Back to Normandy

Norman inquests by Geoff Andrew

Sight & Sound – February 2008

 

Films that might properly be described as « philosophical » - insofar as they are cinematic enquiries into the existence, nature, meaning and interrelatedness of things (including, of course, cinema itself) - are rare indeed. And philosophical films that are wise, warm, witty and intellectually accessible are even less common. But such films are characteristic of the oeuvre of documentarist Nicolas Philibert, who until the success of Etre et avoir (2002) was perhaps French cinema's greatest secret.

Take, for instance, his two museum movies La Ville Louvre (1990) and Un animal, des animaux (1996), which move beyond being accounts of institutions to reflect on notions of taxonomy, language, knowledge and, in the latter, the gulf between life and mere physical existence. Then there are Le Pays des sourds (1992), a consideration of communication and community, and La Moindre des choses (1997), a meditation on mental illness, psychiatric therapy, performance and belonging. And Etre et avoir itself is a study of social change and educational theory in which, in one of many memorable scenes, we watch a small boy come to grips with the concept of infinity.

It's perhaps unsurprising that Philibert's documentaries delve into epistemology, ontology, psychology, language and identity : his father Michel - whose weekly film-club screenings of Bergman, Dreyer, Bresson et al would greatly influence his son - was a professor of philosophy and Nicolas himself graduated in philo. But it's the compassion, clarity anc poetic resonance of his work that take it beyond the academic ; indeed, his latest film Back to Normandy (Retour en Normandie), his most richly philosophical and multi-layered work to date, is also immediately notable for its subtlety, delicacy and humanity.

On the surface, at least, this first foray into confessional « first-person » cinema has a straightforward premise : Philibert revisits rural Normandy to catch up with old acquaintances three decades after he first met them. But this isn’t just a look at the changes in these people and the world they inhabit in the manner of Michael Apted's Seven Up films or Louis Malle's God's Country. For Philibert met the individuals in question when he was looking for locals to cast in director René Allio's 1975 film Moi, Pierre Rivière, ayant égorgé ma mère, ma soeur et mon frère... So his own movie is in part about the relationship between cinema and life.

« The adventure of working on Allio’s film affected me deeply, » says the quietly spoken and engagingly boyish 56 year-old. « I was young and I was suddenly given a lot of responsibility – persuading people with no experience of cinema to participate in the film wasn't easy. But there came a moment when they realised it was a serious project - a film maker from Paris had come to exhume a story that belonged to them. »

The story in question involved the 1835 murder by a young man of his mother, sister and brother close to the area where Allio wanted to shoot his film, which was in turn inspired by a book of the same title published as a collective research project led by Michel Foucault, the philosopher famed for his interest in the history of crime and punishment, madness and the law. Foucault was fascinated by Pierre Rivière's arrest, trial, imprisonment and death not so much because of the crime itself - indeed, in his foreword he claims that parricide was quite common at the time - but because they generated so many documents : legal, medical and forensic records and testimonies by those who knew the family but also - rare at the time -reports by psychiatric « experts ». Moreover, there was an elegant, insightful 8o-page memoir written in prison by a culprit widely regarded as mad or simple and who described himself as someone who could « only barely read and write ». Allio too was fascinated by the case and was determined to restore to the Normandy farming community a slice of its own history by recruiting locals to play the peasants in the film while the judiciary and other figures of authority were represented by their 20th-century counterparts, Foucault included.

« Meeting those people again was just the starting point for my own film, a pretext, » says Philibert. « From the outset I knew I'd also use extracts from AIlio's film and because the project's roots lie in my own memories I knew that for once I'd relate the film in the first person. Not like Michael Moore - I'm not at the centre of the world depicted - but t too had something to tell. I worked with Allio before the villagers came on board, so I also knew about his problems with financing and his struggle to get the film made.

