Longtemps, ce regard

Scattered memories of bygone years in my village, where friendships, a working-class daily life, wanderings and flat fields are celebrated during a poetic and political journey.

Pierre Tonachella does not only make films to revisit the places where he grew up, in the Essonne, south of Paris, but also to uncover in the labour of filmmaking a raison d’être equal to the work of the friends who stayed behind. One of four literary excerpts quoted during the film, all treading a line between the poetic and the political, a fragment from one of Schiller’s letters frames the journey home as a possible compass for aesthetic education. In contrast to sterile nostalgia, this compass both indicates a path forward and a way of remaining true to early beginnings. Following a film dedicated to Tonachella’s friend, the poet Théophile Cherbuin, And Always, That Look… circles back to the collective and collaborative form of Until the Dawning of the Day (featured at Cinéma du Réel in 2018). Throughout the film, familiar faces crop up without introduction, in a series of staged or unstaged situations that bring shared memories into play. Meanwhile, the vacant space carved out by the biographical narrative is filled with words from other times and places. The celebration of friendship, the intimate attachment to a place, and the documentary depiction of the present-day rural proletariat coalesce in a vision that is at once open and alert, sharp and free-floating. Closer to the early works of Guiraudie or Creton than to the films of Bruno Dumont, this vision resonates with the words of Mahmoud Darwish: “The power of poetry lies in the fact that there is no definitive poem. The horizon is open. The path to poetry is poetry. There is no last station, not even God. (…) If we knew what that poem was, we would write it, and that would be the end of it.”

Antoine Thirion