Vincent Grenier

Boys love to spin until they collapse. Is the world then spinning out of control? Preparations for renegotiating the Nonproliferation Treaty.

A collage more than a diary using images as artifacts that reflect processes. Sounds often come from other rooms, altered by their distance and the spaces that they have come through, just as the images themselves reflect the history of their own alterations. It is also a humorous exploration of the ideas of vignetting as it frames, highlights, distances and alters space.

The precisions and idiosyncrasies of movement associated with domestic activities are closely stared at, or as it sometimes happens, watched carefully through the peripheral vision. This while rhyming, is done in alternance, thus creating sudden rushes in the mind while spaces collapse. Also, light burns wedges in this film, recalling…

A boy’s phantasmagoric world of heroes is captured in layers of light and hues. This video, humorously and poetically juggles ideas about make believe and representation of the everyday.

An hour-long saga of Mick Terrific, rock 'n' roll star, and the cast of 50 he encounters on his search for "Mr. Wonderful." “PEED INTO THE WIND smears across the screen like one of those dirty underground comic books. It’s loaded with a lot of big scenes and unusual looking people that make this epic resemble a clogged toilet. Unfortunately, since several of the performers were not as loyal as Ainslie Pryor and John Thomas, the plot is difficult to follow but in no way hinders the sewer-like sequences. It’s quite enjoyable and possesses the releasing power of an enema.” –George Kuchar. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2016.

Changes of spatial relationships, scales, locations, and materials are intimated with recognisable clues which nevertheless do not always eliminate the former understanding of the images. These and other levels of ambiguity are instilled, which shake the photographic image’s authority as a principle of reality by confronting it with its illusory nature. We are back with magic, made possible with black and white film, shadows and lights, the limitations of the screen and the depth of field. So as when film grains, dots in deep space, disintegrate the solidity and enclosureness of a wall, the intentions of the film and the transforming events accumulate at a very intimate level of the viewer, that is at the level of the mechanism of his understanding.

A product of the pandemic, Grenier's new film brings the outdoors in, with curious results.

I had been looking for someone's unnerving encounter, that conversation that one just couldn't get out of their head, the kind of event that leaves one still debating out loud while walking in the streets or doing one's tidies in the bathroom. After interviewing a few people, I found Lisa Black who obliged with one of her own and became the film's main character. A situation with many angles; the telling, the filming, the final projection event... YOU is an imaginary fictionalized you in a whimsical space.

"Two weather worn red vinyl chairs on an outdoor promontory oriented toward a "view", stand as subjects and witnesses. The chairs themselves provide openings or internal views, into color fields, their standard issue "natural textures" upholstery, oval screens for the light projected through wind swept tree leaves." -VG

"The insinuation of camera movements and the familiarity of the same forms recurring in black and then luminous white shapes, makes X an intriguing visual play on positive/negative space. Scale, depth and angle of view are indecipherable. Is it the object or the cameras which moves across the frame? This Rubic's cube for seeing simultaneously demonstrates the illusionism of cinematic space and the camera's ability to isolate and transform. Grenier's use of silence in X is perfectly à propos to its concerns. -Raphael Bendahan, Vanguard, Summer 1985. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2014.

"It shows my interest in materials, medium, and apparatus of cinema. The sound will be produced from the visual on the optical soundtrack – for some parts, I used a 35mm still camera to expose the soundtrack area, and I scratched off the film emulsion directly for other parts. This is my senior thesis project at Binghamton University, and Julie Murray was my advisor." (Tomonari Nishikawa)

Described as "a collection of 'windows' on a personal past" "Time's Wake (Once Removed)" incorporates material from an earlier version. On the earlier version: made from material I collected through the years when I went back to visit my parents at L'Ile d'Orleans, Quebec. It includes both home movie and other types of footage. In this film, the camera "I," in extension with home movie reality, is a living participating entity. The film represents an endearing but removed artifact, a strange contradiction between liveliness and frozenness. (VG) Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2016.

This video was taken using small digital still camera on multiple bus trips between New York City and Upstate NY. The bus' many large windows, afforded dramatic reflections to this perched passenger feeling as if floating through the landscape. Lulled by the noises of the tires on the road, the incessant tremors, muffled conversations and trying to keep digital camera steady while being thrown from side to side, visual wedges kept uncannily intersecting and gesturing.

On the corner of Brooktondale Rd and route 79 near Ithaca is an amazing planting of Forget-Me-Nots and Dandelions. An improbable dance between different layers of reality, one organic, the other mechanical, another the numbing everyday. Timeless fragility joust with fleeting enamels and the upstanding violence.

Tall buildings and cars are shot through the Kinemacolor process, variable color filters and a water lens. Sturdiness jousts with fragility, past with present, alienation with tenderness, abrasiveness with sensuality, red with green. The camera is moving in the slick of space. Shapes vibrate selectively out of the image; others at different points in space and in turn, vibrate or flash as vibrations also vary in rhythms and intensity. The Kinemacolor process was use in 1915 to obtain fairly illusionistic colors from black and white films by filming and projecting them through synchronized, alternating red and green filters. This film, while already in color, takes advantage of many of the particularities of the system.

Distinct fields on the same screen, foreground each other, invite comparisons, between different times and spaces, and the constructed and natural processes that inescapably defines us thru textures and emotional spaces. Commute does refer to regular travels between one place and an other, but also to substitutions, and exchanges.

Is it happening in the screening room or on the screen; in a snowstorm or inside; what isn't surrounding and what is? From filming Ann sewing, on a grey winter day. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2016.

The pulsating rhythms of fluorescent lighting not quite in synch with those of the video image, create a singular array of drifting yellows. Camera handler and son waiting for a pediatric doctor's appointment, while playful taunts mingle with the curious decor, the focused patients, slow blurs and daily life unfurl. Chance encounters, accidental time, in spite of everything, small miracles of cinema and being.

Miracle Grow is a personal piece with elements of a home movie. Originally shot in Mini DV, edited and transferred to film without leaving the digital realm, the film is an inventory of a growing baby as he struggles to gain mastery of his limbs. As the father the filmmaker attempts to insert himself within this well worn and taboo subject and redefine it. As in his other works, the images are composed and structured to lead us within other realms of thoughts.

The aviary in the mirror, in-flight hide-and-seek, mischief on the wing.