At the heart of Pierre Creton’s cinema, is first and foremost the encounter. With beings, places, readings, events and the singular experience of a man living amongst the living, determined to be together. Between living and doing, the films are woven. Acting, feeling, desiring. Films sustained by the lyricism and sensuality of gestures and bodies, as much as events and action. The combination of Pierre Creton’s life and filmmaking is central to his oeuvre and to the creative alchemy that leaves its mark on all of his films. This combination is the material for each film and dictates their form.

It is with deep emotion that, on seeing Pierre’s first films again, I recognise the formal attempts, the narrative principles, and images, some of which will grow stronger while others will nurture recurrent and more or less direct variations. But also, from one film to another, entering into an intimacy, a circle of well-meaning friends where each living being takes care of the other and the surrounding world. People, animals, cliffs, roads and fields… We can imagine Pierre Creton as a surveyor of his familiar territory but also of a cinematic territory whose expansion in concentric circles we experience on discovering the totality of his films.

Creton, a surveyor rooted in his ground, has an acolyte, Vincent Barré; Vincent is the one who leaves, travels afar, sometimes dragging Pierre along with him, as infrequently as possible so it seems. Yet, it is as a twosome, in their exchanges of news from both near and far, in an attentive sharing of a permanent “here”, that the story, the experience and the fiction of the world are conveyed to us.

C.B