Nicole 6

Brenez

The Body’s Night

An Interview with Philippe Grandrieux
Philippe Grandrieux is the director of invent other textures, forge other descrip- Nicole Brenez: You’re happy
numerous documentary-essays and two fea- tive paths, employ instruments other than with your new film, La Vie nouvelle?
tures, Sombre (1999) and La Vie nouvelle language and its normative links. Philippe Grandrieux: Yes,
(2002). These two features constitute the Such an exploration, however, very happy. It was made in such a
most advanced point of cinematic research, should not be opposed either to reason or dazzled state of perception, and to
representing for today what the films of logic—that would be unreasonable and see that projected and recaptured
Jean Epstein were for the 1920s and ’30s or irresponsible, to neglect, forget and even gives me great joy.
Philippe Garrel’s were for the ’70s and ’80s. foreclose what a century of Freudian anal- Brenez: You’ve invented an
Where does such an exigency come from? ysis has taught us about the psyche, to unprecedented way of working. The
What horizon of cinema does it open? continue to tell our little stories of action/ experience involves accomplishing
The exigency comes from a radical reaction as if oblivious to the panic and the all levels of creation at the same time.
position, a dynamic that seeks to return to mysteries which we live. Like the films of Can you describe how La Vie nouvelle
the most profound and obscure sources of Epstein and Garrel (but also Tod Browning was made?
representational desire. Why make images? and Jean Vigo), Grandrieux’s tell no story. Grandrieux: Since the
What purpose do they serve? What real On the basis of a narrative schema they very first sensations, the very first
necessity can animate them? Grandrieux’s invent a mode of elaboration—of perlabo- ideas, the writer Eric Vuillard4 and
work confronts precisely these questions. ration, even—susceptible of acceding to the I worked by mail, constantly corre-
There exists a need for images, and the Id, that grand reservoir of drives which, in sponding until the end. In the course
cinema can measure it. In the history of the thermally-photographed underground of the film’s genesis, Eric travelled
representations, this need has usually been scene near the end of La Vie nouvelle, sud- half the world—he fled, by train, by
considered in terms of the sacred, or power, denly finds an infernal figuration worthy of bus, from Moscow to Peking, then to
or collective symptom (the zeitgeist). But El Greco or Dante. South America … he needed to move
Grandrieux has another answer: To confront the unknowable, pre- around. So we were in permanent
cisely what we don’t want to know: because contact, but with much land and sea
What do we seek, since the first cinema is based upon the linking and between us—an immense physical
traces of hands impressed in rock unlinking of images, it can risk this. Noth- distance, but an intense proximity.
the long, hallucinated perambu- ing is nobler than to shatter a film upon Often we said that we should tear out
lation of men across time, what such an ambition, such belief, such confi- scenes on land.
do we try to reach so feverishly, dence: the cinema can manifest everything, Brenez: You’ve shown me
with such obstinacy and suffering, it can be vertiginous like a coma, pitiless a few pages of the script; they look
through representation, through like a Hobbes treatise, limpid like the spec- more like a prose poem than a stan-
images, if not to open the body’s trograph of a corpse. dard scenario.
night, its opaque mass, the flesh Such a groping journey into the Grandrieux: Yes. Eric
with which we think—and pres- unconscious (as Jean-Claude Polack worked very energetically. He looked
ent it to the light, to our faces, the explains well) takes the form of a night- after the writing, and his style excited
enigma of our lives.1 mare.2 But a collective nightmare, in no me a lot. My desire was sparked by
sense just some tiny, private reverie—part these fragmented phrases. They
Grandrieux’s reflection belongs to of the effective nightmare into which we didn’t directly give me images but
the body’s modernity—the modernity of have all been plunged since revolution- they gave me energy, the necessary
Sigmund Freud, Antonin Artaud, Gilles ary ideas revealed their non-viable charac- intensity to produce sensations.
