The odyssey of a film-maker (1960)

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nothing more to see, nothing more to do. We were spent. We had just one more last day. A kindly oil pipeline inspector who was going in his motor-boat to inspect one of his lines asked us if we would like to go along just for the ride. What a day that was ! It was the spring of the year and the Mississippi was in flood. Everything was in motion, carried down the flooding river— branches, whole trees, masses of debris, ducks floating on logs along with turtles. Cattle stood knee-deep in water that swirled and eddied, gurgling and sparkling around them. And then, looking up, we saw an apparition— a derrick, silvery in the sun, "its slim lines rising clean and taut above the unending flatness of the marshes," and it, too, was moving. Suddenly this familiar sight had become a wonder. It became "movement and rhythm, the essence of all things lovable"— became, in a word, motion picture. Bob sat down and wrote to the Company the opening for his film: We open the film on the scene as we might see it from the bow of a canoe. We are deep in the Bayou country of Lower Louisiana. It is the high-water time of the year— the country is half drowned. We move through a forest of bearded trees. Through the gray moss dangling from the limb of one of them, a possum peers down at us. There are wild fowl everywhere, in flight and swimming in the water— herons, ducks, geese, egrets and red-winged blackbirds fly up out of our way. We are spellbound by all this wild life and the mystery of the wilderness that lies ahead. Suddenly from out of the shadow of a wide-spreading old oak a pirogue glides into a patch of water just ahead of us. In it is a little Cajun (Acadian) boy. The pirogue he paddles, the narrowest, crankiest we have ever looked upon, is hardly longer than he is himself. He paddles slowly, for he is hunting, peering to this side and that, trying to see what he can see. We cut to the details of various things as he goes on, bubbles shooting up mysteriously in the water, the vague outline of a garfish scurrying out of the way, snake birds watching him from the branch of a cypress overhead, a row of turtles on a log, tumbling in one by 37