Black Box: Phoebe Greenberg

Next Floor, 2008, creator and producer Phoebe Greenberg (b. Ottawa, Canada, 1964) drew inspiration from her theatrical training in Paris with Jacques Lecoq for this short film. Director Denis Villeneuve worked with a feature film-scale crew, including Jacques Davidts and Caroline Binet, to realize the twelve-minute work, which was awarded Best Short Film at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival.

Part nightmare, part morality tale, the film references the artist’s interest in theater of the absurd. In turns intense, hilarious, shocking, and gruesome, this work brings to mind the lavish, visceral cinematic tableaux associated with Peter Greenaway as well as the cautionary spirit of Peter Newell’s children’s classic, The Rocket Book, 1912, in which an actual hole penetrates each page to depict a launch trajectory through the various floors of an apartment building.

Greenberg is the founder and director of Driving Horse Creations/ART, a contemporary art venue in Montreal and is the head of Phi, a music and film production company. She summarizes not only her film but also the spirit of these times of economic instability as by recognizing that “In this absurd and grotesque universe, an unexpected sequence of events undermines the endless symphony of abundance…”

Black Box: Phoebe Greenberg