French-Canadian filmmaker Vincent Grenier returns to the PFA with several recent films. Grenier is a leading avant-garde artist whose films explore the ambiguities of material objects when presented as filmed images; within this minimalist framework, he achieves both humor and suspense. British film critic Simon Field has written: "(Grenier's) great skill is that by means of shifts of focus, by subtly altering the 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. The best of these films move between an apparent abstraction and a sense of the concrete, playing upon the pleasure of looking and grasping at meaning."

Closer Outside
“The precisions and idiosyncrasies of movements 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.” --V.G.
• (1979, 10 mins, color, silent)

Interieur Interiors (To A.K.)
Grenier describes Interieur Interiors, which draws its inspiration from the sculpture of Ann Knutson (“A.K.”): “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 of the depth of field.... (T)he intentions of the film and the transforming events accumulate at a very intimate level of the viewer, that is at the level of the mechanisms of his understanding.”
• (1978, 15 mins, silent)

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 (the) Ann Arbor Film Festival, and is a beautiful idea, beautifully realized.” --J. Hoberman, The Village Voice
• (1976, 20 mins, color, silent)
Plus Untitled (1981, 15 mins).