Vincent Grenier in person with his films

AD HOC #35: Vincent Grenier in person with his films 

March 10, 2023, 7pm, Innis College, 2 Sussex Ave. 

Room 222E 

Films will all be all be shown digitally from 16mm films and original digital files. 

Program

Interieur Interiors (To AK), 1978, 16mm, 15min., b&w/silent 

While Revolved, 1976, 16mm, 9 min., colour/silent

Intersection, 2015,, 7min, colour/stereo 

Commute, 2018, 6.10min., colour/stereo

You, 1990, 16mm, 12min, colour/sound 

Wishbone, 2021, 1.10min., colour/stereo

Time’s Wake (once removed), 1977/87, 16mm, 12min., colour/b&w/silent

Watercolor, 2013, 12:15min, colour/stereo

Excerpt from "Habitats of Documentary - Landscapes, Color Fields and Ecologies in the Avant-Docs of Vincent Grenier," by Patricia Zimmermann and Claudia Pedersen, in Philosophy of Documentary Films, ed. David LaRocca:

“These avant-docs of Vincent Grenier probe the relationships between nature and the built environment. They mobilize a series of philosophical paradoxes that fold and unfold into each other: cinema and painting, surface and depth, light and dark, the screen and the frame, the material and the immaterial, the represented and the simulation, nature and technology, horizontal and vertical planes, three-dimensional lived reality and two-dimensional screens, landscapes and technologies, large philosophical enquiries and small places, tableau shots and subject movement, analog and digital. These works also offer analytical dialogues that examines how cinema engages and layers art historical trajectories in landscape, color fields, and environmental art.

“Grenier’s videos introduce a critical practice toward landscape, a strategy of alienation to provoke reflection about our relationship with meditation and the natural world. These videos stage a distancing effect to call attention to cultural fascinations with simulations of nature. The Grenier videos discussed invoke the older traditions of art as imitating nature, a consistent visual trope across all the works discussed in this essay. They then launch elaborately choreographed rejections of this tradition, by making it clear that what one is looking at is a simulation - an image many times displaced - of “natural environments.” This move resonates with postmodernist art focused on exposing process. These works ask what happens when documentary moves beyond the subject and the documentary triangle into the avant-doc octagon, composed of vectors of light, place, movement, framing, landscape, technology, and simulation.”

AD HOC aims to rethink what an experience of cinema can be. We seek to reposition historical landmarks and buried treasures within the on-going tradition of experimental and other non- commercial modes of filmmaking, drawing on work from Toronto, throughout Canada, and internationally. Within these parameters, we aspire to diversity in programming, as well as to multimedia and interdisciplinary screening events that bring together varied communities. 

AD HOC = Stephen Broomer, Madi Piller, Jim Shedden, Tess Takahashi, Bart Testa.