Vincent Grenier: In Focus (Program 2)

"Tabula Rasa" by Vincent Grenier

Los Angeles Filmforum presents

Vincent Grenier: In Focus (Program 2)

Sunday September 7, 2025, 7:30 pm
At 2220 Arts + Archives, 2220 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles CA 90057

Tickets: $15 general, $10 students/seniors, free for Filmforum members

Link:

Curated by Madison Brookshire

Vincent Grenier: In Focus (Program 1) is being presented at the Academy Museum on Saturday September 6, 7:30 pm. For more information on that program, please visit the Academy Museum's site.

Artist, programmer, and professor Vincent Grenier was a mentor and friend to many, including myself. He was beloved by both students and peers, and, for those of us lucky enough to experience them, his sensuous experimental films and videos have had a deep and lasting impact.

Over his fifty-year career, Grenier created a body of work unlike any other in contemporary experimental cinema. Utilizing many approaches, his 16mm films and videos move fluidly between modes of abstraction and documentary, sound and silence, spectral superimposition and stark clarity.

In many of Vincent Grenier’s films, there is a distinct rhythm. A thing appears, flashes, disappears, then returns for a long time. It is not the same as foreshadowing, exactly; it is more like a stutter or a stammer. It happens again and again, across time, in different periods, in films as well as videos, in silent abstractions and documentary portraits alike. You can see it in Tabula Rasa (2004) and in You (1990): a stop-start. It’s as though the image first has to haunt the screen before it can inhabit it, has to flicker before it runs.

Deleuze says of Proust that he has a way of writing that makes language stammer. Likewise, I think Grenier makes time stammer. And in that interruption, that break, is an irruption. There is time in that time, in those layers. And these films are always deeply layered. Grenier divides up the screen, always flat (but deeper still for its flatness), in a painterly way, like a composition by Mondrian or Muqi. And, as with these painters, while some of Grenier’s works may at first appear austere, with time and attention, they give. That is, they reveal themselves to be giving. This is true in the works where he so deftly, fluidly uses superimposition (again, like You and Tabula Rasa), but it’s true in Back View (2011) as well. The frame is complex, almost cubist, even when it is direct, clear, without any superimposition. It is magic: a transformation. Something ordinary first becomes strange and then opens. If there is any formalism here, it is never for itself, but always for this transformation. Closer Outside (1981) shows me this, and of course Intérieur Interiors (to A.K.) (1978), which cannot be surpassed, only entered. With its incredible grain, there is so much movement, even in stillness, so much sound, even in silence. Every frame is rich with differentiated movements—not just contrasting, but differentiated (a difference in potential, as Deleuze says).

When Grenier does use sound, it is as delicate and considered as his framing. Whether the image is abstract or empty of people, which it often is, the sound, always concrete, creates a world. The sound transforms the film, transforms the frame. As above, the frame is already deep, layered, even when it is flat, but the sound reveals everything around it. It creates / reveals a whole world inside / outside the frame. In over twenty films, Grenier created many such worlds, though never by the same approach, not exactly. You almost wouldn’t think it is all the work of a single filmmaker. Across his work, certain familiarities or themes emerge—like water, for instance, ever present; there is a river running through these films, a river made of film, of images—but most especially there is a rhythm that is all Grenier’s, unlike any other that I know. A thing appears, flashes, disappears, then returns. Like a stutter, or a stammer. There is time inside of time—and these films are nothing if not multiple. —Madison Brookshire

Vincent Grenier (1948–2023) was born in Quebec City, Canada and lived largely in the United States. In the early 1970’s, he began making films in San Francisco where he worked as the programmer for Canyon Cinema. After moving to New York City, he was a frequent contributor to both the Montreal and New York art scenes of the 1970’s and 1980’s and was a programmer with the Collective for Living Cinema. Grenier made over two dozen films and videos during his life. His work has earned numerous awards; screened internationally at major museums, showcases, and festivals; and has been the subject of multiple retrospectives. In 2010, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship and, in 2019, the Stan Brakhage Vision Award. He lived in Ithaca, NY and taught generations of students at nearby Binghamton University.

