The violent thwacks of a young woodcutter’s axe, his bold and rapid breathing, fill the first shot of Philippe Grandrieux’s film Un Lac (2008). Two hands are seen in close-up; behind them, we can make out blurry, shining black filaments that ripple across the frame. After showing a few more frantic hacks, the camera looks up: dark trees sway against the pale dome of the sky. The trunk makes a brief, cracking sound, announcing its impending fall. These thundering noises jolt the images and seem to contract, compress them. It is as if the spasmodic sounds brutalised the lofty and serene verticality of the trees and shook them to their core. Sounds breach the two-dimensional perspective of the landscape, and the wounded depth of the plants stabs through the screen. One could think of these noises as punctures, that exist both physically (as the sound waves expand throughout the forested space) and aesthetically (they deface the beautiful landscape), or as a cinematographic manifesto, an artistic posture of sorts; because he favours the use of sound bursts to torment the elements, Philippe Grandrieux creates an auditory stratigraphy that takes over the appearance of the ecological structure. He unleashes a mobile and excruciating vison of matter that smashes through the illusion of the canvassed landscape.

Poetics of the Unstable

For Philippe Grandrieux, every shot is an urge, a pressure, an energy that lays bare the nervous ripples of reality. In that regard, images are not composed solely with the grammar of visual comprehension in mind, because they also aim to convey the physical and motive experience of perception, the body that makes the film and the body-camera meld into one, thus creating a centripetal force that changes reality and moves the senses polyphonically.

The activity of the maker of films pulls bubbling, swarming forces out of life, which resonates, in this sense, with the way phenomenology describes perception: