HOUSE OF LOVE

Pierre Creton
All about love… films such as Go, Toto ! (FID 2017) and Beautiful Summer (FID 2019) were radiantly so. After Life after Death (2002) and The Hour of the Shepherd (FID 2008), The House, is in Pierre Creton is work the cardinal point of his work. House of love: this short film, truly novel in style, takes us into the deepest depths of the matrix, the most intimate core of his work. Three circular panoramas follow one after the other, in three different interiors. Placed in the centre of the room, the camera rotates. Each shot is associated with a piece of music, that fills the space with sound throughout. If image and music come together in such perfect harmony, it is because Creton has placed his camera on a record player, a perfect motorised stand. A simple and ingenious operation, which turns the record into a camera, endowing music with the power to record the passage of time and beings, the variations of the visible as we listen. The monotonous rotation is interrupted by a multitude of events: variations in light, the movement of greenery in the wind seen through the window, the free and active presence of animals, the furtive spectre-like passages of humans. Shadows and reflections of the living and the dead, equally present and absent between the walls that have preserved the memory of love, of hours spent in embrace or listening to records. A gay porno soundtrack sneaks in between Pierre Henry’s creaking door and the song from the second house. In the third, the final chorus of the St Matthew’s Passion invites us to gather around the tomb, awaiting resurgence. With each turn of the camera, a boundless intimate world is born, dies and resurrects. Houses of love are also monuments to the dead, past or future. Sex and death, a secret chamber mingling art and life. Asceticism, regularity, discretion: this new form is also that of the modesty required of those who venture beyond the threshold of such a room.
(Cyril Neyrat)