to the ocean, what Romain Rolland (Nobel Prize for literature in 1915) calls “oceanic feeling”: “a dazzling experience; a feeling of unity and understanding”.
Nothing mystical, however, adds Aline Pénitot, “at most a modified state of conscience which occurs before a landscape, listening to music …” But strong enough for some to organize their lives around the Exploration of this feeling. And they are the ones and they that Aline Pénitot went to see. To them that this composer and documentary maker (she notably produced the unsurpassable forget Moby Dick and what animals owe to the night for France Culture) has set the microphone.
In the first episode, there is talk of abandonment and “dissolution” with the apneists that are Arthur Guérin-Boëri, Alice Modolo or Guillaume Néry. After the drunkenness of the depths, here is the call of the large large (episode 2). For Isabelle Autissier, “the big large, it starts in the head when you wonder what is behind the horizon and you want to go see”. Then will come to the microphone Isabelle Joschke, then in full preparation for the Vendée Globe (edition 2020-2021) and to which Aline Pénitot has since devoted alone at sea, around the skipper of the Imoca-Macsf in which we hear “Isa” , huddled in the heart of his bannette, tell us about his race.
To achieve the oceanic feeling, a series as powerful as it is exciting, and infused with Rilke, Duras and Michaux, Aline Pénitot and its director, Gilles Mardirossian (who “gave his nights”), will be wet in every sense of term.