Deleuze and Michel Foucault, to name ter and left the world without the slightest Brenez: What were your
only a few—and thus returns the anthro- hope, cast into a ruin not only material but starting points?
pological need for representation to a state also moral. Why? What’s happened? Why Grandrieux: Once, during a
of immanence. The image is no longer can’t people live together? Why is there journey to Sofia in Sarajevo, I saw a
given as a reflection, discourse, or the cur- this war of all against all, general exploita- young G.I. with a young prostitute in
rency of whatever absolute value; it works tion, ineluctable betrayals at the highest a hotel. Their youth fascinated me—
to invest immanence, using every type levels, and in the everyday a violence that intact despite the chaos and disaster
of sensation, drive and affect. To make occurs in every possible way to every pos- that reigned in Eastern Europe. I went
a film means descending, via the inter- sible person? home, spoke to Eric, and he went to
mittent pathways of neuronal connection, La Vie nouvelle offers an inventory Sofia for two or three days. So there
down into the most shadowy depths of our of the state of the human psyche at the turn was an extremely simple, basic nar-
sensory experiences, to the point of con- of the twenty-first century: hooked on sen- rative premise: a young man meets
fronting the sheer terror of the death drive timentality, dazed from unhappiness (“the a young woman (Anna Mouglalis as
(Sombre), or the still more immense and wars of the twentieth century and the twen- Mélania) and wants her for himself, in
bottomless terror of the unconscious, of tieth century as war,” as Czech philosopher an Orphic way. Little by little the film
total opacity (La Vie nouvelle). Jan Patocka wrote in his Heretical Essays 3), was constructed in terms of inten-
La Vie nouvelle explores all the devastated by lucidity like Pier Paolo Paso- sity—relations of intensity between
ways in which we fail to understand the lini’s Medea yelling at the burning house characters who could inhabit or
world: sleep, dream, fantasy, trance, delir- where her young children are dying: “Noth- haunt the film. For instance, we never
ium, the plunging of the main character ing is possible any longer!” All the same, exactly know whether Roscoe (Marc
(Seymour, played by Zach Knighton) into we absolutely cannot despair, since La Barbé) and Seymour are friends, or
the incomprehensible logic of the Mafia, Vie nouvelle exists, and since work of this father and son, or lovers… There’s
affective vertigo, the general confusion of quality shows us, despite everything, what the impression that everything is
bodies and perceptions. In order to grasp beauty, profound intelligence and gestures moving all the time, like a kind of
this ordinary, repressed dimension of of love the human spirit is still capable of. vibrant, disturbed materiology.
human experience, it is clear that we must That’s what we were looking
turn to completely different logics than for: a disquieting film, very disqui-
those of the usual discursive economies, eting, very fragile and vibrant. Not

Philippe Grandrieux, Sombre, 1998

a film like a tree, with a trunk and Grandrieux: No, there was Grandrieux: And the
branches, but like a field of sunflow- no plan. Every time, there was a travelling shot comes after a long
ers, a field of grass growing every- totality invested in the body, every sequence where a client strikes
where. Here’s the biggest rupture: moment of every scene was invested Mélania—after that, there’s a possi-
in the way the film was conceived. as if it were the last possible image. bility of understanding that in each
It was conceived and developed on Often I shot at such a frantic speed of these little windows the same
questions of intensity rather than that the crew couldn’t keep up with story is happening. Or maybe some
psychological relations. My dream is me. Sometimes the crew were stuck other story, but always this story
to create a completely “Spinoza-ist” in one place, so I went out on foot of what it is to be human, i.e. con-
film, built upon ethical categories: alone and kept filming. fronted with alterity, with the Other
rage, joy, pride … and essentially Brenez: There reigns in La who is infinitely possible and yet
each of these categories would be Vie nouvelle an avidity, not in the infinitely closed and inaccessible,
a pure block of sensations, passing sense of invidia but as an appetite— no matter what one does. And it’s
from one to the other with enormous an appetite not for things but for from there that one journeys, works,
suddenness. So the film would be a sensory phenomena. Now, in terms loves, fucks…
constant vibration of emotions and of sensory exploration, a particularly Brenez: Or survives, or not…
affects, and all that would reunite striking moment is the track-in, down Grandrieux: Or goes
us, reinscribe us into the material a hotel corridor and out a window, mad, and starts shooting people in
in which we’re formed: the percep- towards the urban landscape. It’s as if Washington…
tual material of our first years, our one were seeing a frame for the first Brenez: Or in Palestine. It’s
first moments, our childhood. Before time: the image opens up, the frame the human condition.
