The oeuvre of Grandrieux marks an advanced stage in cinema researches and represents in terms of material inventions what the films of Jean Epstein were for the 20s and the 30s or those of Philippe Garrel were for the 70s and the 80. From where does this demand stem and what new horizon does it open for the cinema? The work of Philippe Grandrieux rests on a profound conception of the image: in its aesthetic dimension the image does not show the world but show us the way that we are traversed by it, in its ethical dimension the image gives us nothing, its work is not one of appropriation and reassurance but of how to break a path towards the unknown, the unappreciated, the unbeknownst.
Thus in La vie nouvelle Grandrieux explores the unlimited empire of the unconscious starting from these altered states through which we are protected from the real: sleep, dream, sentimental constructions, idealization, denial, transfer, fantasies, delirium, plunged in incomprehensible social exchange. In order to control this opaque dimension of human experience, we must resort to different logics than those of the usual discursive economies, elaborate other descriptive and symbolic ways.
Such an exploration is not opposed neither to reason nor to logic but it encompases them in a larger psychic constellation: what would have been unreasonable and irresponsible would be to neglect what a century of Freudian analysis has taught us about the psyche and to continue to narrate small stories of action / reaction as if we knew nothing of the forces that haunt us and the mysteries that inhabit us. To measure up to the unknowable starting from what is very familiar the sensations which animate our body: since it consists of chaining and unchaining of images, cinema can take this risk.
Nicole Brenez (Translated by Maria Komninos)