Philippe Grandrieux: An American Cinematheque Retrospective

ABOUT THE SERIES:

The American Cinematheque is honored to welcome the legendary, boundary-pushing French filmmaker Philippe Grandrieux for the first-ever retrospective of his work in Los Angeles. Grandrieux joins us to discuss his four feature films, SOMBRE (L.A. Premiere), LA VIE NOUVELLE (L.A. Premiere), UN LAC and MALGRÉ LA NUIT as part of the fourth edition of ‘Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair.’ Emerging from the New French Extremity movement alongside Claire Denis and Bruno Dumont, Grandrieux’s work offers an unflinching, utterly singular view of human desire and depravity. Straddling the boundary between narrative and experimental, the arthouse and the art gallery, and agony and ecstasy, Grandrieux’s films are hallmarks of the 21st-century cinema of transgression.

A doomed romance (SOMBRE); an American’s foolish attempt to save a foreign sex worker (LA VIE NOUVELLE); a mysterious outsider’s intrusion into a hermetic community (UN LAC); a man’s descent to Hell to rescue a lost love (MALGRÉ LA NUIT): each of Grandrieux’s films begin with the purity and simplicity of a fairy tale. But the eternal forces of violence, sex and death intercede, gridlock and complicate.

Often operating the camera himself and utilizing ultra-low light, an innate sense of dread permeates every frame of SOMBRE and LA VIE NOUVELLE. Only in Grandrieux’s world do beautiful landscapes or unadorned interiors take on an overwhelmingly sinister quality. UN LAC represents a foray into brightness with snowy enclaves blown out by shaky, handheld cinematography. MALGRÉ LA NUIT utilizes fluid, dream-like camera movement, akin to Terrence Malick’s late work, implementing flourishes honed through his robust fine art practice, with harsh, blinding light trained on bodies in embrace.

Heavily influenced by philosophy, the writings of Artaud, Bataille, and Giorgio Agamben structure Grandrieux’s interrogation of subjectivity, the abject and the complex negotiations of power one conducts with one’s self, others and the state. Grandrieux’s films have been praised for their intellectual rigor, winning prizes at film festivals in Locarno and Venice and earning the filmmaker a teaching post at Harvard. But Philippe Grandrieux’s cinema is ultimately a cinema of the flesh – breathtakingly visceral, granular in its attention to corporeal detail and wired to provoke extreme sensory reactions. Gravely underappreciated stateside and abroad, see for yourself the films that have made fans of Denis Villeneuve, Brady Corbet and other contemporary masters.