Boat’s Railway Sleepers

 This series, guest programmed by Madison Brookshire, explores a poetic vision of the world through the sensuous work of Vincent Grenier. Brookshire writes:

Artist, programmer, and professor Vincent Grenier was a mentor and friend to many, including myself. He was beloved by both students and peers, and, for those of us lucky enough to experience them, his sensuous experimental films and videos have had a deep and lasting impact. 

Over his fifty-year career, Grenier created a body of work unlike any other in contemporary experimental cinema. Utilizing many approaches, his 16mm films and videos move fluidly between modes of abstraction and documentary, sound and silence, spectral superimposition and stark clarity. He often uses the frame in a painterly way. Whether deftly layering images, as in Time’s Wake (1978) and Watercolor (Fall Creek) (2013), or creating documentary portraits such as Out in the Garden (1991), his use of space and emphasis on the everyday recall both Mondrian and Muqi. 

While many of his best-known works are silent, his use of sound is sensitive and complex as well, deepening and extending the visual field to reveal the world around the frame. There is a delicacy to his work, as well as an openness that is profound. In the end, I believe it presents us with a poetic vision of the world, at once formal and deeply felt, whose beauty is not superfluous, but vital.

Programmed and note by Madison Brookshire.

All films directed by Vincent Grenier.

This series, guest programmed by Ritika Kaushik and Sean Batton, explores the history of India and its fragmentations through a series of experimental shorts from the nation. Kaushik and Batton write: 

In this program, we bring together a montage of experimental films from India that reckon with the history of this nation and its fragmentations. Three were produced by Films Division of India, the country’s vehicle for documentary and public information films, at a moment when state funds were directed toward more idiosyncratic and subversive experiments, exemplified by Pramod Pati's psychedelic collage Explorer (1968). In My Dreams (1975), by the feminist novelist Ismat Chughtai, the Urdu poetry of Ali Sardar Jafri inspires a meditation on the utopian aspirations of Nehruvian modernity on the cusp of its collapse into a period of authoritarianism, an event anticipated in Tyeb Mehta’s Koodal (1970). Referring to the Tamil word for “union” or “meeting point,” Koodal forms the core of our program as it brings together India’s past and present to reveal the dystopian violence beneath glossy hallucinations of progress. Ruchir Joshi’s Memories of Milk City (1991) reflects on the growing victimization of Muslims in Gujarat through a portrait of a city that has seen some of the worst communal violence in the nation’s history. We conclude the program with two films about memories under threat of disintegration: materially, as decaying, speckled, and ephemeral home movies in Ayisha Abraham’s You Are Here (2008), and as the recurring nightmares of filmmaker Mehdi Jahan’s aging mother—an Assamese Muslim woman contemplating the threat of erasure—in What would have been there, had there been nothing? (2023).

Programmed and note by Ritika Kaushik and Sean Batton.

Total program runtime: Approx. 63 min.

Warning: this program contains sequences that may trigger seizures for visitors with photosensitive epilepsy.