“The work of Vincent Grenier, a 30-year-old French-Canadian who has had several previous New York shows, is extraordinarily subtle and elusive, even in the context of other reductionist filmmakers. His While Revolved is so rarefied that the image seems barely there. Smoky forms appear to float out in front of the screen, later converting it to an undulating field of muted colors.

“In X, precise triangles of light spread across the frame to create shifting planes that can be read as either deep or shallow space. Interieur Interiors (To A.K.), also black and white, defines its sense of space through meticulously controlled shadows. But, unlike X or While Revolved, it presents the viewer with the possibility of knowing the profilmic origin of the image (what actually takes place in front of the camera). Here, the screen is trisected by two parallel, vertical lines. The filmmaker match-cuts near identical compositions so that ... the lines are successively revealed to be a door, a corner, a piece of string (connected to a light), or the edges of a cylinder.

“In his... World in Focus, Grenier animates the screen by thumbing through the candy-colored pages of a world atlas, at varying speeds and angles. The camera is static, with a telephoto lens whose depth of field is so shallow that moving the atlas even slightly shifts the portion of the page that is in focus. As Grenier points out in his notes, the film is a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional object (the volume), which itself contains two-dimensional representations of the entire three-dimensional world. An homage to the primitive cinema of the flip-book, World in Focus was a deserved prize-winner at this year's Ann Arbor Film Festival, and is a beautiful idea, beautifully realized.”

-J. Hoberman, The Village Voice (June 26, 1978)

Tonight's program includes:
World In Focus
• (1976, 20 mins, color, silent, Print Courtesy of filmmaker)

While Revolved
• (1976, 12 mins, color, silent/18 fps, Print Courtesy of filmmaker)

X
• (1976, 9 mins, silent/18 fps, Print Courtesy of filmmaker)

Interieur Interiors (To A.K.)
• (1978, 15 mins, silent, Print Courtesy of filmmaker)