#99: Evolve according to changing needs.|#5: Kunsthal Gent is a city where different identities collide in an ongoing exhibition without end date. New exhibitions are always a new layer in this ongoing story.|#75: A building is a capricious thing: it is inhabited and changed, and its existence is a tale of constant and curious transformation.|#137: Use the publication as programming space|#56: Take a lunch break.|#65: No excuses: Thursday morning, team meeting.|#119: Be a space of production.|#39: Be the early stepping stone in an artist’s career|#90: The best systems have a failure or ‘a hole’ in them…|#3: Entrance to all exhibitions at Kunsthal Gent is free.|#94: No objections? Just do it.|#26: More artists, less borders.|#82: Clean and sterile looks professional, but really boring.|#81: Things come alive when there is friction.|#40: Follow the artist|#16: Kunsthal Gent will always be a construction site.|#57: Volunteers must be: cared for / hands on / ready to learn / willing to share / in it to win it / show new or old tricks.|#15: Kunsthal Gent aims to be an extension of public space.|#124: Do less, do it better.|#131: A visitor who comes back after a week might discover new additions to the exhibition.|#32: Be pan-gender polyphonic.|#60: Look after all tools. The moment it looks like things are missing it means that things are missing.|#37: Operate with radical transparency.|#92: We’re a learning organisation.|#59: Always protect the floor when painting (or pouring concrete)|#99: Evolve according to changing needs.|#5: Kunsthal Gent is a city where different identities collide in an ongoing exhibition without end date. New exhibitions are always a new layer in this ongoing story.|#75: A building is a capricious thing: it is inhabited and changed, and its existence is a tale of constant and curious transformation.|#137: Use the publication as programming space|#56: Take a lunch break.|#65: No excuses: Thursday morning, team meeting.|#119: Be a space of production.|#39: Be the early stepping stone in an artist’s career|#90: The best systems have a failure or ‘a hole’ in them…|#3: Entrance to all exhibitions at Kunsthal Gent is free.|#94: No objections? Just do it.|#26: More artists, less borders.|#82: Clean and sterile looks professional, but really boring.|#81: Things come alive when there is friction.|#40: Follow the artist|#16: Kunsthal Gent will always be a construction site.|#57: Volunteers must be: cared for / hands on / ready to learn / willing to share / in it to win it / show new or old tricks.|#15: Kunsthal Gent aims to be an extension of public space.|#124: Do less, do it better.|#131: A visitor who comes back after a week might discover new additions to the exhibition.|#32: Be pan-gender polyphonic.|#60: Look after all tools. The moment it looks like things are missing it means that things are missing.|#37: Operate with radical transparency.|#92: We’re a learning organisation.|#59: Always protect the floor when painting (or pouring concrete)|
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20.03.2023 20:00

Filmprogramma door Artcinema OFFoff

Price: € 8

Philippe Grandrieux – La vie nouvelle (35mm)

Art Cinema OFFoff welcomes the French filmmaker Philippe Grandrieux.

Around the turn of the century, Philippe Grandrieux, a graduate of the Brussels film school INSAS, made one of the most striking and uncompromising feature debuts with Sombre. La vie nouvelle arguably goes even further in its exploration of dislocation, darkness and human extremes. The setting is the new Eastern Europe, Sofia to be exact, where a young American falls for a mysterious sex worker/stripper/chanteuse, and pursues her through after hours clubs and down darkened hotel corridors into a hellish underworld of violence and obsession. La vie nouvelle is nightmarish not just in its subject matter but in its execution too; using extreme fragmentation, a disorienting shooting style, a claustrophobic soundtrack (by Eric and Marc Hurtado of Étant Donnés) and an absolute minimum of dialogue, Grandrieux pushes his narrative to the edge of abstraction and invites us to negotiate our own way through the film’s anxious labyrinth.

There was an extremely simple, basic narrative premise: a young man meets a young woman and wants her for himself, in an Orphic way. Little by little the film was constructed in terms of intensity rather than psychology – relations of intensity between characters who could inhabit or haunt the film. There’s the impression that everything is moving all the time, like a kind of vibrant, disturbed materiology. That’s what we were looking for: a disquieting film, very disquieting, very fragile and vibrant. Not a film like a tree, with a trunk and branches, but like a field of sunflowers, a field of grass growing everywhere. That’s the impulse – the desire – which led to the film.
— Philippe Grandrieux

Film historian Nicole Brenez calls La vie nouvelle a film with a “stupendous formal inventiveness… a film that forces us to reconsider what we believed about cinema.” For instance, Grandrieux shot an extraordinary sequence with a thermic camera, normally used by the military or by engineers in order to gauge the resistance of materials. Other than with infrared photography, here, it is no longer light which makes an impression. Thus bypassing the essence of cinema, it is purely the animal warmth of the bodies which imprints itself on the celluloid. The scene was shot at a reduced frame rate in the basement of Sofia’s Fine Arts Gallery in total darkness; no one could see anything except Grandrieux through the camera.

Film print: Cinémathèque de Toulouse
Followed by a Q&A with Philippe Grandrieux

La vie nouvelle Studiocanal

This evening takes place on the occasion of Philippe Grandrieux’s immersive staging of Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde with Opera Ballet Vlaanderen (from March 22 to April 23). Two of his other films can be discovered in a special screening series in Ghent and Antwerp:

• White Epilepsy (2012) at Studio Skoop, Ghent (March 5)
and Cinema Cartoon’s, Antwerp (March 12)
• Un Lac (2009, 35mm) at De Cinema, Antwerp (April 7)

You can read a conversation between Philippe Grandrieux and Nicole Brenez from the time of the release of La vie nouvelle on Rouge. A Dutch translation by Veva Leye is available on Sabzian.

La vie nouvelle 2 Studiocanal
La vie nouvelle 0 Studiocanal