Pierre Creton

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. Pierre Creton’s adaptation of Maupassant’s short story is startling in its luminous serenity. It is above all a portrait, a black-and-white study of a body, a face and their clear, opaque beauty. Paying attention to it all is enough to ward off the ghosts and the madness. (Cyril Neyrat)

The life of a young police officer in a small town in Normandy is thrown into turmoil when he accidentally kills a farmer threatening to commit suicide.

Whoever thought phantom rides are a historical genre has not seen how Pierre Creton put his camera on a record player: it’s a lesson in harmony and openness. Music and images have rarely been so close in their perception of time. The film follows three movements in three different interiors with three different songs moving under the camera. While our gaze circles in those intimate spaces, the rooms become alive. Light and cats move, shadows appear, and the wind tells of eternal possibilities we may discover if we just open our eyes.

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. There, he made a film which he has just completed, twelve years after an unsuccessful attempt. One of the first shots shows the cabin from a steep high-angle view as if seen from the top of one of the trees bordering the glade. More than Thoreau’s cabin, this shot brings to mind Edison’s Black Maria studio. Like the house in Vattetot, the wood cabin is a film studio. And a haunted house.

Follow those who work in the field and turn, plow the images with them.

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

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

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

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

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

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.)

I met Pierre twenty-five years ago, when I set up my market stand next to his: he was selling poultry and eggs, me, flowers and honey. I asked his son, Arnaud, if I could follow them and film the flax harvesting.

An elderly woman discovers an adolescent wild boar on her doorstep and decides to adopt the beast as her last -- and most beloved -- child.

An elderly woman discovers an adolescent wild boar on her doorstep and decides to adopt the beast as her last -- and most beloved -- child.

An elderly woman discovers an adolescent wild boar on her doorstep and decides to adopt the beast as her last -- and most beloved -- child.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sir/Madam The reconstruction works on the new site of Maniquerville’s Yvon Lamour Gerontology Centre are now completed. The residents will be moving to the new premises over two days: Monday 11 and Tuesday 12 October 2010. This is the note displayed at reception, and which I did not wish to reword. It conveyed the crude tone that I had taken out of Maniquerville and which, this time, I was ready to tackle head on. Who is this information addressing? The residents’ children? Who is this Sir, this Madam? Residents? Spectators? Spectators of a reality that concerns us all? I see Le Grand Cortège as different from Maniquerville, in its form: here, the camera is constantly moving, the colour, nostalgia rather than melancholy…

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”.

“When FACIM (Foundation for international cultural activities in mountain regions) called me to propose making a film about Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt, I didn’t know him as a writer, only a little as a translator. So I immediately read his books, Le Recours and Le Poing dans la bouche, published by Verdier, which moved me deeply….I didn’t write a script. The commission was to film Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt in the places he arrived at in France during the war, in Megève, and his relationship to the region, which is very present in his books. I filmed him from day to day over four days. On returning to the places of his childhood exile, he met the families who had helped him survive, people his own age who were children at the time, whose memories were reconstituted together.”

“It begins with an exhibition at the French Institute in Munich. We had decided to create an installation together [with Vincent Barré] in the greenhouse of the Seyssel d’Aix palace: a tribute to Paul Cézanne and his final model, the gardener Vallier….We spoke about the project with one of Vincent’s childhood friends, Christine Toffin, who reminded us that she was related to the painter. Her aunt, the painter’s granddaughter, still lived at Bourron-Marlotte. We decided to go and film Aline Cézanne in her retirement home at Bourron-Marlotte….It was during the sound editing that we thought of making a film using the images we had shot for the sound. The framing is minimal – it’s fine as it is, but it was not set up with a film in mind. A year later, we went back to see Aline. Her speech had become more confused and we went off with her to the village to find the houses of her childhood.”

“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”.

Simon, At the Crack of Dawn is the fifth film that Pierre Creton and Vincent Barré have made together. As the film is the quintessence of poetic cinema, it is impossible to lock any subject into the confines of a form, which is nonetheless as round as a cob loaf. What we can try to write about is the resonance of signs, the vibrations of matter and the mysterious radiation of meaning between the images and sounds….If the film were to lend itself to a summary, a single sentence would suffice and would describe the most banal reality: “Before dawn, while people are still asleep in their beds, a baker makes his bread”. But this would be to disregard two shots that ill fit such a narrative….and which tip Simon, at the crack of dawn towards a tale of fantasy.

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.

“The title came to me from Samuel Beckett’s book on Proust, in which he recalls that a new form of advertising appeared post-war, one that not only imposes a product, but also the time of day it has to be consumed: “Midday, seven o’clock: time for a Berger.” I knew this advert but it was on rereading this passage that I realised how similar it was to the shot where I’m alone drinking a [glass of] Berger, with the label clearly visible, and where the church bells are striking seven o’clock. Berger pastis is, of course, completely associated with Jean [Lambert], with our get-togethers, our weekly aperitifs. L’Heure du Berger is the recreation of Maniquerville. They were both made at the same time. In addition to Jean’s insistent “return” to his house, as his ghost inviting me to make this film, it is perhaps the heaviness of shooting Maniquerville that led me to make this film using such a light and intuitive touch.”