« Obviously I didn't want to make a sequel to Etre et avoir, especially as things ended up going badly on that. [Protracted court cases were brought against Philibert and the film's producers by the teacher who appeared in it, who claimed that as one of its creators he deserved a full share of the profits.] Perhaps there's a link between the unhappiness connected with that film and my desire to make this one, which revisits a very special, happy experience. Certainly Etre et avoir’s success made it a little easier to find money for this one. And my obsession was to make a film that could be understood by anyone, including those who'd never heard of Allio or Foucault. Ifs not for specialists - it's just about a film-maker going back to examine the traces on people's lives of making another film 30 years earlier. »

One of Back to Normandy 's central themes, then, is memory. Besides Philibert's own recollections, his interviews with villagers reveal that the production of Allio's film was an illuminating experience for most of them and even had a profound effect on some, particularly Claude Hbert, the young loner cast as Pierre Rivière. But then there is also Rivière's own remembrance of his life, and this written account leads Philibert into an investigation of different forms of documentation. Details of the murder were initially documented not only by the culprit but by a great many witnesses, experts and journalists; over a century later these records were analysed by Foucault and his team; their book inspired AlIio's account of the crime in the form of a filmed docudrama; and now Back to Normandy constitutes one more document, concerned not only with the crime and the ways it has been represented but with its resonance in the lives of the director and others. All these levels of narrative - likened by Philibert to Russian dolls - are interwoven into a clear, coherent movie. So how did he go about planning the film?

« To make a film I need just one strong idea to begin with - in this case, meeting the people in Normandy again. After that anything can happen, and even more than in my other films I made this one up day by day. Sometimes I had to prepare in advance, as when I needed authorisation to shoot in the prison or wanted to interview a whole family, but otherwise it was very improvised. One idea would lead to another, one encounter would lead to another, something else would lead nowhere at all. The villagers saw me filming different things here and there and wondered howl could construct a film from such diverse elements.

« When I'm shooting I simply have a desire to make a film about a whole range of things, without knowing how I'll combine them. I only really find the film during the editing : in this case I had about 6o hours of footage, so a lot was left out. To use a psychoanalytical term, I edit by association. Sometimes I'm fully conscious of why I'm putting things together; in other cases it's less clear what the precise link is. When I made my first film His Master's Voice with Gérard Mordillat, who was the other assistant on Allio's film, we edited it entirely according to what the interviewees said, creating a logical narrative from their words. But when we screened it we realised that it didn't work because we'd failed to take account of the intonation and rhythm, how they looked, and so on. So we changed it. I've always remembered that : you shouldn't get too theoretical about what you're doing. Sometimes it's more important to have faith in your intuition, otherwise things can turn out dry and academic. »

It's hard to imagine such charges being levelled against Back to Normandy, which ranges free and easy, far and wide, from its opening sequence of a piglet's troubled birth through scenes of the villagers reminiscing or going about their business, clips from Allio's movie, shots charting Philibert's voyage of rediscovery and - the only scene in this tender, touching film that's remotely difficult to watch the butchering of another pig. The sequence comes shortly after shots of the prison in which Rivière was held and eventually died : was that link a deliberate parallel ?

« I can't explain everything I do and some choices aren't part of a grander metaphor. For me the butchery sequence was primarily about work and about the pig farmer Roger. In fact, my producers wanted me to remove the footage of the butcher talking before he kills the pig so as to make the slaughter feel more metaphorical. But I said no. A metaphor for what ? I just wanted to show that there's a violent side to Roger's work which is an integral part of the everyday existence of many country people. »

Philibert's compassionate curiosity about people's lives and his unplanned approach can lead to fortuitous but fruitful discoveries. Those who've seen La Moindre des choses will not be surprised by his interest in the psychiatric aspects of the Rivière story, but the fact that Annick Bisson, who as a girl played Rivière's sister in Allio's film, now works with the mentally handicapped was something the director was unaware of until he started filming. Moreover, his longterm fascination with language finds poignant expression in his encounters with two villagers : one woman who has speech problems due to the onset of mental illness in her family and another who suffers from aphasia following a stroke.

« Before starting on this project I spent three months attending hospital sessions for people suffering from aphasia and t was considering making a film about the condition. Then when I went to Normandy and learned that Nicole had lost her power of speech, 1 found it very moving because she'd always been a rather militant person, accustomed to using language to make political points.

« For me this is partly a film about l'après : what happens after a film is made. For directors of fiction it's less important because your actors can go off and act in another film, but when you make a documentary it's usually a one-off in people's lives. With La Moindre des choses, for instance, it was essential to return several times to the psychiatric clinic to talk with the people I'd filmed before I showed them the movie. I needed to prepare them for what they'd see: for how they might see themselves, but also to ensure they didn't think things had been cut because they were less attractive or clever than others who appeared. I had to help them understand that a film is always a narrative construction, not a « best of » or a competition.

