Pierre Creton

For the 30th anniversaire of FIDMarseille about thirty directors have done us the honor of offering us some very beautiful short films.

A film about belonging, gay rural life, physical labor & elderly bodies. The arrival of Toto the marcassin at Madeleine's house, Vincent's trip to India and his troubles with the monkeys, or Joseph's dreams provoked by the continuous pressure machine, are three stories that Pierre will share and that in one way or another summon up our relationship with the animal, with this other neighbor

Laurent, a young brigade commander in a gendarmerie in a small town in Normandy is planning his wedding with Marie, his partner and mother of his daughter. He loves his job despite facing social misery on a daily basis. One day, a farmer who might try to kill himself runs away.

The journey of a young man as he begins an apprenticeship in the French countryside to train as a gardener. There he encounters a trio of men who will prove decisive in both his nascent career as a horticulturist and in unleashing his sexuality.

During a trip to China with Vincent to meet people in art schools and universities, I discovered the work of Deng Guo Yan, the director of the Tianjin school of contemporary art. A painting style that seemed to me to be a mix of traditional Chinese painting, Claude Monet and Cy Twombly, and which I liked. The black and white of his large ink brush paintings on paper, almost the size of a mural, made it possible for me to jump from black and white to colour in this film, as I had done in the Recueil but with other connotations: with excerpts from Jean Renoir in Aline Cézanne, photos of Le Havre destroyed in Papa, Maman, Perret et moi, and infrared images taken by Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt in Le Paysage pour témoin”.

Following the steps of an English botanist, in the landscapes of the Normandy coast, people and cameras look at flowers. This is an essay on attention and friendship, a cinematic herbarium.

African immigrants start working on a farm in Normandy and hope to open their own restaurant someday.

Portrait of the film-maker and visual artist Pierre Creton, who shoots films in the country of Caux, in Normandy, while taking on his agricultural tasks as a worker and farmer.

The comedienne Françoise Lebrun regularly comes to the Maniquerville gerontology center to read Proust to the residents. It is an opportunity for them to discuss together the memory of lost time. A strong bond develops between Françoise and Clara, the center’s host.

Inland from the chalk plateau of Pays de Caux, the rituals of smoking hives and honey extraction are documented by an apprentice beekeeper, and a schoolboy watches from his classroom window over fields of rapeseed blown about by a coastal zephyr.

From his father, Pierre inherited a wood that he looks after and, in the middle of the wood, a cabin, his father’s old hunting lodge where Pierre now enjoys spending time alone with his dog.

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Spring equinox 2024: 20 March at three hours, six minutes, twenty-one seconds (GMT). Vattetot-sur-Mer, in the Pays de Caux region of Normandy. Gaza is being bombed…

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Pierre Creton placed his camera opposite the small black table that had always stood in the middle of the lawn facing the front of the house. He filmed himself gardening – potting plants, preparing cuttings. Cat, dog, donkey, hens are moving about, playing, resting around the table, the goat is prancing on the table top, the whole menagerie is living its life, crossing the frame freely. On these images of perfect insouciance, he edited the sound of a radio news report about the Fukushima disaster. The date is March 2011: here, the garden, the end of winter and the pleasure of plunging one’s hand into the earth, touching the plants, to prepare for spring’s arrival; over there, death, sky and sea contaminated for many years, untouchable. The garden is not at odds with the disaster provided it heeds its echo, albeit unwillingly. The garden table is also the altar where domestic rituals are performed to ward off the horror.

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In a sequence shot, the slightly slowed movement of hands manipulating and caressing the surface, whose texture is like skin criss-crossed with scars, a wax sculpture that is vaguely anthropomorphic. The sound is the voice of Mathieu Amalric, giving a raw account of three nights of sex that Simon shares with Robert and Nessim, their African lover. With this ball of black matter, a dark satellite seemingly detached from its feature film, Pierre Creton reveals the night-time, and painful, reverse shot of Bel été’s gentle community Utopia. (C.N.)

“This was, a priori, a more familiar commission, as I had lived in Le Havre – it’s actually the only town I know a little. And I’ve always liked the architecture of Auguste Perret…Annette Haudiquet, a curator at the Malraux museum, asked me to come to Le Havre. She had planned visits to different sites. We began with the Perret show-apartment, accompanied by the guides Elisabeth Chauvin and Pierre Gencey. We had lunch, I went to their home – they also live in a Perret apartment, arranged identically to the show-apartment. And I imagined the two of them with their son Vincent, as characters “acting” as the residents of the show-apartment. With this first idea, I accepted the commission: staging them as residents of the apartment when, in reality, they are the guides, between two realities, two epochs: the apartment that they live in and the one they show to people”.

A walker who crosses three regions: Vattetot-sur-mer in the Pays-de-Caux region, Saint-Firmin-des-Bois in the Gâtinais region, and Carrouge in Switzerland, drawing an imaginary geographical thread between the places where we live and the place where Gustave Roud spent time on his family farm in the Pays-de-Vaux region. This film was inspired by Gustave Roud’s text, whose title we have borrowed. Travelling through landscapes, looking closely at the tiny and changing forms of nature, meeting living beings – animals and people.

In the Paris metro, there’s a man in a black mask. An anti-vax demonstration passes by the indifferent camera. The man goes home, the sound of social anger following him inside, but nothing seems to matter to him except his business with his double whom he finds inside the white walls The curve of his shaved head mirrors the sculpture behind him on the mantelpiece. Portraits appear in his back. Elsewhere, on the banks of the Seine, a woman and a dog look out into the distance, as if they’re waiting for something to happen.