FILM

INTERIEUR INTERIORS (TO AK)
With special assistance of Ann Knutson.

16mm, 1978, 15 minutes, silent

"Grenier's great skill is that by means of shifts of focus, by subtly altering 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." -Simon Field, Time Out, May, 1980.

"One striking aspect of INTERIEUR INTERIORS (TO AK) is that each specification of a spatial reading has a short perceptual life. If it is not renewed and reinforced the viewer soon loses it and is confronted again by an indeterminate space, which can be changed at will. Grenier relies on two kind of factors to achieve these temporary specifications: motion, which is itself unambiguous if in a direction parallel to the screen and which automatically defines a recession; and the insertion of a recognizable element. When the two factors appear together, even for a moment, the cinematic space is transformed into one of representation." -Graham Weinbren and Christine N. Brinckman, Millenium Journal.

Award:Second Prize winner, San Francisco Art Institute Film Festival, 1979. Purchased by: Collections of the Universities of Wisconsin at Milwaukee - University of Colorado at Boulder - the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto - the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Donell Library, NYC.

Distributed by CFMDC, CC, FMC, Light Cone, PFC/Cinedoc, LUX, FDK.
Available as16 mm, QTHD, DCP, & DVD.
High quality digital scan to HD performed by Anthology Film Archives, NYC, 2015

 

“‘Interieur Interiors (To A.K.)’ creates a cinematic space that remains separate from representation, severed from the profilmic but nevertheless presenting an illusion of space. It is a film that hovers between conceiving the interrupted projection beam as an image... and conceiving it as a non-image, a mere illumination of the surface on which it falls. The gap between these extremes is posed by Grenier’s film as the raw data of cinema, the interval in which structural aspects of the medium’s depiction of space are revealed.” - Grahame Weinbren and Christine Noll Brinkmann, Millennium Film Journal, 1981

"... And although we may repeatedly be laced back through the spatial ambiguities and the similarities of light reflection (a kind of sensuous and tendentious voyage), what Grenier leaves us with is finally not the realization that lines and shapes become objects, nor that objects deliquesce into abstraction, but that both object and abstraction can be accessible at the same moment. That is what is so demanding and so unrelenting." - Martha Haslanger, Downtown Revue, Winter 1980

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 the depth of field. So as when film grains, dots in deep space, disintegrate the solidity and enclosureness of a wall, the intentions of the film and the transforming events accumulate at a very intimate level of the viewer, that is at the level of the mechanism of his understanding. - V.G.LUX