This maverick film director's work covers several areas of kinetic visual arts: feature film, experimental television, video art, documentary, and museum and gallery installation.
Born in Saint-Étienne, Loire, Rhône-Alpes, France, Grandrieux, years later, studied film at the Institut National Supérieur des Arts du Spectacle in Belgium (INSAS).
Post-graduation, Grandrieux later exhibited his first video work at Galerie Albert Baronian, Bruxelles.
In the 1980s, he worked in collaboration with the French Institut National de Audiovisuel (INA) and the television channel La Sept/Arte.
This was 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.
For instance, these included the conventions behind documentary, information and film essays.
Among his credits, Grandrieux is best known for co-writing and directing the 1998 French drama/horror film 'Sombre'.
It follows a serial killer named Jean (Marc Barbé) who follows the Tour de France cycling race in his car and murders women (mostly prostitutes) along his way.
While there, he meets Claire (Elina Löwensohn), a psychologically troubled and confused woman who falls in love with him.
Jean also meets her sister Christine (Geraldine Voillat). This was after the sister's car had broken down.
Later that same year, 'Sombre' was nominated for the Golden Leopard (Pardo d'oro) at the 52nd Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland in August 1998. Instead, the film won the C.I.C.A.E. Award - Special Mention.
Since 2005, programs devoted to Grandrieux's features, video, documentary work and shorts of which have been broadcast all over the world.
In 2007, Marylin Manson, who admits having seen 'La Vie Nouvelle' several times, asked Grandrieux to direct his video-clip for his song Putting Holes in Happiness that belongs to the album Eat Me, Drink Me.
The following year, Grandrieux's 'Un Lac' (2008), was ready for the 65th Venice Film Festival where he won a Special Mention in the Orrizzonti Section. This section rewards movies that initiate new cinematographic trends.
During 2012 and 2013, Grandrieux was a Visiting Fiction Film Professor at Harvard University. During that time, Grandrieux's one-hour film 'Meurtrière ['Murderess'] (2015) was in progress of being made.
Grandrieux once said: “I never watched any rushes. Because I frame the shots and operate the camera, the images are directly inscribed on my retina.”
Among his credits, Grandrieux is also known for directing 'La Vie Nouvelle' ['A New Life'] (2002), 'Un Lac' (2008), 'White Epilepsy' (2012) and 'Malgré la Nuit' ['Despite the Night'] (2015).
Both of his first two fell-length features 'Sombre' and 'La Vie Nouvelle' are examples of Grandrieux's creativity in photography, sound and narration.
Grandrieux followed the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini ('The Gospel According to St. Matthew', 'Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom'), French filmmaker, film theorist, literary critic, and novelist Jean Epstein, and Japanese actor and film director Teinosuke Kinugasa.
All three 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 features.
His 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.
American associate professor of film studies at the University of North Carolina Tim Palmer situates Grandrieux's work within an ongoing tendency of a cinema of the body.
These are linked to other filmmakers such as French film director, screenwriter and actress Marina de Van, French film director and screenwriter Diane Bertrand, and French writer and director Damien Odoul.
Grandrieux's work covers several cinematographic fields – television 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.
Grandrieux’s films have been recognized internationally. He has a penchant for de-centered narratives and disturbing subject matter (i.e., prostitution and sexual violence).
He also has polarized audiences around the world, but his painterly, formally innovative approach to image-making has also won him a legion of admirers among adventurous filmgoers as well as prominent theorists and critics.
Grouped among the controversial cineastes "New French Extremity" and/or the cinema of transgression, Grandrieux's contribution to film has a singularity that has broadly been recognized.
"New French Extremity" is a term coined by Senior Programmer at TIFF Cinematheque Toronto and Artforum critic James Quandt for a collection of transgressive films by French directors at the turn of the 21st century.
Grandrieux, among other filmmakers of this genre, are also discussed by chief film critic for the Independent Jonathan Romney on Sunday. He is also a regular contributor to Sight & Sound, Film Comment, Screen International, and more.
Grandrieux enjoys a profuse critical reception, whether adulatory or negative, and which stands in inverse proportion to how widely his films are seen.
Grandrieux has been active from 1982–present.
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