Back to Normandy by Nicolas Philibert

Back to Normandy recounts the story of Pierre Rivière, a young peasant who cut the throats of his mother, his sister Victoire and his brother Jules on June 3rd 1835. Rivière explained his actions in his prison memoirs : he killed through the hand of God, because he believed that his father was being destroyed by the three other members of his family.

The investigation is interspersed with extracts from the 1975 feature film (on which Philibert himself worked) based upon this true story, I am Pierre Rivière, directed by René Allio. Through a cinematographic poetics, Nicolas Philibert plunges us into the almost polar construction of his film. Philibert mixes the mystery and murder with his will to find Allio’s old crew. He recalls the sequence of fateful events in parallel with his own literary and criminological research, in a kind of self-reflexive representation of his art.

His skills are varied : he does not limit himself to assembling images to serve the topic, but he is also able to show the aesthetic and intellectual advancement of each film. In an aesthetically neat documentary, he works on the sources and failings of his own research, cleverly exposing the keys to understanding its subject.

Ariane Beauvillard