I, Pierre Rivière, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister And My Brother
René Allois 1975
I was struck by a series of images when watching this last night,
especially considering the way the filmmaker had split them up and
repeated them, utilising the same actions and objects through different
cinematic techniques. In fact, this is mentioned in passing in Gilles
Deleuze’s book on Michel Foucault (Foucault having written at length on
the Rivière case), as an example of productive
disjunctions between image and text. Deleuze makes reference to the
opening shots of a tree embedded in a boundary fence, which is combined
with shuffling noises from an adjourning or commencing court session.
Deleuze highlights the problems in dealing with the discrepancies
between Rivière’s lucid and precise written (and
spoken) account of the story and his actions as dramatised by the actors
on screen – or, as both Deleuze and Foucault put it, between what is seen and what is articulated.
Allois deals with this disjunction in interesting ways – not just in
using voice-over, but repetitions of action – for example when Pierre is
seen writing in his prison cell, his voice-over recounting that he was
disturbed in his previous attempts to write out his experiences, he
jumps up from his chair, sure that someone is behind him. The film
immediately cuts to the ‘original’ version of that gesture, Pierre
writing at a desk in the attic as his sister sneaks up behind him, his
renewed (and recounted) startled jump and turn – an action efficiently
doubled, even emanating from the same area of the frame. Allois also
inserts still images, both from his own film and historical
drawings, engravings and images from painting. Beyond these techniques,
there is also an intereting correlation to reenactment, as the farmers
are played by farmers, peasants are played by peasants, the only
professional actors playing ‘outsider’ characters, in order to preserve
the genuine discrepancies between two broad sensibilities and
assumptions, which may or may not be upheld. In fact the whole film
rests on this multi-faceted positioning, always showing a few slants on
the same incidents, feeding in the context of an individual voice, a
different physical or imagined perspective.
In nay case, I was struck by the references in Pierre’s extraordinary
written confession/explanation/description – a discourse that Foucault
views as so extraordinary as to make the crime disappear – to a machine
he had constructed for killing birds. I wondered whether it would be
productive to think about this structure as an apparatus – if, the
apparatus would be, as Giorgio Agamben describes it, “literally anything
that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine,
intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions,
or discourses of living beings,” Pierre’s invention of new implements
signals a desire to manufacture situations and to capture them – a
device for controlling something he cannot control. Yet, this makes one
wonder about the gesture of burying the apparatus – to preserve
it, to keep it safe, as if this might imply a kind of deferral or
abandonment of control. An exhumed apparatus, perhaps aged, is one that is doubled reclaimed.
I also wondered about such an implement’s relation to writing – the
isolation of objects through a process of naming; its killing capacity
and its torturous look… it made me think of Kafka’s apparatus, the
Calipen (oh… pen? calipers?) including components named ‘Bed’,
‘Designer’ and ‘Harrow’.
