A magic identification with forms: Philippe Grandrieux in the Night of Artaud

Since the 1970s up to his most recent feature film, Malgré la nuit (2015), French artist Philippe Grandrieux’s prodigious work in cinema, video, television, installation and writing has wrestled with the tension between plasticity and narration. In this journey, Grandrieux has called upon the inspiration of Antonin Artaud. This essay retraces the path of Grandrieux’s driving impulse as an artist operating in the "night of Artaud" – on what he calls the "insane horizon" of cinema suggested to him by Artaud’s "delirious", savage theorising. For Grandrieux, cinema is a matter of emotional intensities, and these intensities create both form and content.