Henry Hills

SSS is composed from footage of movement improvised on the streets of pre-gentrified East Village by Sally Silvers, Pooh Kaye, Harry Shepperd, Lee Katz, Kumiko Kimoto, David Zambrano, Ginger Gillespie, Mark Dendy, and others, painstaking synched to music previously improvised for the project at Noise New York by Tom Cora (cello), Christian Marclay (turntables), and Zeena Parkins (harp). Beauty emerging from rubble. (Henry Hills)

A superabundance of useless information effectively subdues freedom of speech. Condense and survive!

A self-reflective study of the dance and rhythms of life in Bali, Bali Mécanique presents a luscious spectacle for the eye and a momentary vision of paradise for the soul. The casual documentary-style cinematography combines with an intricate jigsaw-puzzle-style of music-driven editing to create for the viewer a feeling of being in the center of the action.

A flickering structural examination of Elvis.

Boys love to spin until they collapse. Is the world then spinning out of control? Preparations for renegotiating the Nonproliferation Treaty.

A raw documentary of New York "language poets" in their milieu.

Goa Lawah is a sacred bat cave on the east coast of Bali. Actual footage.

“North Beach is a beautiful film. The human race should stick around to enjoy it. It’s all cinema, all experience. No ‘problems,’ art in-jokes, other fashionable bluffing. Hills composes, orchestrates. The film’s a concentrate of rhythmic invention, solid work, shapely; gorgeous.” —Ken Jacobs

A film set to "Batman" by Naked City. Taking the band’s name and first album cover as a clue, Henry Hills drew heavily on themes in WeeGee’s photographs, recreating many of his pictures in their actual Lower East Side/Little Italy locations.

Kino Da! (1981) is a portrait of North Beach Communist cafe poet & gentle comrade, Jack Hirschman, editor of the “Artaud Anthology” (City Lights). Shot in sync with wind-up Bolex.

A detailed look at a remarkable artist who died in 1999 at age 85. Aspects of Burckhardt's work in photography, film, and painting are examined in interviews with Rudy Burckhardt, painter Yvonne Jacquette, and curators Robert Storr (former Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture, Museum of Modern Art, New York) and Brian Wallis (Chief Curator, International Center of Photography, New York). In his studio in New York, Burckhardt discusses his photography and its significance within its historical framework. In the woods near his summer home in Maine, the viewer sees Burckhardt's easel and painting in front of the scene he is depicting. Whether in city or country, Burckhardt appreciated and transformed the chaos he discovered.

Avoiding traditional narrative structures, all images revolve in one way or another around the letter H.

Documentary about the life of avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren, who led the independent film movement of the 1940s.

The tree here is an ancient American Elm standing in Tompkins Square Park in New York. It’s named 'The Hare Krishna Tree' because an Indian spiritual leader founded the International Society for Krishna Consciousness nearby. Meticulously edited, frame by frame, the tree comes to life, more than 40 years after the images were shot.

A vision of the tortured torrential psyche, made out of two scenes from the film noir NIAGARA — the movie that made MM a goddess and the embodiment of projection (the iconic image used by Warhol is a still from the souvenir shop scene here). The single-frame juxtaposition simultaneity and fugal repetition makes it seem almost real. We share her longings and her suffering. Hollywood, the pretty face of late monopoly Capitalism, exploits us all. It doesn’t have a happy ending.

Henry Hills’ most recent film consists of footage recorded from a moving train during his trips from his home in Vienna to his work as a professor at FAMU in Prague. Over ten years of commutes are condensed in dozens of shots of railway tracks, each set to diferent pieces of music ranging from Eduard Artemyev to Kraftwerk. In line with Hills’ decades-spanning investigations of rhythm in film, the mundane Vienna-Prague line is transformed through rapid montage into a musical reverie of geometries in motion; a joyous, personal rif on that cinematic motif par excellence: the train.

Henry Hills is among the film artists who, like filmmaker Abigail Child, marries frenetically fast image montage with split-second music and sound editing: the changes in rhythm and mood stream so fast they create a giddy delirium in the spectator. SOCIAL SKILLS provides Hills with the perfect subject: discontinuous fragments from a 60-day class in liberated body movement led by David Zambrano in Belgium. The soundtrack does the splits between disco funk and cartoon noise effects. Is it dance, childlike play, or the Utopian vision of a community of negotiated differences? It is all of these things at once.

A ramshackle underground SF satire set and shot in the self-absorbed art world of lower Manhattan, written, produced, and directed by Joe Gibbons, who also plays one of the lead parts. Gibbons plays a mad scientist who's developed a technique for transferring personalities from one person's body to another; he becomes obsessed with an outlaw artist (played by performance artist Karen Finley) who destroys paintings in various galleries as a form of anarchist, anticapitalist protest.

A “remake” of my first film, Porter Springs 4 (1999) is composed from footage shot over 20 years (reversal, negative, 8 mm, super-8, 8mm video, mini-DV, & old photos), with an audio track composed from the video sync, ambient recordings, and a tape I made in highschool of my uncle telling stories and playing piano & of selections from his record collection that we listened to on family vacation in my childhood. My father growing old & feeble, my only footage of my dead sister and grandmother (Gonga) and of my log cabin (the Bug House) which was struck by lightning and burned to the ground in 1990, memories of my two ex’s, eternal nature, endless walks in the woods, building my new cabin and dream time there, the rotting boathouse, and various typical family scenes, assembled and presented in the rhythms of my mind and body. (Henry Hills)

An opera by John Zorn and Richard Foreman

My first film (San Francisco, 1975) was Porter Springs, an exalted home movie shot on summer vacation in the North Georgia mountains at a place I have spent every August of my life including the month before I was born. The next summer I shot Porter Spring 2 (1976), focusing more formally on a few of the elements presented in the first film, and the following summer I made Porter Spring 3 (1977), my most “painterly” work, basically one image: reflections of trees on the lake broken by a line of waterlillies, an hallucinatory love poem (“elegant and serene experience” --Pat O’Neill).

A re-edited version of NORTH BEACH; more frenetic, more out there, more '80s. "It is interesting to note that this tendency toward design, so prominent in '70s filmmakers like Hills, currently have connotations of hard-mindedness, rigorousness and even asceticism, whereas in other times such a preoccupation with pattern would more often than not be associated with mere decoration, hedonism, frivolousness and irrationalism." – Noel Carroll, The Soho Weekly News

Henry Hills’s Emma’s Dilemma reinvents the portrait for the age of digital reproduction. In a set of tour-de-force probes into the images and essences of such downtown luminaries as Richard Foreman, Ken Jacobs, and Carolee Schneemann, Hills’s cinematic inventions literally turn the screen upside down and inside out. In this epic journey into the picaresque, we follow Emma Bee Bernstein, our intrepid protagonist, from her pre-teen innocence to her late teen-attitude, as she learns about the downtown art scene firsthand. In the process, Hills reimagines the art of video in a style that achieves the density, complexity, and visual richness of his greatest films.

MECHANICS OF THE BRAIN is an experimental film in the form of a scientific documentary. A "remake" of the documentary film of the same name by Poudovkin (1926) on the work of Pavlov. Mechanics of the Brain presents 25 vignettes in 21 minutes, with an original soundtrack by John Zorn.