A collection of short films by filmmaker Pierre Creton, including Still Life Primavera, presented last summer at the 36th edition, will be screened at this upcoming event in Nice.
L’HEURE DU BERGER
Pierre Creton
France, 2008, 39’
Grand Prix of the French Competition, FID 2008
One of Pierre Creton’s earliest films was entitled Life After Death. In it, we see him in the house of a much older friend, Jean Lambert, beside him. We see them reading aloud together from different books. We see them delighting in listening to vinyl records. We see them waiting for something: Jean Lambert’s death. In 2008, seven years after his friend’s death, Pierre Creton is still living in that house. He reuses images from that time in order to patch them together—quite literally, with a sewing machine borrowed from Lautréamont—with those of today. A work of mourning? Perhaps, but above all a welcoming of the marvellous in everyday life, guided by the reading of Pavese’s The Business of Living: “A certain kind of daily life (fixed hours, the same people, forms and places of devotion) gave rise to supernatural thoughts.” A spider makes short work of an insect; the filmmaker improvises as a hairdresser; we hear the radio broadcasting a meditation on the brain and perception; we witness strange superimpositions (unprecedented in Creton’s body of work!); we are treated to a duet with Vincent Barré, and so on. If his earlier Secteur 545 and Paysage imposé (FID 2004 and 2006) had familiarised us with a rural world devoid of exoticism yet expanded to the dimensions of great Romanticism, this time we are ushered into another strand of the Romantic tradition: black humour, unease, the fantastic. L’Heure du berger thus becomes the first genre film in Pierre Creton’s filmography.
(Jean-Pierre Rehm)
LA CABANE DE DIEU
Pierre Creton
France, 2020, 16’
From his father, Pierre inherited a wood that he tends, and within it a cabin—his father’s former hunting lodge—where Pierre now likes to spend time, alone with his dog. There he made a film he has just finished, twelve years after a first, unsuccessful attempt. One of the opening shots shows the cabin in a steep high-angle view, as if seen from the top of one of the trees bordering the clearing. More than Thoreau’s cabin, it is Edison’s Black Maria that this shot calls to mind. Like the house in Vattetot, the cabin in the woods is a film studio. And a haunted house.
(Cyril Neyrat)
STILL LIFE PRIMAVERA
Pierre Creton
France, 2025, 24’
Communication with the dead, apparitions/disappearances, and other supernatural events: since L’Heure du Berger (2007) through to House of Love (2021), Pierre Creton has continually turned the interior of his home into a fantastical device. In Still Life Primavera, this device is reduced to a single closed window looking out onto the garden. It is 21 March, the spring equinox, in Vattetot-sur-Mer. While nature awakens outside, Gaza is dying under the bombs. How can one be present here without forgetting what is happening over there? To hold together the here and the elsewhere, the filmmaker has assumed the role of officiant in a solitary ritual: each hour, for 24 hours, he records a one-minute shot, the camera fixed before the window. During the 12 hours of night, at the beginning and end of the film, the window becomes a dark mirror reflecting the flame of a lit candle: a solitary vigil for the people of Gaza. During the 12 hours of daylight, a dog, a donkey, a cat, a blackbird—animals appear and disappear in all innocence in a garden that could be mistaken for paradise. But at the back of the garden, an upright column echoes the candle: the vigil continues. The window becomes an altarpiece that, far beyond the garden, opens onto the distant disaster. When night returns and images of the catastrophe appear on a laptop screen placed before the window, a hand presses its black silhouette against it. We had seen it earlier, holding between two fingers a white primrose, caught between the window and the camera.
(Cyril Neyrat)
