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- Agenda
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Screening in the presence of the filmmaker
The single frame is the basic constituent unit of film. Kubelka’s Schwechater is one of the boldest (and possibly the first) explicit demonstrations of this fact. I have placed it at the beginning of this program as a warm-up for the eyes. Despite my love of Brakhage and insistent preference to watch silent films silently, for me “sync” (the precise and hopefully varied and ever changing relation between sound and image) is the principal dynamic of composition in film. Sound is ever flowing, whereas in film the flow is constantly interrupted as each frame singly progresses through the gate of the projector (which historically led to the possibilities of editing becoming gradually discovered). I first taught myself the mechanics of sync by filming “in sync” (albeit on a single-system sound camera similar to the one with which Warhol made his sound films in the 60’s), as here in Radio Adios, a purposefully dense work of great discovery for me and the composition I finished just prior to making Money, my most-often screened work.
SSS, on the other hand, is my first deep exploration into the creation of “sync”. I had set out to do something new and so turned to the experts for my collaborators, poets for language, dancers for movement, and improvising musicians for my non-ambient sound. In contrast to SSS’s almost anti-musical soundtrack of fragmented improvisations (by a trio of Tom Cora, Christian Marclay, and Zeena Parkins), Little Lieutenant (made in collaboration with choreographer Sally Silvers) is composed & story-boarded to accompany and illuminate a continuous piece of music, John Zorn’s eccentric interpretation (the arrangement changes every four measures) of a Kurt Weill/ Bertolt Brecht song. The Falls employs stock footage with an already-mixed soundtrack (2 scenes from Marilyn Monroe’s first color film, Niagara) to explore the insane possibility of “single-frame sync sound”.
The inspiration of Marie Menken and Billy Bitzer is, I think, obvious.
Growing up watching television, I always preferred watching movies, which somehow retained some of the magical charisma of film, in contrast to live or video programming, which somehow seemed too much like real life. So I have been able to accept, and to some extent even embrace, especially now with high resolution scans, footage shot on film released as digital (as an almost fair trade-off for the enormous increase in access), and this is the way I made Exalted States and Commute.
– Henry Hills
Born in Atlanta, Henry Hills began making 16mm films in 1975 in San Francisco and moved to New York in 1978. A longtime resident of New York's East Village, he has ongoing working relationships with the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poets, composer John Zorn, and choreographer Sally Silvers. His dense and intensely rhythmic films, with an eccentric humor, seek abstraction within sharply-focused naturalistic imagery and the ethereal within the mundane, promoting an active attentiveness through a relentlessly concentrated montage. He taught at FAMU in Prague from 2005 through 2019, commuting from Vienna.
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SCHWECHATER
by Peter KUBELKA 1957-1958 / 35mm / color / sound / 2' 00 |
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RADIO ADIOS
by Henry HILLS 1981 / 16mm / color / sound / 11' 06 |
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SSS
by Henry HILLS 1988 / 16mm / color / sound / 7' 00 |
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ARABESQUE FOR KENNETH ANGER
by Marie MENKEN 1961 / 16mm / color / sound / 4' 00 |
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LITTLE LIEUTENANT
by Henry HILLS & Sally SILVERS 1993 / 16mm / color / sound / 6' 00 |
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EXALTED STATES
by Henry HILLS 2007-2025 / DCP / color / sound / 9' 50 |
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THE FALLS
by Henry HILLS 2019 / DCP / color / sound / 8' 00 |
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INTERIOR NY SUBWAY, 14TH STREET TO 42ND STREET
by G. W. BITZERAMERICAN MUTOSCOPE & BIOGRAPH CO. 1905 / 16mm / b&w / silent / 5' 37 |
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COMMUTE
by Henry HILLS 2024 / DCP / color / sound / 9' 12 |
| address |
Luminor Hôtel de Ville 20 rue du Temple 75004 Paris France |
|---|---|
| metro | Hôtel de Ville (lines 1 & 11) / Châtelet (lines 1, 4, 7, 11 & 14) / Les Halles (RER A, B & D) |
| tel | +33 (0)1 46 59 01 53 |
| lightcone@lightcone.org | |
| rates |
full rate: 12.00 € reduced rate: 9.50 € under 26 years old: 7.50 € cards accepted: Carte des cinémas indépendants parisiens, Cartes illimitées UGC et Cinépass, Carte CICAE, CNC & Europa Cinemas |