Noé Grenier is a French artist working with film material and cinematographic language through different media: films, videos, installations, photography and text.
Noé Grenier’s recent works explore phenomenons of false memory in cinema history through a practice of found footage and experiments with filmic material. His work on perception and his experimental practice lead him to interrogate the disappearance and the resilience of images and memories.
Noé Grenier lives and works in Lille (France). He is graduated of ESBA-MOCO (Montpellier) and of Fresnoy Studio National des Arts Contemporains, and currently associate artist at La Malterie (Lille). His work has been presented and awarded in various film festivals such as Pesaro Film Festival (Pesaro, Italy), FRACTO (Berlin), FIFA (Montréal), Instant vidéo (Marseille), IndieLisboa (Lisbonne) as well as in art centers and galleries. He also works in collaborative exhibition projects and co-direction of films with Gwendal Sartre and Gilles Ribero.
The following images never happened
HD Video / 07:12 min / 2022
01:31 min excerpt
The following images never happened is a found-footage film made from the 35mm trailer of the American action film TWISTER (Jan de Bont, 1996) and based on a phenomenon of collective hallucination.
A strange incident occurred on May 22, 1996 at the Can-View Drive-in in southern Canada. The disaster movie Twister was scheduled to be shown as the weather conditions became threatening. Shortly after, a real twister destroyed the screens. The showing was canceled, but some spectators have built up the memory of having attended the movie, in the middle of a storm.
This film was supported by the Atelier 105 Light Cone, DRAC Hauts-de-France and la Malterie (Lille)
The Sunstill
HD Video / 06:00:00 / 2019
08:27 min excerpt
The Sunstill is a 6-hour film made during the Wicar residency in Rome. It consists of twilight moments of the city of Rome filmed every night during three months. Over the 6 hours of projection, Rome becomes the place of a strange endless evening. A science fiction short story written at the same time as the film The Sunstill describes the story of a fictional character chasing the sunset aboard a perpetually flying supersonic ship. The film and the short story have been presented during the exhibition Format à l’italienne X at L’espace le Carré in Lille.
Flight Memory
HD Video / 12:00 min / 2018
“With Flight Memory, Noé Grenier focuses on false memories and mental dismantling. The project is entirely composed of black and white blow-ups of a 35mm trailer for Robert Schwentke’s movie Flightplan. What once was an advertisement for a Hollywood production is transformed, fragmented, deprived of its colors and given new rhythms and tones in order to bathe the viewer in a world of Markerian reminiscences.”
— Stefano Miraglia