TRT 70 minutes

Intérieur Interiors (to A.K.)

1978, 16mm, black and white, silent, 15 minutes

With special assistance of Ann Knutson. "Grenier's great skill is that by means of shifts of focus, by subtly altering light level and shadow, by moving the camera axis, by playing upon grain, contrast and surface texture, he can provoke constant mystery as to what exactly we've just seen, are seeing, will see next." – Simon Field, Time Out, May 1980 "One striking aspect of INTERIEUR INTERIORS (TO A. K.) is that each specification of a spatial reading has a short perceptual life. If it is not renewed and reinforced the viewer soon loses it and is confronted again by an indeterminate space, which can be changed almost at will. Grenier relies on two kinds of factors to achieve these temporary specifications: motion, which is itself unambiguous if in a direction parallel to the screen and which automatically defines a recession; and the insertion of a recognizable element. When the two factors appear together, even for a moment, the cinematic space is transformed into one of representation." – Graham Weinbren and Christine N. Brinckman, Millennium Film Journal "... And although we may repeatedly be laced back through the spatial ambiguities and the similarities of light reflection (a kind of sensuous and tendentious voyage), what Grenier leaves us with is finally not the realization that lines and shapes become objects, nor that objects deliquesce into abstraction, but that both object and abstraction can be accessible at the same moment. That is what is so demanding and so unrelenting." – Martha Haslanger, Downtown Revue, Winter 1980

Closer Outside

1981, 16mm, color, silent (24fps), 9 minutes

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... Made with a grant from the Canada Council and the Creative Artists Public Service Program (CAPS). With special assistance of Ann Knutson.

You

1990, 16mm, color, sound, 12 minutes

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. It is the still live residue of the broken relationship Lisa is here confronting. A parallel actor, the film is in the business of reinterpreting. As a result the film is closer to a psychic space, an ironic place where distance is also intimate and a measure of insight. Lisa Black is a member of theater 00bleck in Chicago. Award: Director's Choice, 1990 Black Maria Film and Video Festival – Screening: Society for Cinema Studies Conference, 1991, UCLA 11th Chicago Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, 1992 – Orlando Film Festival – Independent Focus, WNET – London Film Festival 1992, "Art and Experiment" – 15th Denver International Film Festival,1992 – 6th New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival – Munich Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, Enoy Arena, Fall 1992. Purchased by: The collections of the Canadian Art Bank and Sinking Creek Film Ce 15th International Festival of Films on Art, Montréal, March 1997.

Surface Tension #2

1995, 16mm, color, sound, 5 minutes

This film was partly shot in Kinemacolor. A process which was used in 1915 to obtain fairly illusionistic colors from black & white films by filming and projecting them through synchronized, red and green filters.

Tabula Rasa

2004, digital, color, sound, 7 minutes

Tabula Rasa was “one of the absolute stand out of Views From The Avant Garde (NY Film Festival) 04’.” Also on 2004 Top Ten Films List – Michael Sicinski, Online Journal “The Academic Hack”

Filmed in a South Bronx high-school, Tabula Rasa attempts through sound image juxtapositions, digital manipulation and layering to deal at once with the propensity to mislead and eloquence of the recorded image. The ambiguous qualities of appearances, so assiduously cultivated by institutions, the motivations found in the clues that tells the history of objects, colors, textures, architecture and ultimately, psychological states of mind are but some of the players in this poetic and cultural happening.

All the material for this digital video was initially shot on16 mm film, in June of 1993. thanks to a grant from the Canada Council. We hear the voices of mediation counselor Victor Hall and student John Cruz. The filming would not have been possible without the help of an extraordinary teacher Dan Sheehan.

Straight Lines

2009, digital, color, silent, 5 minutes

A black and white collage in motion. - VG

Backview

2011, digital, color, sound 17 minutes

The Upper West Side has some of the tallest brick apartment buildings in NYC. The orderly but deserted and aging concrete courtyards, their metal stairs and shafts, register a dramatically changing atmosphere. This is a cinema that seeks to observe, obscure, shorten and protract, and redefine, while remaining open ended.