Epileptic

A young man searches for his true love and finds himself sucked into the dark and cruel underworld of the porn industry.

The first in a planned series of films about radical filmmakers by film critic Nicole Brenez and filmmaker Philippe Grandrieux, It May Be That Beauty Has Strengthened Our Resolve is a portrait of Masao Adachi, who emerged during the Japanese New Wave of the 1960s as a screenwriter for Nagisa Oshima and Koji Wakamatsu, and directed a series of avant-garde films that grafted radical politics to the sexploitation genre. A 1971 visit to a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) training camp while on the way back from Cannes resulted in Adachi's most infamous film, the agit-prop documentary Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War, which he co-directed with Wakamatsu. Soon after, Adachi joined a splinter cell of the Japanese Red Army in Lebanon, where he stayed from 1974 until he was deported to Japan in 1997 to serve time for passport violations.

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.