speech. That’s the impulse—the opens, then the screen, the the- Grandrieux: Yes, Eric and I
desire—which led to the film. atre, and finally us too, everything is worked with this theme. Eric sent me
Brenez: This intensity man- opened and we gaze wide-eyed into a very beautiful note where he sug-
ifests itself in (among other ways) a this most intensive clarity. Did you gested the film should be “a docu-
disjunction on the plastic level: each foresee this shot? mentary on the living.”
sequence is visually very different. Grandrieux: Yes. I knew Brenez: And rightly so,
Grandrieux: That comes since the location scouting in the because it strikes me that in both
from this sensation of something hotel’s corridors that I wanted this your films—totally so here—the basis
discontinuous, but at the same time sensation of opening, a very large of your work is the body, drives, the
gathered up in the same, uncon- opening onto the city, resulting from being-ness of things. Because you
scious force, the same drive that camera movement. possess this knowledge of cruelty,
brings together very disjointed Brenez: We really only grasp you are the only person who has won
events. It happens via fragments, at that moment the extent to which the right to reintegrate sentimentality.
blocks of pure sound and image La Vie nouvelle is a political film— This is at work in Sombre in the char-
events. One day I would like to make although, with the opening images of acter of Claire (Elina Löwensohn), but
a film where this process of fine frag- the people of Sarajevo, it’s there from in La Vie nouvelle it’s a question of
mentation would occur in a more the beginning. In Sombre, we only the relations between young people,
vigorous way, achieved not just at the realized it at the very end, with those and what allows you to depict them
level of the sequence but from one long travelling shots on the crowd at as angels. Sentimentality has proba-
shot to the next. the Tour de France. A political film on bly been the most taboo dimension
Brenez: But that’s already the material, not sociological state of of representation in modern cinema,
the case in La Vie nouvelle, with its the world… but you have finally reintegrated it,
art of kinetic match-cuts. Did you Grandrieux: …on what links because you situate yourself at the
plan these? us very intimately to chaos, to disas- antipodes of that which produces an
Grandrieux: Yes—blindly. ter. Which takes us to the question of effect of perfect, affective plenitude.
Brenez: Like relationships what it is to be human, this constant The first ensemble of sequences in
established not in a causal but a menace, a pressure so great that it the nightclub, divided in two by the
caused way, gradually? envelops us. angelic apparition, treats the two
Grandrieux: Yes, like in dif- Brenez: That landscape shot possible versions of a relation to the
ferential calculus, from one discrete seems entirely new in your cinema, body, the terrestrial and the celestial,
element to another discrete ele- and it is almost like a visual conden- like recto and verso.
ment. That’s why there is this con- sation of what has been written for Grandrieux: Yes, two faces
stant vibration of the film, because a century on disaster as the very of the same coin.
it comes from the structure. Those symbol of civilization. The urban Brenez: Or the same desire:
who reproach the film for its violence landscape represents what is famil- we only ever love a body according
want to know a reason for that. But iar in its pure state, except we have to this doubled, twisted relationship.
what kind of reason? It isn’t a ques- never also considered it at the same You manage to capture the totality of
tion that can be resolved on the level time catastrophic. It’s a little like desire in a single sequence, every-
of a social or psychological morality, the ruins in Roberto Rossellini’s thing appears and everything disap-
but a morality of forms. Germany Year Zero (1947), except pears, leaving us as abandoned and
Brenez: La Vie nouvelle is a that here there is no need for a unhappy as the character.
milestone for many reasons, nota- war—it’s daily war, it’s Europe. Grandrieux: Indeed, that’s
bly because it opens out the most Grandrieux: Yes, all that is the result …
extensive visual palette ever seen given in the truth of Sofia. Brenez: La Vie nouvelle is a
on screen, from the least identifiable Brenez: But it’s also the exac- film devoted to the inaccessible, but
blur to the most trenchant sharpness. erbation of any suburb in any city, at the same time it offers us every-
Was that planned, or did you discover any oppressive housing estate which thing. It is a film about abandonment,
these optical nuances, this entire drives people crazy with unhappi- but it never becomes melancholic,
kinetic vibration, in the physical act ness, which mutilates them and robs which would be the usual way of
of shooting? them of themselves. depicting loss.
