Shorts Program 1: Habiter (dwelling)

Short documentaries by Pierre Creton, sometimes joined by Vincent Barré, transform familiar locations—a friend’s home, domestic interiors, a bakery, a flax field—into sites for evocative visual poetry.

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L’Heure du Berger (2008)
Dir. Pierre Creton
39min
In French with English subtitles

One of Pierre Creton’s first films, La Vie après la mort (“Life After Death”), showed the filmmaker visiting the house of a much older friend, Jean Lambert. Creton suggested making a film together with Lambert, then completed it after his friend died. Seven years later, Creton returns to Lambert’s house, there to walk among ghosts in a light, intuitive counterpart to the heavier film he was making at the same time, Maniquerville. The title L’Heure du Berger refers both to a notion mentioned by Beckett in his book about Proust, citing a new kind of advertisement that instructs a consumer what time a product is to be used, and also to a memory Creton links to his time with Lambert.

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House of Love (2021)
Dir. Pierre Creton
21min

Whoever thought phantom rides are a historical genre has not seen how Pierre Creton put his camera on a record player: it’s a lesson in harmony and openness. Music and images have rarely been so close in their perception of time. The film follows three movements in three different interiors, with three different songs moving under the camera. While our gaze circles in those intimate spaces, the rooms become alive. Light and cats move, shadows appear, and the wind tells of eternal possibilities we may discover if we just open our eyes.

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Simon, At the Crack of Dawn (2009)
Dir. Pierre Creton
9min
In French with English subtitles

If Simon, At the Crack of Dawn were to lend itself to a summary, a single sentence describing the most banal reality would suffice: “Before dawn, while people are still asleep in their beds, a baker makes his bread.” But this would be to disregard two shots that ill fit such a narrative, which tip Simon, At the Crack of Dawn towards a tale of fantasy. The fifth film Creton and Barré have made together, this short is the quintessence of poetic cinema.

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L’avenir le dira (2019)
Dir. Pierre Creton
26min
In French with English subtitles

“I met Pierre 25 years ago, when I set up my market stand next to his: he was selling poultry and eggs; me, flowers and honey,” Pierre Creton says of this 2019 short documentary. “I asked his son, Arnaud, if I could follow them and film the flax harvesting.” The director proceeded to document their work, the physicality of their labor reflected in his own efforts to shape this modestly poetic portrait of their homes in a familiar landscape.