« Of course, one of this film's themes is cinema as collective or familial experience. Allio's film brought together a very diverse group of people, Parisians and country folk, young and old, who had a great curiosity about each other and developed real affection for each other. And everyone, even now, has fond and vivid memories of that experience."

Not that Philibert's film is in any way sentimental : just as it reveals that rural life has a bloody and violent side, so it admits to both the virtues and drawbacks of familial bonds, the strength and vulnerability of communities, and the potential and limitations of film as an enduring form of documentation. And while his passion for cinema as a means of expression is gloriously evident in the poetic beauty of his images - see him capture, for instance, the improbably balletic grace of cows walking through a farmyard - and in his discreet deployment of sound (some of the music was composed by his maternal grandfather), he never romanticises the medium, even showing the Eclair labs to remind us that film is part of the chemical industry.

« Cinema is often a product of obstinate ambition. I was lucky to get my start with Allio, a real artist who had been a painter, then a theatrical set-designer, and made his first film when he was in his 40s. His films were contemporary with the nouvelle vogue but he was never part of it or of any other fashion. He never had a hit, never rested on his laurels, and was always looking to do something new. He was important in giving me confidence in myself and I had a very strong dialogue with him over the years, right until his death. So this film is also about fathers : Pierre's father, God the father - who is invoked by several people - Allio, who was a paternal figure to me, and my own father. That's one theme I did know I'd be dealing with from the start. »

 

 

« The ideas come when shooting - I love that ! »

Time Out – January 16, 2008

 

Wally Hammond meets Nicolas Philibert, the french documentary-maker behind the 2003 hit Être et Avoir and finds that his latest film - Back to Normandy - is both spontaneous and beautifully crafted.

Of the new talents to have emerged in this special decade for documentary - the era of the « event » feature documentary kicked off, say, with Hoop Dreams in the mid- '90s though Fahrenheit 9/11 to the super-sizing present - that of Nicolas Philibert is possibly the most fascinating and intriguing. The success, domestically and worldwide, of the hitherto little-known director's 2003 film, Être et Avoir - you remember the poster of sweet, paint-splattered little Jojo ? - may have catapulted him into the documentary « big league », but there was something about his charming and thoughtful portrait of the Auvergne school that distinguished him from his contemporaries.

Evident in his marvellous new film, Back to Normandy - where Philibert revisits the farm area where, as a young assistant director in 1976, he recruited locals for René Allio's reconstructive feature on a celebrated mid-nineteenth century rural triple murder, I, Pierre Rivière… - and developed over a career that encompasses five cinema documentaries, is
Philibert's unique, sensitive and rewarding way of looking at the world. His cinema is notable for its discreet, observant and cinematically rich insights and is devoid of the didactic and overemphatic tendencies that can overwhelm the work of some of his contemporaries.

« l am a bit of an anti-Michael Moore, » the director says of politics in cinema. « For me, the political dimension comes in trying to give something to people to think about. And not, as Michael Moore does, to think for people. Am I to tell people what to think ? I try to give them some material, a basis on which they can think for themselves. »

Talking the morning after a Q&A in London, the 57-year-old director is still slightly stung by a questioner's attribution of nostalgia to Être et Avoir . « That film is not nostalgic for a rural school, » he says. « I chose to film at such a school because of what interests me and that's political; it was the mixture of age groups in that class. The old ones help the little ones. » With the children and their teachers, he perceived a paradigm: « You have to be autonomous and, at
the same time, work with others. That's how we learn to live together ».

You could say that this interest in how people live together - or are made to live apart -has been paramount in Philibert's work. As his absorbing, 1987 portrait of mountaineer Christophe Profit for Trilogy For One Man understands the human need for solitude, for instance, so his interest in work helps humanise a forbidding institution in Louvre City (1990). Likewise, his sensitivity to his subjects qualifies the separation felt by the hearing-impaired who feature in In the Land of the Deaf (1992).

