 If you enjoy watching Common Ground online, please consider making a tax-deductible donation at lptv.org. Lakeland Public Television presents Common Ground, brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota. My name is Christian Berg, and I'm a filmmaker and public television producer and director. Growing up in Grand Rapids for me was a very special experience. As a filmmaker, I always seem to come back here. Ha, ha, ha. Maybe it's some kind of homing instinct. But, you know, the pine trees and the, you know, the clear waters of the mine dumps and the red iron ore dust seems to draw me back all the time. And the people that are up here, the stories that people tell and retell, I think, are from those formative years. Where they draw the most meaning. And Northern Minnesota is where that happens for me. I've mostly worked on national PBS shows, dealing with science, dealing with history, but Pustinia is the first film that I've done as an independent. I've known Gendron since I was eight years old. He was a dear friend of my father's, and he's been a character that's always fascinated me, and he has a poetic way of talking, and he's devoted his life to his medium and to his subject matter, which is objects from nature, which he calls relics. Mortal leavings, he calls them. His vocabulary is extremely unique and colorful. And he's someone that I've always wanted other people to know about. And as a filmmaker, that's a privilege. The beginning of his creative journey basically starts while he's in a monastic community. He had thoughts of joining the community, of actually taking the monastic vows and becoming a monk. And he went another path, and the path took him into nature. It's been an interesting journey. At first I was involved with a larger project, wanting to do a feature length documentary. On Gendron's Life, there were some upstate New York filmmakers who had started in on a project, and I kind of insinuated myself into it. I said, well, I've known him since I was a kid. There were a few attempts at some fundraising that fell through. And in the meantime, I was organizing volunteers and getting equipment, and I would go out and shoot with Gendron every time he came back to the state. So I built up a collection of footage, and after the project basically fizzled, I had another opportunity to shoot with Gendron in New Mexico, where he moved to in 1987. I also happened upon some footage that an earlier filmmaker who also wanted to make a film about Gendron had shot years ago. If I had cut this short and made something in the early 2000s when I was shooting with him in Northern Minnesota, it wouldn't have been the film that it wound up being. And by continuing to put those tapes on a shelf and waiting for another opportunity, we finally had the elements that worked together as well as they did. Narrative film, The Director is God, and in documentary, God is the director. You let the footage inform your decisions, and I was working with an incredible editor, Greg Feinberg, and I cut down the footage to the essentials of what I thought should be there, and then he took it from there. The way that the early footage of 40-year-old Gendron interacted with the modern footage of 75-year-old Gendron, there was almost a dialogue built between them, and you also see the consistency of his message where there's even one point in the film where he talks about the motion that he sees in the bones. I mean, the bones, you can't get much more still life than bones. They are as dead as can be. But he sees movement and motion, and 40-year-old Gendron basically finishes the sentence that 75-year-old Gendron starts. Inanimate, inert things, supposedly, but the bones are not static to me. The bones are not static to me, even though the creature's dead, it's never static. And then my editor animates the bones to give them that motion, which, because it's a moving medium, you can't pass up those opportunities. I wanted to give people the feeling of what it's like to hang out with Gendron because hanging with Gendron is really almost a spiritual experience in itself because he's a self-taught artist, largely self-taught and extremely articulate in expressing himself about what motivates him and what he sees in the bones. When I find them, I feel this tingling in my hands and then I feel some on the naked nape of my neck and go sneaking down the spine. It's the oldest part of the brain. It's primordial. It's all instinctual. It's all rooted in the naked nape, this frying in my hands and the ingestion of air in ecstatic surprise. Here you are. You, they say, and I say you. You know, it's like falling in love again. I mean, bones are considered symbols of eridity, sterility, and death. But Gendron sees them as, he calls it portals unto exaltation. He sees them as a window as a connection to the divine, to the eternal. He might draw the cross section of the half of a black walnut shell or he might draw the hip bone of a grasshopper and he draws them to epic size. And you would think you're looking at a photograph of some alien landscape, but it's not. It's what's right under our feet, which really gets back to his central message, which is to open your eyes and to look into nature. I hope viewers will check out Gendron's work. He does have a website online. He's in a number of permanent collections. Just last year, he and his wife, the very accomplished artist, Christine Taylor Patton, were both accepted into the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. And his work is part of major collections all over the country. So I would hope that people would both seek out his work and follow his admonition to open their eyes to the world around them and to care for the world around them. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland Public Television's Common Ground, consider making a contribution at lptv.org.