The ever-varied and ever-botanically-focused Pierre Creton’s Still Life Primavera finds the director making one of the structural experiments that he previously dabbled in with films like House of Love (2021), where he placed his camera on a record player and let it spin away to make something with the manipulative wit of a Michael Snow film. The camera doesn’t appear to move at all this time around, but it once again looks out a window: there’s a lit candle as the only object visible, but we’re being tricked when it turns out to just be its reflection against the glass as the countryside trees outside the window become more visible. Nighttime turns a window into a mirror of our interiors, but daytime allows us to look out at the world. When the sun comes up, the camera remains unmoving as it looks out at the resulting springtime still life of the title, but odd edits every minute that allow animals to suddenly materialize in the frame and the light to shift as needed draw our attention to the small manipulations of time that Creton is performing.
The sudden appearance of a donkey, and a shot of the fog blowing by, recall one of the most famous films operating in the single-take mode in Larry Gottheim’s Fog Line. What this film creates out of stasis, however, could be considered a new form of in-camera editing that separates it from your standard long takes and turns it into a deliberate highlight reel. Further evidence of how much control is being exercised over this seemingly uneventful “shot” comes from inside the room, when a pet cat and Creton’s hand holding a flower pop into the frame from inside the camera’s room, followed by a needle drop from a band with the revealing name Eyeless in Gaza. Night falls again, and the window becomes a new kind of mirror: one that reflects a laptop displaying images of death and explosions from the current genocide in Palestine, with Creton’s hand once again reaching out to touch the screen. It turns out that all this time spent staring out the window was not so much a lazy stare as a form of vigil of remembrance, with Creton’s candle and flower being small funereal gestures for all the dead murdered by Israel in Gaza. It has been a full day of more needless death and pain: one unfortunately has to light another candle.
Published as part of FIDMarseille 2025 — Dispatch 2.
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