Philippe Grandrieux

The same year, the Tate Modern of London, along the retrospective "Paradise Now ! Essential French Avant-Garde cinema 1890-2008," played Putting Holes in Happiness, A New Life, The Late Season and an excerpt of Un Lac (A Lake), his latest movie, which was not completed back then.

Philippe Grandrieux (born 10 October 1954) is a French film director and screenwriter.

Grandrieux was born in Saint-Étienne.

He studied film at the INSAS (Institut National Supérieur des Arts du Spectacle) in Belgium.

He exhibited his first video work at Galerie Albert Baronian in Brussels.

In the 1980s, he worked in collaboration with the French Institut national de l'audiovisuel (INA) and the television channel La Sept/Arte where he helped develop new cinematographic forms and formats that challenged basic principles of film writing, for instance, the conventions behind documentary, information and film essays.

In 1990, he created the film research lab “Live” which produced one-hour-long sequences by Thierry Kuntzel, Robert Kramer and Robert Frank.

Since 2005, programs devoted to Grandrieux's features (including Sombre, La Vie nouvelle, Un lac, and Malgré la nuit), installations, documentary work and shorts have been presented across the world.

Léo Scheer, février 2005.

With texts from – Jonathan Rosenbaum, Raymond Bellour, Nicole Brenez, Sothean Nhieim, Fabien Gaffez, Serge Kaganski, Augustin Gimel, Lionel Soukaz, Adrian Martin, Vincent Amiel, Peter Tscherkassky... This book including a DVD of La Vie nouvelle.

The psychanalist Jean-Claude Polack declares about Grandrieux's movies that they “carefully try to understand the exact inner-working of one's psychic, and more especially the part that deals with desire and transformation.

How does desire work?

What are the elements that this energy-matter is using to expand its empire?

What are the social repressions that desire has to face?

Unlike Pasolini who is really interested in the way that society is theatrically transforming the ceremony of predating into a show, there is here an experimental cinema; it is true; that is trying to register, thanks to the camera, what humans eyes would never be able to see in order to deconstruct and analyze reality.

Grandrieux's films are analytical films, like a microscope, that give the viewer the possibility to see more accurately what is movement, emotion, sensation, colour, darkness and the emergence of the image (either material or thought).

What is the process that enables something to become an image in the dark?

Why can this process only be seen as a threat?”

In 2006, Grandrieux appeared in Sarah Bertrand's documentary There is no direction.

In 2007, the singer Marilyn Manson, who admits having seen La Vie nouvelle several times, asked Grandrieux to direct his video-clip for his song Putting Holes in Happiness that belongs to the album Eat Me, Drink Me.

In 2008, Japan paid homage to Grandrieux's work, thanks to the French Embassy, in the famous Uplink movie theater of Tokyo, under the title "Extreme Love - around Philippe Grandrieux".

Un Lac, was ready for the 65th Venice Film Festival (2008) where he won a Special Mention in the Orrizzonti Section which rewards movies that initiate new cinematographic trends.

In 2011, his documentary It May Be That Beauty Has Strengthened Our Resolve - Masao Adachi (PG co-author of the project with Nicole Brenez) has been programmed in more than 35 festivals... and was awarded at: CPH:DOX Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival / Denmark.

The NEW:VISION AWARD that aims at promoting the experimental documentary in the field between documentary and art was given to Philippe Grandrieux's documentary about the Japanese filmmaker Masao Adachi.

In 2012 and 2013, Grandrieux was a visiting professor of fiction film at Harvard University.

In 2022, Philippe Grandrieux wrote Marcus, the screenplay for his next feature film, in collaboration with Jonathan Littell.

The premiere of his staging of the opera Tristan and Isolde took place in March 2023 at Opera Ballet Vlaanderen in Ghent.

Grandrieux's work covers several cinematographic fields – TV experimentation, video art, research movie, film essay, documentary and museum exhibition.

His uncompromised vision of Art, leads him to push the boundaries of the cinematographic fields he is working on.

As a consequence, he is always producing an inventive and radical cinema.

His full-feature movies, Sombre (Special Jury Prize at the Locarno Film Festival), La Vie Nouvelle (A New Life), Un Lac (Orizzonti - Special Jury Prize in Venice) and Malgré la nuit, are examples of Grandrieux's creativity in photography, sound and narration.

Grandrieux's films, deriving from horror movies and experimental movies, give the viewer intense sensorial experiences.

His goal is to make the viewer psychologically involved in his movies.

Its films actually express a whole world of energies based on sensations and affects despite a linear narration and an iconography that relies on archetypes that refer to the archaic images of the fairy tale and the legend.

Tim Palmer situates Grandrieux's work within an ongoing tendency of a cinema of the body, linked to other filmmakers such as Marina de Van, Diane Bertrand, Damien Odoul.

For his soundtrack, he worked with Alan Vega (on Sombre), with the musicians, poets and performers of the band Etant Donnés (on A New Life) and with Ferdinand Grandrieux (on Malgré la nuit).

The American actor Zachary Knighton played the main character with Anna Mouglalis.

The writer Eric Vuillard also participated in the writing of the script of A New Life.

A part of the email exchange between Grandrieux and Vuillard about the script has been published in the French film review Trafic.

Published also: "La Vie nouvelle/nouvelle Vision, à propos d'un film de Philippe Grandrieux," under the direction of Nicole Brenez, Paris, Ed.