La Borne on Fire - a 71 min feature documentary film – portrays the culmination of 500 years of ceramics: life, pottery, sculpture, wood-fired kilns, and a passion for creativity and centuries-old traditions – art that endures in the center of France around the thriving town of La Borne. Now a magnet for international craftsmen and French artists alike who are drawn to a culture that captures old and new, one wonders, as do they: will this culture survive in decades to come?
Synopsis
More than fifty years ago a five century-old French town of ceramic craftsmen, whose ateliers were dying under the weight of modern ceramic and plastic goods, filled with a spirited coterie of young potters and sculptors. They were artists with a passion for the touch of earth and for wood-fired kilns. They reinvigorated this town in central France called La Borne, bringing new kilns and cosmopolitan interests, and they built a community that became a magnet for creative endeavor in Europe and for ceramicists around the world.
Under a vérité cinematic gaze this unique French/European story begins with the slippery manipulation of clay in cold March and April workshops, within which love of fire and clay is tarnished only by fear of creative or technical failure. The artistic goal, the problem set and solved, the successful execution, is an elusive process. Some succeed. Others do not. Some leave La Borne, to be replaced by others anxious to join the community and prove themselves among their peers. Some will display their works in exhibition around the country and throughout Europe. Some will be honored with distinction, their work acquired in the collection of prestigious museums of Paris and other cities.
Thriving on the centuries-old production craft, they suffer the danger of cracking slips and glazes through long nights and days of tending their kiln fires. Their anxiety – poignant as it is during discussions of misgivings about timing and techniques for producing a scorching heat in their wood kilns – stands in stark contrast to imagery of the beauty of their successes. The imagery and sound of the process of firing, and especially of the creative finale, provoke a fearsome respect for the forces of nature that the ceramicists harness in order to prod their creations to a safe completion. While flames escape through kiln doors and pressure release holes, the final moments of a firing explode into giant red plumes of fire bursting from their chimneys skyward.
Every new ceramicist attempts to master the range of production skills necessary to compete with their peers for the sale of their production and the recognition of their creativity. It takes ten years, according to a Norwegian master craftsman, to come to terms with the knowledge and skills necessary to produce well. Eighty artists and craftsmen devote their life to the pursuit of new ideas and subtle artistic growth. Eighty families support this pursuit in this singular region of rural France. They struggle, they survive, and some thrive.
The locus of their appeal has spread throughout Europe, drawing artists and students from far and wide, as far as Japan, North Africa and the Americas. Yet, not a single child of these artists has chosen in their turn to follow their parents’ example, often for fear of a bleak economic future. In La Borne today, too, for an aging generation there is growing anxiety that hides behind stoic faces about the survival of their values and the town’s living monuments. A desperate desire to create and to celebrate their skills and objets d’art accommodates the quiet struggle for economic survival and to keep their community intact beyond their generation.
An indulgence of cinematic beauty amplifies the importance of this unique place and people. To be sure, the survival of the potters and sculptors of La Borne matters to all who embrace the values of artistic heritage and of a way of life. The footage of La Borne is alive, an enduring testament to an historic center of ceramic culture in the western world, which continues to evade the fate of lifeless shells of brick and mortar that so many other ceramic centers in the Occident have become.