While I would never compare the end of a magazine’s run with the end of a person’s life, there is a painful appropriateness to the fact that I am eulogizing my friend, filmmaker Vincent Grenier, in the final issue of Cinema Scope. Grenier’s work represents a tactile, phenomenological cinema that is not very popular with current tastemakers. It is allegedly too abstract, too unfocused, insufficiently engage or “relevant.” The same could be said of a number of meticulously formal, poetically inclined film- and videomakers, and, indeed, has been said about them.
This attitude frustrates me for several reasons. For one thing, cinema is a medium that is uniquely suited to interrogating our senses, the way we see and hear. That’s what it does. When a viewer has no interest in…
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Cinema Scope (Digital) - 1 Issue, Issue 97 - Winter 2024