Petit traité de la marche en plaine
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
Vincent Barré
Also Directed by Pierre Creton
An elderly woman discovers an adolescent wild boar on her doorstep and decides to adopt the beast as her last -- and most beloved -- child.
For the 30th anniversaire of FIDMarseille about thirty directors have done us the honor of offering us some very beautiful short films.
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.
African immigrants start working on a farm in Normandy and hope to open their own restaurant someday.
“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.”
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.
“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.”
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”.
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)
Also Directed by Vincent Barré
“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.”
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”.
“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.”
“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.”
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.
A meeting between friends, two sculptors: Vincent Barré and Richard Deacon. The studio: a space for producing sculptures and for conversation, and a frame assigned to the camera. But it’s also the camera that commands us to leave this studio, to open up to another archaic workspace at the foundry, to open to its darkness dotted by incandescence. And then, even more openness, in a backward movement, the filmed image goes back to the source of its sculpted shapes. Images as proof of their relation, the landscape and rites in the Mediterranean parade: Cistercian architecture in Provence, ancient Greek sites, Holy Week processions in Sicily. Slowly, reminiscence returns, accompanied by essential texts, Empedocles and Bataille, read by Françoise Lebrun. Then, what was supposed to be illuminated gets blurred, what was supposed to guide gets scattered. Instead of informing, form gets deformed.
“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”.