« Maybe Back to Normandy is particularly different to my other films - friends have even said it's a self-portrait, » continues Philibert. « But what it has in common with the others is that when I shoot, I prepare as little as possible. When I started this shoot, I knew I could meet four of the original actors again. I also knew I wanted to use Rivière's text, his diaries, and that I would use voiceover, that I would go to the jail after the courtroom, etcetera. But the ideas come when shooting, and I love that. The fact that we are inventing a film little by little. »

This sense of spontaneity is astonishing given how much of Back to Normandy’s richness comes from Philibert's deft - and sublimely edited - interweaving of information. Allio's original film was made possible by philosopher-historian Michel Foucault's exploratory account of the Rivière case and the wide-ranging documents he assembled and deposited in the IMEC foundation in Caen - including Rivière's « dazzlingly beautiful » memoir explaining his sad
and tragic deeds - extracts and examples of which Philibert includes.

« There's a very beautiful sentence in the notebooks of René Allio, » explains the director, « and I cite it because it means something deep to me. It's a mirror on my own work. "We must make a film," he says, "to express as best as possible the world in artistic and poetic terms what I write here, or say so often. Namely my deep desire to save from oblivion those vibrant, intense, beautiful moments of all these lives of those... who leave no trace and yet who display
skill, imagination, bravery, invention and love in order to simply exist, to go on existing or to change, or simply to endure." »

There's a spiritual dimension to how Philibert honours the fruits of his close attention - how small keys can unlock large doors. But his work is distinguished too by a wonder at the world. There's a delightful shock and surprise, for instance, in the surrealism and sympathy he shows in the studies of the stuffed menagerie in Animals (1996). « l was like a child with animals, » he enthuses. « I felt a sort of astonishment... I wanted to turn my back on documentary when it can be too serious and boring and give it a sort of fun dimension, a dream-like direction ».

 

Back to Normandy touches on broad themes - the relationship of the peasant with his/her past, how past actions are transformed in memory, the strange contingencies of human relations, the interactions of cinema with real life - but this sense of play is never lost. The film opens with a shot of cows traipsing across a yard. « Yes, they seem to be on high heels, don't they ? I'm not somebody who has an optimistic vision of the world. But I've tried to hang on to things that make me smile or have a bit of laughter in them. »

Monsieur « Etre et Avoir » returns to his roots  by Wendy Ide

The Times  - January 17, 2008

 

The documentary-maker Nicolas Philibert has emerged from the lawsuits of his village-school blockbuster to find calmer waters in a work about his debut in films, he tell.

 

 In 2003, a gentle documentary about a single-room school in rural France broke all the rules that usually consign factual film-making to a box-office backwater. It says a lot about the impact of Être et Avoir that even now, while promoting his new film Back to Normandy, the director Nicolas Philibert (pictured) inevitably finds himself talking about the one before.

The success of Être et Avoir was all the more unexpected given its unfashionably organic, fly-on-thewall approach - a contrast to the hipper, slicker personality-driven documentaries of the likes of Michael Moore, whose Bowling for Columbine was doing the rounds at the same time. But this unassuming portrait of the small crises and triumphs in a classroom captured audiences in at least 40 countries and worked equally well in all of them.

To the utter bewilderment of its director, Être et Avoir  became a phenomenon, while the film's central character, Georges Lopez, the brusque teacher who singlehandedly ran the school, became idealised in the eyes of the audience.

Peering over his mournfully drooping moustache, Philibert explains at length how the unexpected sensation turned sour for him. The success of the film, he says, brought out the worst in the people. « I believe that [the film] was a beautiful portrait of the teacher. But I discovered that there was another man behind th e one that I had thought I had seen. It was hard. »

When the film started to take off, Philibert suggested to the teacher that he take part in the promotion of the film. « He was delighted with the idea. And we offered him some money at that time. This was for his work on the promotion side, not for his participation in the film. » But caught up in the momentum of audience responses and press interest, Lopez decided that he wanted considerably more money. « That's when we started to see lawyers appearing. »

Encouraged by his lawyer, Lopez mounted five separate court cases, each of which was dismissed by the judge. « He started by saying that he had not really given his authorisation. Or that he had agreed that the film could be made but not that it could be shown. He then started saying that he was co-author of the film. Then he claimed that by filming his lessons we owed royalties for his own intellectual property. Then he argued that he was also an actor in the film. »

Philibert adds wearily that, in addition to Lopez, the parents of the children also took him to court once. He estimates that Être et Avoir  and its aftermath has taken up more than five years of his life.

