The Body's Night

“What do we seek, since the first traces of hands impressed in rock, the long, hallucinated perambulation of men across time, what do we try to reach so feverishly, with such obstinacy and suffering, through representation, through images, if not to open the body’s night, its opaque mass, the flesh with which we think — and present it to the light, to our faces, the enigma of our lives. Body and thought, body and sensations, these are the same structures with which cinema engages deeply.” (Philippe Grandrieux) This series – taking its name from Granrieux’s evocative idiom and comprised of films closely associated with the French New Extremity – deals with that unknowable quality of corporeal existence, each film exploring the body (along with its drives and desires) as it takes over, subverts, even sublimates what’s known as reason and civilization, through intricate confrontations with the terror – and sometimes, the ecstacy – of the unconscious.