© 2026 The Couch Critic
As Grandrieux has written, 'No narrative link unites the three parts of the triptych, what we have is rather three stages of bodily presence, three affective intensities, three events that we are able to access only via what they make us experience inside of us, our own disquiet'. Unrest comprises three movements: White Epilepsy (2012), Meurtrière (2015) and Unrest (2017).
Where do images come from? This disturbing and essential question is posed by Philippe Grandrieux, and he already imposed it on himself the start, via Sombre (1999) up to the portrait recently devoted to Masao Adachi (FID 2011). From where, then? Maybe from the depths behind our eyes, ungraspable visions, night in suspension, promise of the end of an eclipse, between dream and nightmare. This is the start (and in truth the programme) of White Epilepsy. In a darkness barely broken by light, a mass advances: a nude back, in a long shot entirely centred on the shoulders.
In the second part of the trilogy on anxiety (in continuation of White Epilepsy), the only light source that reflects on the screen is the naked human body. Its surface, full of bones and muscles, flexes and vibrates in a frantic rhythm. The livelier the reflection, the deeper a viewer feels his/her mortality, as he recognizes between the convulsions the forces he/she cannot control.
Unrest is the third movement of a triptych by Philippe Grandrieux whose common thread is anxiety. A body as a return from the depths of time, an archaic body that we do not know and which nevertheless continues to project in us its shadow, its anxiety.