"In Refraction, the camera is set so that the leaves of a large tree fill the frame. Green ordinary leaves which move in their baroque ways under the wind. In a sense it is shocking to put on film such ordinary things, things which could be so easy to dismiss. Yet this undemanding, pleasant image hides something. The image IS of what one hypnotically stares at in forgotten moments, amd from which one wakes, when shapes make themselves up in it. These furtive possibilities confront the delimiting, all-eyes-cinema. The intimate sensation is made to bear on the public circumstances of film, provoking new readings of the moving leaves. As the image presses its quiet offerings on the viewer, a subtle interaction occurs between changes of speed in the camera and wind as they, in different ways, accentuate or diminish the speed of the fluttering leaves. Both the changes in camera speed and the changes in wind affect the illumination and modulate the created rhythms. The variations, fleeting and startling, expose the hypnotic and liner states of mind, to leave us in a condition which is unsettled but palpable and moving. Refraction is a humble film that succeeds in uncovering the contradicting but unexpected profundity of small things."
- Vincent Grenier