MAKING LIGHT OF IT

Elemental, I’ve read, yes elemental, pertaining to the agencies, forces, or phenomena of physical nature...

 Passion, yes passionate, a passion that often threatens to overwhelm even the bonds of family...

 Brother, Sister, Mother, Father, emerging from the swathes of the unknown deep within a mythic chamber... 

The arrival of a stranger, an unexpected savior and transitional catalyst...

Groping, grappling, caressing, convulsive ecstasy, a slightly sinister edge still lurking somewhere inside these tender confrontations...

Fragile whispers cut through a thin air, breathtaking silence, an anomalous seraphic interlude, an aural landscape rich as the misty mountainous terrain...

This environment, cold and vast, these bodies, warm and close, intertwining to the point of (sexual) unity...

Ethereal halos of light gently quivering as darkness slowly envelopes fluid outlines on the verge of melting away...

A sublime tactility (these textures, my God!, is this how they spoke of Noren’s Huge Pupils?), an exquisite warmth, a physicality that no longer needs escape through the lethal grip of a Raskolnikovian figure or a closed fist in Sarajevo...

A song of pure serenity, Philippe Grandrieux, drawing a line of perception through Brakhage back to Epstein, somatically searching cinematic territories hitherto unexplored, occasionally haunted by specters of cinema’s past, erasing boundaries, both literal and figurative, in the name of Vision…

(All stills from 'Un Lac' by Philippe Grandrieux)