 Grandrieux: There’s no mel- a “first look.” Instantly the whole like that, a scene in which the viewer
ancholy. The film was made under world is given, without anything too would understand virtually noth-
the sign of enormous heath, vital needing to be said, without any dis- ing. They would see bodies caught
energy, the blazing sun. That sur- cernible distance, no gap wedged. up in some kind of ritual to which we
passes desire, it is even more archaic A first look—of course this is a pure would have no access, whose codes
and formative; it comes from the sun phantasm—belonging to a child. are unknown. A very archaic ritual,
itself, from a star beyond us that we Everything’s there, all at once, a total- perhaps with glimpses of body parts,
aspire to, in a totally chaotic way. ity is seized. When I talk about vibra- something which would be happen-
This aspiration towards great energy tion, that’s what I’m trying to convey. ing and repeating weirdly. I wanted
and happiness, it infused the film, Brenez: So, a “first look” total night—to work in the deepest
which we made in a wild state of joy, which demands a “last image”! recesses of night.
six weeks of shooting like a single Of course, when I say last image, I Brenez: At the start of the
stroke, without a second thought mean that in the sense of an ultimate film, we are plunged into a state of
[arrière-pensée]. image, necessary from start to end. dread, corresponding to the scene
Brenez: Without “deeper Jean-Luc Godard said that he looks of the little, blind boy in Sombre.
motive” [pensée de derrière] either, for the first image, the matrix that So, straight away, you put your films
as Nietzsche would say.5 But you engenders all the other images. With into a grave state of peril. The pathic
mentioned blazing sunlight, while in you, it’s the last image, in the sense effects which follow are going to
the film there are no shots of the sun, that there is no other image possible. have to be much stronger than this
only darkness, twilight or dawn— Grandrieux: Yes, an image already terrifying opening scene. And
sometimes it’s hard to tell. that is totally absorbing—and devas- your films do manage to go much
Grandrieux: The sun tating when you find it. further than their initial set-ups—the
remains hidden, we never show Brenez: What is the pro- blind groping in Sombre or the horror
it. But it’s there as something we cess used in the thermic camera of La Vie nouvelle. Do you try to kick
chase, which dazzles and blinds us, sequence? Is the thermic footage off from an “emotional launch pad,”
which gives us an appetite to live. In printed in negative? where you indicate the tonality of the
this sense, there is no melancholic Grandrieux: No. The ther- whole piece and thus the tenor of our
temptation, nothing is truly lost, mic camera is used by the military, response to it?
everything is available immediately— but above all by engineers in order Grandrieux: An emotional
things can disappear but they aren’t to gauge the resistance of materi- launch pad, that’s what it is. It’s a
lost. It’s like a multiple look, which als. It records the different levels of sensation that has been researched,
never ceases to sweep up the pieces, temperature in a body. You can set but also forgotten. For example,
and proceeds without any nostalgia. the camera to record particular tem- after I’d started shooting this scene
Brenez: In the greatest peratures of your choice: for example of people in darkness, I altered the
affective films—Nicholas Ray’s, for if you set it between ten and eigh- thermic light level. But the image
example—the fusion not only of teen degrees, variations in tempera- still didn’t seem strong enough, so I
characters but also phenomena is ture will be indicated by variations in slowed down the speed and shot at
projected towards the horizon. But shades of grey. eight images per second. And this
in your work this fusion is already Brenez: But usually, thermic was when I felt it started to vibrate. I
given. Creatures can be separated, shots are in color? was far away and I moved up closer.
