Vincent Grenier Movies, TV Shows, and Filmography
Vincent Grenier
Directing
Biography
Vincent Grenier is a native of Quebec City, Canada. Since the seventies, he has made over fifty films and videos. One of his video, Tabula Rasa, was screened in the "Best Avant Garde Films & Videos of the Decade" program at the Lincoln Center. Watercolor (2013) received two grand prizes in Experimental Cinema at Black Maria and Athens Film Festival. He will be receiving the Stan Brakhage Vision award at the Denver Film Festival in November 2019. He has received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2010 and numerous Canada Council Grants earlier in his career amongst others. He lives in Ithaca NY and teaches at nearby Binghamton University.
Filmography Movies
Acting
Peed Into the Wind
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.
Failed States
Boys love to spin until they collapse. Is the world then spinning out of control? Preparations for renegotiating the Nonproliferation Treaty.
Production
Armoire (2 Parts)
The aviary in the mirror, in-flight hide-and-seek, mischief on the wing.
While Revolved
(This film has been referred to as both White Revolved and While Revolved.) Project at 18 fps. This film is concerned with the projected, not just light or the emulsion or the illusion or the projector or the camera, but all of them. The surface of the film, the grain, is remembered when a similar but illusionistic surface appears (just as magnified), crossing the frame. Other times the grain is left to itself. There are the idiosyncratic focusing qualities of shadows acting as diaphragms inside the image. The elusive background confounds itself with the foreground. The notions of appearances and disappearances transform themselves in notions of time. Made with a grant from the Canada Council.
Tabula Rasa
"Revisiting footage he shot more than ten years ago in an American high school, Vincent Grenier combines deftly manipulated and layered images with oblique commentaries delivered by students and instructors. The socializing process of education is made visible in the architecture, surfaces and colours of the school, 'in the ambiguous quality of appearances so assiduously cultivated by institutions' (Grenier)." - Images Festival, 2005
The Chairs
"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
Wishbone
A product of the pandemic, Grenier's new film brings the outdoors in, with curious results.
Wishbone
A product of the pandemic, Grenier's new film brings the outdoors in, with curious results.
Wishbone
A product of the pandemic, Grenier's new film brings the outdoors in, with curious results.
Moonrise
In the playful and hypnotic miniature Moonrise, avant-garde luminary Vincent Grenier sets falling rain and its sweeping pock-filled shadows to an audio collage of DIY foley mimicking the persistent pitter-patter.
Honey Moon Lane
Inspired by dreams and nightmares, Honey Moon Lane unfolds with a series of absurdist entanglements in the heterosexual love life of a man and his loved one. For better or for worst, this film is as engaged in the unraveling of amorous film clichés and fantasies than it is in the spirited creation of a somewhat schizophrenic and hysterical emotional space.
X
"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.
Gallery