“I talked to Françoise Lebrun about the nightingales’ song at Vincent’s place in the Loiret. She then introduced me to Colette’s Les Vrilles de la vigne [The Tendrils of the Vine], a text that she had read at a friend’s funeral. The idea for this very simple film came to me with Françoise’s voice: ‘As long as the vine grows, grows…’, to the song of the nightingales, as night was falling, at Vincent’s place. We did three takes, three readings one after the other, so that the last would finish deep in the night. I kept an excerpt from the second take and the end of the third, in the darkness. This film was the trigger for Maniquerville.”

Three weeks of hiking in one of the highest-altitude places on earth: the Spirit Valley in the Himalayas. Two sequences of flowers picked like in herbarium, emphasized by the voice of villages and the chants of monasteries.

Beyond the visit of Yvetot Agricultural High School, a walk through a landscape that is both familiar and remarkable.

“It was on Foula, the furthest island from the main island [Shetland Isles], that we ran into Jovan. Or rather he ran into us, coming off the ferry late in the day. The mist was thick and we looked worn-out. He took us under his wing and offered to show us around the island the following day. There is a long sequence shot of the passing scenery, taken from inside his car. Driving along the only road, Jovan pointed out to Vincent the island’s disarray: abandoned cars and tractors, heaps of rusting scrap metal. Then on another island, Papa Stour, with a view of Foula, we filmed what was to become the first part of the film.”

After the death of his father, Pierre and his friends Marie and Bénaïd, travel to Vézelay to Georges Bataille's tomb. There, they are get in touch with a priest, who seems to distinguish tourists from mystics, those who come for God and those who come for the writer.

Dairy controller in the "Secteur 545", Pierre Creton does the portrait of a rural existence devoid of picturesque reduction

“Yves Edouard is someone I hear a lot about. He’s a farmer and cereal grower, an endive producer…. He’s clearly a character out of a novel. One morning, I went to his farm and he hired me, as he needed someone to weed his endive fields….When I went to see him, I imagined constructing something romanesque and aesthetic. I had planned to film the work but this proved impossible. I then met Catherine Pernot, the friend of my friend Sophie Roger. I was enchanted by her way of talking about things, even the most ordinary ones. I described the work on the endive farm so that she could turn it into her own story. I recorded her and reworked her words to create a text that she then had to learn and act out in front of the camera. Next, I filmed an interview between Yves and myself. The film is thus composed of two sequence shots: Catherine, then Yves. As if they had slipped into their characters’ skin, she tells the story, he answers the questions.”

“I met Jean Lambert one year after my arrival in Bénouville, in 1992...Before we met, I used to see his house, his farm, and wondered who could be living in such a mess, amidst such neglect. I had prowled around a lot before approaching him, for months. The day I decided to go and see him on the pretext of buying milk, I cycled from Bénouville with my empty milk bottles. On the way, the police stopped me to ask where I was going. What a coincidence! Jean Lambert gave me the milk, pointing out that there were other farms closer to where I lived. The most difficult step had been taken…I went back to have dinner with him once a week. I’d arrive around 7pm and leave around two or three in the morning, always on my bike, often drunk…Later, I suggested that we make a film. He found the idea amusing, even though he mistrusted cinema. ‘You’re wasting your time, poetry is the only good thing. He died in April, the year of the eclipse….I finished the film I’d begun with him, without him"

“Sophie was doing a series of portraits of friends reading. I suggested to her, along with our common friend Sophie Marie Le Pallec, that we make an adaptation of Mercier and Camier set in the coach on the Fécamp/Le Havre line that passed in front of the houses where we lived.”

“At the same time as I was helping my new friends Yves Edouard and Patrick Hébert with the harvest of 1997, there appeared in Le Monde Diplomatique: “The Fourth World War Has Begun”, a geostrategic analysis by Sub-Commander Marcos. On reading this manifesto, the idea of the film came to me.”»

“I consider Le Vicinal to be my first film, made when I settled in Bénouville in the Pays-de-Caux region. It was also my only experience shooting with rolls of film…What I wanted to film was my encounter with Marcel Pilate…He is the first hero of my films. The film shows the moment he came to set up the beehives I had bought from him. It was with him that, for the first time, I acted [in nature], had an occupation there. It was also the first time that I saw someone work like that: each object, each tool, each gesture, everything was done in a sort of ceremony and ritual.”

“My first work with disabled children. I had proposed to the CESAP (Committee for Studies and Care of People with Multiple Disabilities) to film a summer stay with the children. I made an institutional film for them, for me a film with Yvan and Adeline.”