return to Pierre Creton and his short circuit films

Little is known about it, but a work unlike any other is being developed in a small corner of France, merged with the work and the days of an earthling who happens to be a filmmaker, but also and above all a peasant. For nearly thirty years, Pierre Creton, born in 1966, lives, works and shoots films in the country of Caux, in Normandy, without ever that his agricultural tasks of worker and farmer do not oppose the practice of a “home-made” cinema, made day by day, according to the seasons. Far from Paris and official cinema, however, the man has nothing of the solitary creator or the caulked hermit, but practices a decentralized cinema, with friends (the documentary filmmaker Ariane Doublet, the sculptor Vincent Barré, the philosopher Mathilde Girard, director Pierre Trividic), a small informal and local cooperative where everyone contributes in their own way to other people’s films. Made with precarious means but a rare artistic requirement, close to nature, interwoven in life, Creton’s films trace a territory of unprecedented sensitivity. Three DVD-books published by La Traverse offer an overview, bringing together some twenty short, medium and feature films made between 1988 and 2020, but also, over the pages, a collection of photographs, collages and drawings.

Read also: The life choices of Pierre Creton, filmmaker and farm worker, shaped his work

This joyous refusal of specialization, of the traditional division between manual work and works of the mind, is also that of Creton’s films, which, neither fictions nor documentaries, play with established categories. They are more readily located in the floating zone of the essay, drawing as much from the surrounding reality as from the fantasies, mixing observation and wandering. Many of them are devoted to relatives, friends, neighbors or passing people.

The beauty of Creton’s cinema is very much due to its human scale, its poetry in direct contact with things.

From The Vicinal (1994), Creton films, in his own garden, beekeeper Marcel Pilate installing the beehives he had ordered. The camera focuses on his precise and mysterious gestures, handling the smoker and the frames with dexterity. What is at play here is a relationship with the vibrating mass of bees, between which expert hands skilfully weave, like a sort of secret exchange. In Life after death (2002), he paints a post-mortem portrait of a farmer from Bénouville (Calvados), the jovial Jean Lambert, reader of Cioran and lover of javas in 45-rpm. During a magnificent scene, where Creton cuts his hair, it is again the gesture which speaks of friendship and all that it contains of tacit tenderness: the hands of the young current on the fleece of the old one like a caress.

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