Philippe Grandrieux

Philippe Grandrieux
Grandrieux presenting Sombre in Paris in 2009
Born	1954 (age 62–63) Saint-Étienne, France
Occupation	Film director screenwriter

Philippe Grandrieux (born 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, Bruxelles. 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 called into question some 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 (Sombre, La Vie nouvelle, Un lac), installations, video, documentary work and shorts have been broadcast all over the world.

2012 / 2013 Philippe Grandrieux is Visiting Fiction Film Professor at Harvard University (USA) / In progress, a feature film Fever and a film/installation Meurtrière.

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 first two full-feature movies Sombre (which won an award at the Locarno Film Festival) and La Vie Nouvelle (A New Life) are examples of Grandrieux’s creativity in photography, sound and narration. Following the work of Teinosuke Kinugasa, Jean Epstein and Pier Paolo Pasolini who were constantly looking for and inventing new narrative forms that would only fit films, 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.