7 Walks with Mark Brown

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

Inland from the chalk plateau of Pays de Caux, the rituals of smoking hives and honey extraction are documented by an apprentice beekeeper, and a schoolboy watches from his classroom window over fields of rapeseed blown about by a coastal zephyr.

A film about belonging, gay rural life, physical labor & elderly bodies. The arrival of Toto the marcassin at Madeleine's house, Vincent's trip to India and his troubles with the monkeys, or Joseph's dreams provoked by the continuous pressure machine, are three stories that Pierre will share and that in one way or another summon up our relationship with the animal, with this other neighbor

A institutional documentary short made for the Committee for Studies and Care of People with Multiple Disabilities [CESAP] by Pierre Creton following disabled children during one summer.

Laurent, a young brigade commander in a gendarmerie in a small town in Normandy is planning his wedding with Marie, his partner and mother of his daughter. He loves his job despite facing social misery on a daily basis. One day, a farmer who might try to kill himself runs away.

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

The journey of a young man as he begins an apprenticeship in the French countryside to train as a gardener. There he encounters a trio of men who will prove decisive in both his nascent career as a horticulturist and in unleashing his sexuality.

“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.”

“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.”

Portrait of the film-maker and visual artist Pierre Creton, who shoots films in the country of Caux, in Normandy, while taking on his agricultural tasks as a worker and farmer.

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

“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”.

“Love is not made to console, no doubt — it is made to save. But we know all too well that one is only ever saved once. And only for as long as that once endures.” Inspired by The Eternal Return, Michel Surya’s novel, the film is a portrait of the book itself.

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.