Philippe Grandrieux: Sonic Cinema

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Philippe Grandrieux is one of cinemas only living true radicals and feted as one of the most innovative and important film makers of his generation. His consistently controversial work remains, however, relatively unknown outside of the international art film festival circuit. In this volume, the first book-length study of the work of Grandrieux in any language, Greg Hainge provides an overview and critical analysis of Grandrieuxs entire career during which he has produced works for television, video installations, photography, performance pieces, documentary films, short films and prize-winning feature films. As well as providing an overview, the book argues that a critical appraisal of his work necessarily leads us to problematize many of the critical orthodoxies that have been formed in recent times, to reject the concept of a haptic cinema and to supplant this instead with the idea of a sonic cinema.

Reviews

This book offers the very first comprehensive study of a major contemporary filmmaker and artist. From Grandrieuxs work as a producer to the deepest challenges posed by his films and installations, the study conducted by Greg Hainge illuminates the consistency and magnitude of an exceptional artistic career, organically structured by experimental values. * Nicole Brenez, Professor, Paris 3 Sorbonne nouvelle University, France *
Deploying a vocabulary derived from sonic principles, and in dialogue with questions about aesthetic logics of sensation, Greg Hainge reveals the Philippe Grandrieux of choreography, improvisation, dynamic contrast, rhythm, force, cacophony, all that is intensely immersive and (thereby) inventive. Hainges exploration takes the form of an abyssal unfoldingof Grandrieuxs corpus, extending from film through television, video, photography, installation and critical reflection; of the speculative potential of film-theoretical concepts derived from the sonic in place of the haptic or visual; of the inventive and political possibilities of (all) cinemas of cruelty; and of the new conceptual lives enabled by the promise of closely reading for form. * Eugenie Brinkema, Author of The Forms of the Affects (2014) and Associate Professor of Contemporary Literature and Media, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA *
Philippe Grandrieux is one of the very rare truly innovative filmakers who has appeared in french cinema since Chantal Akerman and Philippe Garrel. Altogether powerfully visual, haptic and sonic, his images excel to express all possible states of the body, from the most extremes to the most daily. Here is what shows at the best the book of Greg Hainge, stressing particularly the sonic dimension which allows him to harmonize all the components of a cinema of the Figure, in the sense that Gilles Deleuze has given to this word through the painting of Francis Bacon. * Raymond Bellour, co-editor of Trafic, revue de cinema and Director of Research Emeritus, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris, France *

Author Bio

Greg Hainge is Reader in French at the University of Queensland, Australia. He is the author of Noise Matters: Towards an Ontology of Noise (Bloomsbury 2013), a monograph on Cline and numerous articles on music, cinema, philosophy and literature. He is Editor-in-Chief of Culture Theory and Critique and serves on the editorial boards of Studies in French Cinema, Contemporary French Civilization, Etudes Cliniennes and Corps.