So it's perhaps not surprising that for his follow-up film Philibert has turned his camera back to a happier time in his career. At the age of 24 he took the job of first assistant director on René Allio's 1976 film, I, Pierre Rivière, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister and My Brother... This unique project was filmed in Normandy and based on a notorious local crime. Rather than use professionals, Allio cast his film from the local people in the area.

Philibert describes it as a challenging but profoundly rewarding experience. « I spent three months in the region, meeting and talking to loads of people. For me as a city person, it really was diving in. It was a world that I didn't know, that I viewed through clichés. And they also had clichés about us, the city people, as well. »

For his documentary, Philibert returned to the region, tracked down as many of the cast members as possible and encouraged them to share their memories of the making of the film. It soon becomes clear that the experience was as life-changing for many of them as it was for Philibert himself. The film has been described as a partial self-portrait and there's a shared intimacy between the film-maker and his subjects that lends an almost voyeuristic feel to the viewer. His aim was to record the words of these people who shared with him an intense period of collaboration but then went their separate ways. He also hoped to boost the profile of Allio, a director who is in danger of being forgotten.

With its intensely personal subject matter, its organic, meandering structure and its sudden, shocking images of animal husbandry, Back to Normandy is not likely to repeat the mainstream success of Être et Avoir . But then success is probably the last thing that Philibert would want to live through again. « Since the beginning I have made documentary films. If I had chosen to become a film-maker in order to drive a Ferrari, I would have chosen a different field of cinema. »

 

 

 

 

 

Returning to the Scene of a Crime Movie by Jeannette Catsoulis

The New York Times  - July 25, 2008

 

More than 30 years ago the French filmmaker Nicolas Philibert began his career as an assistant director on René Allio’s true-crime drama I, Pierre Rivière, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister and My Brother... Adapted from Michel Foucault’s celebrated account (based on the killer’s jailhouse confession) of a young Norman peasant who in 1835 used a billhook to commit triple murder, the movie was filmed only a few miles from the crime scene, mainly with local residents.

In Back to Normandy, Mr. Philibert returns to the region to catch up with the cast and relive an experience that was pivotal in forging his artistic identity. But he has more in mind than an indulgence of nostalgia. As he chats with the families whose lives were briefly touched by the arcane disruptions of moviemaking, his visit yields a palimpsest of observations on work, rationality and the ineluctable connections between history and modernity.

As though to emphasize this, the movie opens with the bloody birth of a piglet and the traditional, hard-to-watch cruelties — snipping, injecting, slapping — that accompany it. The animal’s frantic squeals are uncomfortably echoed in a segment of the murder scene from “I, Pierre,” one of a number of clips that serve as a bridge between the two films and the villagers’ dual roles as actors and interviewees.

Structured around a series of relaxed, lighthearted conversations (most of which take place outdoors), Back to Normandy has a bucolic placidity that grounds the film in the lulling rhythms of country life and the daily chores of farming and animal husbandry. At times not much appears to be happening, until you realize that the director’s sidelong, subtle approach has teased out modern-day parallels to the issues that surrounded the Rivière case.

Charles and Annie Lihou speak movingly of the impact of their daughter’s schizophrenia on the rest of the family (Pierre Rivière’s trial was one of the earliest examples of psychiatry’s rocky relationship with the law). Annick Bisson — who, as a 16-year-old, played the luckier of the killer’s two sisters — now works with mentally handicapped adults.

Though rooted in 19th-century tragedy, Back to Normandy is an overwhelmingly cheerful film (the merry Borel family views its patriarch’s thespian adventure as nothing short of hilarious) that explores the frustrations of filmmaking alongside its impact on an isolated community. Admirers of To Be and to Have, Mr. Philibert’s delightful study of a rural schoolteacher, may find his elliptical style less engrossing this time out, but from bloody start to poignant end, Back to Normandy is never less than an extraordinary journey through time, memory and the repercussions of a baffling, bygone crime.

 

Opens on Friday, July 25, 2008 in Manhattan. Released by Kino International. At Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Avenue at Second Street, East Village. 

 

Self-portrait of Nicolas Philibert as a filmmaker by Isabelle Régnier

Le Monde – May 25, 2007

 

What is the cinema? This open, vast and demanding question sums up the essence of Nicholas Philibert’s Retour en Normandie better than any synopsis. After Être et avoir (To Be and To Have, 2002), focused on its tiny classroom, this new film, spread out over time and space, is impossible to relate, except in fragments.