but something more profound links Grandrieux: Yes, and after- When we look for something in a
and keeps them together. wards you can alter the colors. But scene, there is an intense relation to
Grandrieux: It’s a vibrant the principle is that it is no longer forgetting: what you have to avoid at
presence. My perception of the film light which makes an impression. all costs is a simple execution of what
was physical and intimate, like for a With infrared photography, you must you’ve pre-planned.
shaman. I just had to be a conductor use an infrared light, a beaming light Brenez: You’re looking for
for the flux, the music, the rhythms— that illuminates the bodies, and the the physics of the scene.
the body exists to transmit all this. reflection of that registers on the Grandrieux: Yes, not its pre-
Brenez: We see this in the celluloid. But here, there is no light. given content. In this scene, it wasn’t
match cutting that whirls around It is the animal warmth of the bod- just a matter of filming people mov-
like a dervish, in the dance scene ies which imprints itself on the cel- ing around in darkness. The reason
between Boyan (Zsolt Nagy) and luloid. The scene was shot in total I film as I do is because if the scene
Mélania. Moreover, the anthropol- darkness; no one could see anything isn’t unmade, destroyed, attained or
ogists and filmmakers who have except me through the camera. All ruined during shooting, I experience
worked with shamans, like Raymonde the participants were in an absolute such depression, boredom and dis-
Carasco, tell us that for the shaman, blackout, and they moved around in a gust—it’s incredibly physical—that I
it’s a matter of transforming this deranged state. just can’t go on filming. For me, the
world into another, but in the most Brenez: How did you moment when it becomes possible to
precise way. Trance is often consid- direct them? shoot is the moment I am no longer
ered as a state of confusion, but in Grandrieux: There were a slave to order, to some necessity to
fact it’s the contrary—the access to a eighty people. I had built a labyrinth execute the scene. The totality of the
much clearer perception. inside the Fine Arts Gallery basement body, an entire affective framework,
Grandrieux: Yes, because at Sofia. I told everyone simply to enter must be engaged.
it’s the perception of the Real. The it. The noise they made was deafening; Brenez: It’s like that the
film is probably troublesome in this some of them were very scared. whole time?
regard, because it belongs on the Brenez: A bit like a collective Grandrieux: For La Vie
side neither of the Symbolic nor the performance piece? nouvelle, yes. If not, I didn’t shoot.
Imaginary. It’s created within the Grandrieux: Yes, that was Brenez: Were the actors able
framework of the Real, in the sense our idea from the outset. Eric and to follow you? Were they empathetic?
that it develops a perception of the I had worked on a project called A Grandrieux: Yes, they were all
world which is of an immediate order, Natural History of Evil which began impressive, the way they abandoned
 1
themselves to the film. It would have make films and, in the course of my Philippe Grandrieux,
been impossible to do it otherwise. studies at INSAS in Brussels, I discov- ‘Sur l'horizon insensé
Brenez: How did you ered three films a day, seeing things du cinéma’, Cahiers
du cinéma hors série:
work with Eric and Marc Hurtado that I had no idea existed. I remem- Le siècle du cinema
of the group Etant Donnés on the ber Moses and Aaron (1975) by Jean- (November 2000).
soundtrack? 6 Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet,
2
Grandrieux: I think their that was a blow, an aesthetic and Cf. Jean-Claude Polack,
films are magnificent, and we have political shock. I still recall it today. ‘La Forme Cauchemar’
a lot in common. All three of us have Suddenly—cinema. (“The Nightmare Form”),
worked with Alan Vega. They’d made Brenez: A reinvention of in Nicole Brenez (ed.), La
Vie nouvelle: nouvelle
a CD based on texts by Georg Trakl, of thought—not discourse, thought. vision (Paris: Editions Leo
whom I’m an absolute fan.7 A charac- Grandrieux: And what came Scheer, 2003).
ter in one of my film projects is named through bodies, fragmented bod-
3
Trakl. So, there was an enormous ies, legs, the extremely flat earth, the Jan Patocka (ed. James
connivance between us. I sent them sunlight at its zenith, the brutality of Dodd & trans. Erazim
a first draft of the script and asked the shots. All of that struck me. I was V. Kohak), Heretical
Essays in the Philosophy
them to compose the music based on motivated. My cinephilia has con- of History (Chicago:
what they read. They sent back three structed itself in a fragmentary way, Open Court Publishing
or four hours of music and sounds. but it’s not like there is cinema on one Company, 1996).
