2005 Philippe Grandrieux Philippe Grandrieux
A filmmaker is born, after twenty years of work with experimental video and documentary films (in 1981 he co-directed La Peinture cubiste with Thierry Kuntzel). If we were called upon to name those that have influenced his work, or rather the shadows that Sombre calls to mind, I can think of three, however impressive they may be: Antonioni, in the love scene next to the railroad track in L’Avventura, and in Aldo’s wanderings in Le Cri; Brakhage, in the artistic use of the landscape, the natural materials and the sense of an experi-mental body; and, of course, Cassavetes, for the work with the actors, the camera movements and the horizon of the body. In France, where film production has been invaded by the theme of the psychology and throes of adolescence, we apparently have not had a film as new and as forceful since Philippe Garrel’s L’Enfant secret.”
In Trafic n° 28, winter 1998
Philippe Grandrieux is passionate about inventing images full of life. Whether it be in documentary (where he began, with Retour à Sarajevo for example) or in fiction (with two brilliant films: Sombre and La Vie nouvelle), his images (together with the sounds that modulate with them) are in search of themselves, open to the perceptive, sensorial and psychic worlds that they aim to discover as they are being constructed. His wager is that the research they comprise is also a hope to remain at the height of the most extreme mutations and tearings apart of contemporary reality.