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Tartan Video
Posted: March 28th, 2008.
Based on documents compiled by leading French philosopher Michel Foucault, this unique and original film charts the gruesomeevents which took place in a Normandy village in 1835, when a young man, Pierre Rivière, murdered his mother, sister andbrother before fleeing to the countryside. With a cast made up of real-life villagers from the area where the events tookplace, the detailed re-enactments and careful attention to the gestures of their ancestors serve to create an intenseand sometimes disturbing atmosphere of hyper-realism.
Details of the crime and of the trial that followed are told from varied perspectives, including the written confession ofPierre himself, and form a rich and complex narrative that interrogates the concepts of ‘truth’ and ‘history’. Radical,bold and uncompromising, director René Allio’s extraordinary work (which is itself the subject of the documentary Back toNormandy by Nicolas Philibert, who served as Allio’s assistant) is at one and the same time an ethnographic enquiry, anhistorical reconstruction, and an unflinching portrait of psychopathology and its aftermath.
The DVD is out now and retails for £19.99, but is currently on Amazon at the link above for £14.99.
News page content input by Dominic Robinson, 2008.
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.