I shot the film with this material, it side, and literature and philosophy on
4
was played loudly on set. And it was the other. All of it is part of the same Eric Vuillard is the
also present all through editing, as a question, the same attentiveness, the author of the novels La
layering of sound, a sonic structure. same enterprise. Chasseur (Paris: Editions
Michalon, 1999) and Bois
Then, once Françoise and I had some Brenez: Exactly. When I vert (Paris: Editions Leo
things in place, Eric and Marc returned left a screening of your film, I said Scheer, 2002). He also
to Paris and we worked together for to myself: “At last, the equivalent in worked on the crew of
Sombre.
fifteen days. During this time every- images of Jean Epstein’s great texts.”
thing was recomposed in a very Epstein is the one whose thought on 5
precise way, scene by scene, on the what cinema can be and do went fur- This sense of the term
one hand retaining some of the ini- thest—I mean in terms of completely pensée de derrière
derives from Pascal:
tial sounds, on the other hand finding reorganising our categories, in partic- “One must have deeper
new ones… The sound editor, Valérie ular our perceptual categories. And motives and judge
Deloof, is terrific. A sound design or his final texts, highly political, are as everything accordingly,
but go on talking like an
sonic sculpture is constructed using remarkable as they are unknown. For ordinary person.” From
direct sounds, sound effects, ambient me, La Vie nouvelle is the first film A.J. Krailsheimer (ed. &
sounds, and the sounds provided by shot inside the human body—not only trans.), Pensées (London:
Penguin, 1972), p. 53.
Etant Donnés. As they composed, we physiologically, but also in the sense
mixed almost immediately in order to of showing everything that dwells 6
judge the form being created. They within us. I know of no other film- Etant Donnés comprises
would re-listen, change certain ele- maker who has attempted this, apart Eric and Marc Hurtado,
who are collaborative
ments… They were unbelievable, fan- from Epstein in his writings. musicians, filmmakers,
tastically generous. They came with Grandrieux: Well, Epstein is poets and performers.
their sounds, their sonic space, and fantastic. I remember his text recol-
7
they gave it to the film. lecting Trieste, a grand hotel where he Georg Trakl (1887-
Brenez: Ultimately, the came across a screen, deckchairs … 1914) was an Austrian
work doesn’t resemble their own the light faded, the projector began, Expressionist poet. His
work is collected in Daniel
soundtracks. They have entered into and the chairs started trembling… The Simko (trans.), Autumn
your universe, even if they too deal image trembled, everything trembled, Sonata: Selected Poems
with intensity… What does the film’s he was under the impression that the of Georg Trakl (Kingston:
final scream express? trembling of the images had spread to Moyer Bell, 1989).

Grandrieux: A devastation, the hall. In fact, it was an earthquake!

but also perhaps a rebirth. There it is, That’s great. It’s terrific that cinema
the “new life.” can have a place within experiences
Brenez: Like Sombre, La Vie that are so concrete, so physical—
nouvelle is traversed by flashes, by in the presence of a body, this mass
certain high moments of cinema—not through which things are thought.
at all in terms of influences or repro-
ductions, but all the same you connect
with certain images.
Grandrieux: You film with a
history behind you. It’s hard to film as
if Dreyer, Murnau and Lang had never
existed. But I never think of anteced- Interview recorded 23 October, 2002.
ents as I film a shot; I couldn’t. I don’t Translated by Adrian Martin
have a cinephile background. My
cinematic culture was formed late. This interview was first published in
When I was eighteen, nineteen, I’d Rouge 1 (2003). All 13 issues of Rouge
only seen regular films like The Guns (2003-2009) can be accessed online
of Navarone (1961)—which, by the at www.rouge.com.au. Courtesy of
way, I liked a lot! But I had an urge to Adrian Martin.
Philippe Grandrieux, La Vie nouvelle, 2002