Aboard a trawler in the Celtic Sea
Reproduced with the permission of the filmmakers Fabien Clouette and Jeremie Brugidou, 2016
This boat is a 17 meter trawler. In late summer 2016, we were onboard, looking for cod off the Celtic Sea, after a short unsuccessful attempt at monkfish in the St George’s Canal.
We had set off for 15 days at sea, cut off from the world, without internet or telephone.
Four deckhands and a skipper, with three- to four-hour shifts and periods of sleep, with no real breaks.
“17 meters, but the work of a 24-meter,” said a deckmate who didn’t really like this boat, meaning that it had been built to meet standards, but that it didn’t take well to the sea and offered an inadequate working space. This boat, like all trawlers, also consumes a lot of fuel. Some deckhands confided that you could come home having burned as many or more tons of diesel than tons of fish caught.
This boat was part of my thesis ethnography (2014-2019). I had chosen not to film aboard the fishing boats of my fieldwork, because I was afraid of the “monument-image” effect as Jacques Rancière calls it. Artistic representations – of which audiovisual productions and creative documentaries are a part – have long made “the mud or the harvest” speak for the workers. I wanted to find a way of making the words of the workers heard, these fishermen who are so often stigmatized in representations, and who are presented as not very talkative. The challenge for the social sciences in such terrains seemed to me to be to go beyond the fantasy of the beauty of gestures, of working-class “cathedrals”, of the “beautiful work” of the old sea dog. It’s at the heart of my film ROUTE TERRE, a documentary co-directed with Jeremie Brugidou on my thesis site, for which we take the time for long interviews and choreographed moments around the mimed gestures of working at sea.
And then, aboard the trawler, one of the deckhands had brought along his GoPro, and asked me to take a few images of the work. I decided I could just film a trawl tow and immediately started shooting it. I liked how the grain of the all-terrain camera captured the materiality of the work.
Back on land, I reworked these images with Jeremie Brugidou, co-director of my documentary films, and we put together a short ethnographic video. The result is “SUD IRLANDE”.
Today, Brittany’s Finistère region has seen its bottom trawl fleet dwindle in numbers.
Many vessels have been scrapped as part of the post-Brexit fleet reduction plan.
This boat in particular has not been broken up. It changed its name, and continues to fish, for another company, despite its unsuitability for the major environmental challenges of decarbonization facing the fishing industry worldwide.
