The Body’s Night (excerpts)
by Nicole Brenez

From Rouge

Grandrieux’s reflection belongs to the body’s modernity – the modernity of Sigmund Freud, Antonin Artaud, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, to name only a few – and thus returns the anthropological need for representation to a state of immanence. The image is no longer given as a reflection, discourse, or the currency of whatever absolute value; it works to invest immanence, using every type of sensation, drive and affect. To make a film means descending, via the intermittent pathways of neuronal connection, down into the most shadowy depths of our sensory experiences, to the point of confronting the sheer terror of the death drive (Sombre), or the still more immense and bottomless terror of the unconscious, of total opacity (La Vie nouvelle).

La Vie nouvelle explores all the ways in which we fail to understand the world: sleep, dream, fantasy, trance, delirium, the plunging of the main character (Seymour, played by Zach Knighton) into the incomprehensible logic of the Mafia, affective vertigo, the general confusion of bodies and perceptions. In order to grasp this ordinary, repressed dimension of human experience, it is clear that we must turn to completely different logics than those of the usual discursive economies, invent other textures, forge other descriptive paths, employ instruments other than language and its normative links.

Such an exploration, however, should not be opposed either to reason or logic – that would be unreasonable and irresponsible, to neglect, forget and even foreclose what a century of Freudian analysis has taught us about the psyche, to continue to tell our little stories of action/reaction as if oblivious to the panic and the mysteries which we live. Like the films of Epstein and Garrel (but also Tod Browning and Jean Vigo), Grandrieux’s tell no story.
On the basis of a narrative schema they invent a mode of elaboration – of perlaboration, even – susceptible of acceding to the Id, that grand reservoir of drives which, in the thermally-photographed underground scene near the end of La Vie nouvelle, suddenly finds an infernal figuration worthy of
El Greco or Dante.

To confront the unknowable, precisely what we don’t want to know: because cinema is based upon the linking and unlinking of images, it can risk this. Nothing is nobler than to shatter a film upon such an ambition, such belief, such confidence: the cinema can manifest everything, it can be vertiginous like a coma, pitiless like a Hobbes treatise, limpid like the spectrograph of a corpse.

Such a groping journey into the unconscious (as Jean-Claude Polack explains well) takes the form of a nightmare. But a collective nightmare,
in no sense just some tiny, private reverie – part of the effective nightmare into which we have all been plunged since revolutionary ideas revealed their non-viable character and left the world without the slightest hope, cast into a ruin not only material but also moral. Why? What’s happened? Why can’t people live together? Why is there this war of all against all, general exploitation, ineluctable betrayals at the highest levels, and in the everyday a violence that occurs in every possible way to every possible person?

La Vie nouvelle offers an inventory of the state of the human psyche at the turn of the twenty-first century: hooked on sentimentality, dazed from unhappiness (‘the wars of the twentieth century and the twentieth century as war’, as Czech philosopher Jan Patocka wrote in his Heretical Essays), devastated by lucidity like Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Medea yelling at the burning house where her young children are dying: ‘Nothing is possible any longer!’ All the same, we absolutely cannot despair, since La Vie nouvelle exists, and since work of this quality shows us, despite everything, what beauty, profound intelligence and gestures of love the human spirit is still capable of.