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Vincent Grenier 1974-1982

Vincent Grenier 1974-1982 (English)
Location
Main screening room
Date
January 27th, 2025
Duration
78 min
Cycle
Vincent Grenier, almost everything

Vincent Grenier has been one of the most influential filmmakers in the North American experimental scene over the past fifty years. Frequently featured in Montreal’s festivals and the Cinémathèque québécoise’s programming, he is truly deserving of this tribute. Born in Quebec City, he moved to California and later to New York State, where he became an active member of the experimental filmmaking community and devoted time to teaching. This overview of his work highlights his contemplative sensibility and his keen eye for detail, gradually bringing his practice closer to video art.

Vincent Grenier 1974-1982
Directed by
Vincent Grenier
Language
English
Origins
USA
Duration
78 min
Genre
Experimental
Format
16 mm and digital
Synopsis

Filmmaker Vincent Grenier began his career in San Francisco, between his studies at the Art Institute and many months of programming at Canyon Cinema, a hub of underground cinema on the West Coast. After relocating to the East Coast, and encouraged by pioneering filmmaker and teacher Ken Jacobs, he developed a more personal style, marked by a keen sense of formal cohesion that led him to create a highly accomplished structural cinema, experimenting as closely as possible with his immediate environment.

Shut Up Barbie, Vincent Grenier
[É.-U., 1974, 14 min, num., VOA]

Window Wind Chimes: Part 1, Vincent Grenier
[É.-U., 1974, 27 min, 16 mm, VOA]

World in Focus, Vincent Grenier
[É.-U., 1976, 20 min, 16 mm, Sil.]

D'après Meg, Vincent Grenier
[É.-U., 1982, 17 min, 16 mm, VOA]
Preserved in our collections

Vincent Grenier 1974-1982

Vincent Grenier

Vincent Grenier was an avant-garde filmmaker born in Quebec City in 1948. He moved to San Francisco in 1970, where he attended the San Francisco Art Institute, and earned a Master of Fine Arts in filmmaking. He ran the San Francisco Cinematheque from 1974 to 1975, and took various teaching jobs in American universities. Grenier completed more than fifty film and video works. His early films from the 1970s were part of the waning structural film movement, with a focus on movement and geometry and a prominent use of negative space. He often balanced abstraction and representation within a film, moving between the two through small changes. Critic J. Hoberman described his work from this period as "extraordinarily subtle and elusive, even in the context of other reductionist filmmakers." Grenier made a series of short vérité-style portraits of friends in the 1990s. As he made the transition from film to video, he began working with superimpositions, dissolves, and dense soundtracks. After he settled in Ithaca, his films captured his home there, as well as the local community. Michael Sicinski compared Grenier's work to objectivist poetry, in that it "both describes and reconfigures its subject".

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Ces films qui surgissent... Entretien avec Vincent Grenier (1948-2023)

Nous consacrons trois projections en hommage au cinéaste Vincent Grenier, figure majeure du cinéma expérimental nord-américain des cinquante dernières années, décédé le 7 novembre 2023. Souvent présent dans les festivals montréalais, il a eu droit à deux précédentes rétrospectives à la Cinémathèque : la première en 1991, à l’initiative de Nicole Gingras, puis en 2017, grâce à une collaboration avec Visions et Double négatif, collectif de cinéastes dont il était proche. Cet entretien inédit avait été réalisé à l'occasion de ce second événement. La Cinémathèque québécoise conserve la plupart des films de Vincent Grenier, réalisés en format 16mm.

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