Emma's Dilemma

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

A globally composed, musically arranged montage-round: so Henry Hills’s arcana appears to be, a fulminant 30-minute cut-up epic that takes footage – both found and shot by the filmmaker – and crosses it in an almost arithmetic manner with a pre-arranged soundtrack. The basis is a written film treatment of the musician John Zorn, in which 254 scenes, bundled into 15 sequences, are captured in short, sometimes cryptic descriptions. Hills, very much in the style of a Harry Smith or Bruce Conner, has collected takes of radically differing origin for each of the 254 script directions and funneled them into a complexly ramified stream of associations. The sequence of scenes is underscored, or rather, interlocked, with pieces from the John Zorn composition The Bribe (1986), a musical tribute to crime fiction writer Mickey Spillane.

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

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.

A flickering structural examination of Elvis.

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.

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.

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.

“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