Henry Hills

Experimental filmmaker Henry Hills was a seminal figure in the 1980Ìs San Francisco and downtown New York art scenes, and he continues to generate unique and exciting works that are screened and broadcast on television worldwide. His films are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Archives du Film Experimental dÌAvignon and several other important art institutes. Two of his best known pieces are shown in this Roulette TV video. "Money" is a jazzy, rhythmically-edited montage built of speech and poetic fragments, single words, sighs, and other on-the-street exclamations from many artists, intercut with pointed musical and dance gestures. Added together, these accents ("maybe 5000 cuts") form a stunning essay on capitalist anxieties. "Little Lieutenant" is a dance/music video to music by John Zorn, a sequence of live movements against rear-screen projection evoking a pre-WWII mythos: drunken bar scenes, wild cartoonish fantasies, stealthy night and spy moves, bombing and the eventual armed conflict. In his interview, Hills discusses the method of shooting and editing his short, dense 16mm films, his influences from literature and music, and his sense of time in film as compared to standard Hollywood filmmaking. Click here to view clip.