One can say that it’s a documentary. That it revolves around another film, René Allio’s I, Pierre Rivière, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister and My Brother..., on which Nicolas Philibert worked as first assistant director thirty years ago.  One can say that it is consistently surprising without ever being disturbing and that, as a direct descendant of the previous film, it pierces some astonishing holes in time. And that it is a dazzling meteorite in the Cannes 2007 harvest.

The origins of Retour en Normandie lie in Philibert’s desire to return to the locations of Allio’s film on which he took his first steps in the cinema, in order to see the people that he had convinced at the time to become actors, to find out what has become of them and to see what memories they have of the film. He also wanted to remind audiences of the specificity of that film: a period fiction work, performed by local farmers and adapted from a collective work edited by Michel Foucault on the “case” of Pierre Rivière.

In Normandy, in the 19th century, this young man killed his mother, his sister and his brother before being sentenced to death and then pardoned. He ended up committing suicide, but not before leaving the world a poignant manuscript outlining the reasons that led him to commit this triple murder. The approach recalls that of Hervé Le Roux who, in his fine film Reprise, set off in 1995 to find a woman he had seen in a short film dating from 1968 on the return to work at the Wonder factory. But the aim of Retour en Normandie is both much vaster and more intimate because, through this multi-layered story, Nicolas Philibert provides us with nothing less than his own self-portrait as a filmmaker.

The heart of the film beats at several different speeds and takes in the history of ideas, social struggles and the peasantry, along with that of madness and the cinema. The former actors in the film have returned to their “normal” lives but their stories all strike a chord with René Allio’s film. Retour en Normandie opens on a farmer assisting the birth of a litter of piglets, one of which he brings out of a coma; a woman works in a centre for mentally handicapped adults; a couple talks about the way in which their daughter sank into psychosis; a militant anti-global baker’s wife struggles against aphasia... Not one of them has performed in another film since then, except for Claude Hébert who played Pierre Rivière and who, after a brief but promising career, vanished without a trace. Like a gaping hole in the film, his absence gradually creates genuine s.uspense

Between interviews, the director roams around. He visits the library that holds René Allio’s archives, reads extracts from his diary in voice-over, goes to the prison where Pierre Rivière took his life, follows a procession of anti-nuclear demonstrators and calls in at the Éclair film laboratory whose existence has been under threat since its acquisition by a pension fund.

While giving a continual impression of being sidetracked, the filmmaker builds up a moving and poetic work that is clearly focused in spite of its kaleidoscopic nature. Slender threads run from one section to another. They are called utopia, commitment, art, marginality, humanism or ethics and originate in Allio’s film before irrigating Philibert’s.

In laying claim to this legacy, but also to that of his father, who occupies the last frame of Retour en Normandie, Nicolas Philibert sketches out a reply to the question “What is the cinema?” It could be a story of inheritance, of lone creators and collective creation, of the seizing of a breath of life. A mild form of madness.

Looking at the world to reconstruct it

Cahiers du cinema / Spain n° 3 – july/august 2007

Excerpt from Carlos Reviriego’s interview “Nicolas Philibert - Mirar el mundo para reconstruirlo” (Nicolas Philibert - Looking at the world to reconstruct it), published in Les Cahiers du Cinema/Spain, July-August 2007.

 

After Être et Avoir (To be and to have), which was so successful, how did you come up with such a different project as Retour en Normandie (Back to Normandy)?

After the success of Être et Avoir, I was looking for something to take me back to my sources, to my roots. The filming of Moi, Pierre Rivière... was a fundamental experience in my life. In 1975, I worked as assistant under the director René Allio filming a feature-length fiction film based on a true story which took place in the French countryside in 1835. A young farmer killed his mother, sister and brother, and fled, hid in the woods for a month before getting caught and, then in prison, asked for paper and ink. The lad who everyone took for an illiterate halfwit started to write an extremely long, magnificent, highly surprising text revealing not just an extraordinary memory, but also lucidity. While working in 1972 on the relationship between Justice and the principles of Psychiatry, the philosopher Michel Foucault discovered the text and published it together with all the files from the trial. [The book has been translated into Spanish, Yo, Pierre Riviere, que he degollado a mi madre, mi hermana y mi hermano... (Tusquets)]. When Allio made the film, he sought out Normandy farmers to play some of the main roles, including that of Pierre Rivière himself. Thirty years later, I decided to go back to the scene of the crime to seek out these “actors”, find out what they had been up to since and shoot a film with them.

