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Philippe Grandrieux: l'au-dela des visages.

Article Excerpt
PHILIPPE GRANDRIEUX THE REAL BEYOND THE FACES

Rarely has a filmmaker had such a disconcerting effect as Philippe Grandrieux. And yet, ever since its classical period, film fictions have confronted us with scenes of violence that have divided the critics on questions of morality: should violence be represented or not? Can the representation of violence be minimized through the exercise of propriety, through elision and off-camera effects? Or are there cases in which, on the contrary, violence must be shown by avoiding any montage effect, a problem dear to André Bazin?

There is something profoundly new about Grandrieux's plastic exploration of violence, but also something very contemporary. His approach is not based on such editing and framing effects one finds and admires in Hitchcock and Ray, nor in an exploration of excess as in Tarantino. He works on the inside of an image, on the special relation between the luminous content and the vibrant and fragmentary representation. Grandrieux may "tell" the story of a serial killer in Sombre (1999), but the violence is both removed from the story and heightened: it descends with its hero into the dark, in scenes of a carved-up female body, captured with a hand-held 35mm camera. As Raymond Bellour observes in his eulogy and lively defence of the film, "Pour Sombre" (1):

[the camera places us] among the bodies, into situations of unmitigated suffering, in order to confront us, despite the brutality of the acts, with ambiguous content, in a constantly disrupted fusion.

In his second fiction film La Vie nouvelle ("A New Life" 2002) Grandrieux immediately situates the original violence in a different kind of context. He is not preoccupied with abandoning the classical system of shot/reverse shot in order to conjure up the unspeakable. This film redirects us by subterranean means--in images suggesting memories (of things recorded on film)--towards another scene, towards a collective trauma, that of a recent, unresolved war, which is referred to only briefly in a passing phrase. We only know that we are in a East European city, a strange gathering place for all sorts of mercenaries and foreign soldiers in search of pleasure.

How can La Vie nouvelle incite so much reaction with such an enigmatic story, a story that disrupts its own narrative? Centred on the adventures of bodies, which are presented as elementary, disconnected, and resistant to...

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