Where do images come from? This disturbing and essential question is
posed by Philippe Grandrieux, and he already imposed it on himself the start,
via Sombre (1999) up to the portrait recently devoted to Masao Adachi (FID
2011). From where, then? Maybe from the depths behind our eyes, ungraspable
visions, night in suspension, promise of the end of an eclipse, between
dream and nightmare. This is the start (and in truth the programme) of White
Epilepsy. In a darkness barely broken by light, a mass advances: a nude
back, in a long shot entirely centred on the shoulders.
The story (is it a story?) that follows this announcement has the necessity
of the elementary: the encounter between this first (feminine) figure with a
second masculine one. A familiar scenario. However, a slow-motion ballet
between these two bodies takes place. Do we really know what became of
Adam and Eve once they were cast out of Paradise? Maybe this is a representation
of that. The bodies entwine, rub together, twist together, strip each
other and wrestle like moving sculptures framed as a deliberately vertical
image. In this choreography, Grandrieux chooses to present gestures from
a chthonian, archaic world, full of mute intensities, which ultimately aspires
to immobility. The first part of a trilogy to be completed, it is about the
frontiers of cinema to be crossed and pushed back into the secluded space
of secrets. (NF)