Why was the shooting of  Moi, Pierre Rivière... so important to you?

It was one of the most intense experiences I have ever had; a human adventure. Back then, the idea of giving the leading roles in a film to non-actors, to country folk, was a fairly unique decision, unheard of in French film. I travelled around Normandy with my friend Gérard Mordillat in search of people who fitted the characters and were prepared to take part in the film. Those encounters were incredible. It was a thrilling, but difficult and uncomfortable experience… three weeks prior to shooting, we still didn’t know if there was enough money to make the film or not. Shooting was hard work too. Allio did not expect any less of his country actors than he would of professionals. He made similar demands of them. He wanted them to work as professionals even though they weren't. And so, in the group we all formed, we never felt any kind of division between the film crew and the farmers. We were all living the same project. With the benefit of hindsight, I have been able to gauge the importance of this film in my life. It has never left me and, without doubt, runs like an underground river through my own work. Maybe because, to a certain extent, it approaches that duality between fiction and non-fiction which I was talking about earlier.

Retour en Normandie is the first of your films in which you openly speak. You thread the plot. What limitations and possibilities does such personal involvement imply?

I don’t use voiceovers very much, and ones of my own voice even less, but in this case, it was the logical thing to do because it was about a film so deeply rooted in my own personal memory. Despite speaking about quite personal matters, I didn’t hold myself back. I don’t like bragging about or exposing my private life. You ask about limitations, but the truth is that I felt I had total freedom in creative terms. Both in terms of tackling matter and approaching a subject so different from anything I had done before. You never want to resemble yourself, you want to get away from what you’ve done before and try out unbeaten paths. If there was unity of time and place in my previous films, then this time I took up position in three periods of time.

It’s true that  Retour en Normandie breaks the distance with which you have always portrayed reality. But there is obvious continuity of your previous work in the subjects dealt with…

I can’t deny it. It looks like a film by another director, but if you dig a little deeper, then you’ll find that it has a lot in common with La Voix de son maitre (His master’s voice) (1978), Le Pays des sourds (In the Land of the Deaf, 1992), with La Moindre de choses (Every little thing) (1996), with Être et Avoir (To be and to have). They all look into how individuals express themselves, communicate with others. I don’t understand where this obsession comes from, but, true enough, I return to language through the aphasic woman, Allio’s notebooks, Rivière’s writing, which I consider very important. Another obvious similarity is the portrayal of people in their working environment. I like filming people working…

Was it during editing that you decided to end the film with the scene of your late father, Michel Philibert?

It’s one of the images I added at the end, indeed. From the outset, I wanted to find one of the scenes from Moi, Pierre Rivière...  which had my father in it, but which were all cut out in the final edit. Of course, I didn’t know if I was going to find one and didn’t know where I could put one in my film. I didn’t find the scene until the final, final edit. I looked in La Cinémathèque française, in the Toulouse Film Archive, in the Swiss film Library... but there wasn’t a trace of the long version of the film, until finally, when I had given it up for lost, I asked at La Cinémathèque française again and, miraculously, it appeared. In fact, I already had a picture of my father taken during the shoot and, if I hadn’t found that scene, then maybe I would have used the photo. That brings us back to one of your earlier questions, about one’s reluctance to speak about oneself. On the one hand, I very much wanted to include that scene, but, then again, I was afraid of using something too personal in the film. It was a tough decision.

What made you decide to include it in the end?

The fact that the subject of fatherhood, of filiation, runs throughout the film. It is one of its main themes. The first person I visited was Joseph Leportier, who played Pierre Rivière’s father in Allio’s film. In fact, Pierre killed his mother and his brother and sister to protect his father. The father figure is present throughout the film, right from the moment I look back on René Allio, my filmmaking mentor, another father figure for me. Michel Philibert, my actual father, was the person who transmitted his love and enthusiasm for film to me. This film also talks about legacy, transmission, filiation, about what one generation gets from another.