With a Russian cast, minimal French dialogue, and geographically ambiguous setting, Philippe Grandrieux’s A Lake (Un Lac), like his multilingual preceding film, La Vie nouvelle, expounds on the notion of a borderless cinema – one that not only dismantles the man-made frontiers between nations and cultures, but also the boundaries between image and sound, material […]
Tag: Philippe Grandrieux
La Vie nouvelle, 2002
While Sombre embodies the categorization of quasi-allegorical gothic fairytale, La Vie nouvelle can be described as quasi-mythological in its underlying plot. Implementing a slow reveal from darkness to a jittery, contextually ambiguous image that similarly occurs in the opening sequence of Sombre (in this film, of anonymous women’s faces staring out into space), the effect […]
Sombre, 1998
While I’m not at all enraptured by the murky, elliptically fractured, and characteristically amoral transgressive cinema of Philippe Grandrieux, I also cannot help but be drawn to certain aspects of his filmmaking that I find undeniably sublime in the sensorial purity of their realization. One such moment occurs in an early episode in Grandrieux’s debut […]