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The Act of Seeing with Philippe Grandrieux's Eyes/By Haden Guest
THE DARING AND OFTEN TERRIfyingly dark films of French director Philippe Grandrieux represent one of today's very few vital and authentic attempts to expand narrative cinema into the realm of the experimental film. Although barely known in the U.S., where they have never been commercially released, Grandrieux's three fiction features - Sombre (98), La Vie nouvelle (02), and Un lac (08) - draw with extraordinary invention and inspiration from major currents within the postwar American avant-garde cinema. Cryptic fables about human frailty and savagery, these uncompromising films are driven by a restless search for a purely cinematic language. The unconventional avant-garde direction pursued by Grandrieux has made him a divisive figure and die frequent target of moralistic critiques diat claim his films to be unnecessarily extreme both in style and content. In particular, umbrage has been taken by French and North American critics alike, at the deliberately non-realist and highly stylized portraits of harrowing subjects in Grandrieux's first two films - a serial killer in Sombre and the war-ravaged former Yugoslavia in La Vie nouvelle. Such narrow critiques ignore die radical fusion of form and content that allows Grandrieux's films to engage far richer philosophical, ethical, and epistemologica! questions than are typically asked about the limits and possibilities of image and narrative in contemporary cinema.
The striking opening sequence of Grandrieux's debut feature, Sombre, immediately announced the bold amalgam of die mesmerizing and visceral that lies at the nervously palpitating heart of his cinema. The gliding, solitary passage of a station wagon along a remote mountain road that begins the film is rendered instantly strange, even sinister, by the camera's fixed, omnipresent position behind the car - a bravura reinvention of The Shining's opening - and the low, unexplained rumbling sound that accompanies it. The hypnotic tension of the moment, intensified by the swift fall of night, is suddenly shattered by a strident, shocking burst of human voices, the signal for an abrupt jump cut to a series of verité-style handheld shots of children shrieking in simultaneous delight and fear, some watching in rapturous fixity and others peeking cautiously between open fingers at what is later revealed to be a puppet show performed by...