Henry Hills' Experimental Films: Mechanics of the Brain

Sally Silvers

MECHANICS OF THE BRAIN
(Henry Hills & Sally Silvers, 1997, 21min.)

On one level I conceived of our film as a "remake" of the Pudovkin's 1926 documentary (of the same name) on Pavlov's experiments--in the postmodern Hollywood sense (like the remakes of famous noirs and TV shows where a knowledge of the original is presumed and thus the "story" is just a vehicle for making a statement on the current state of movie perception). Our MECHANICS is a dance film in the guise of a science documentary, an exploration of relationships between film and video, a shadowplay giving a literal presentation of the "mechanics" of the brain, an advanced rhythmic structure extending the art of film into future possibilities through an organic development of new methods of information management. Science films made with the most serious attempt to explain complex processes to a general audience at a point in time tend to look ridiculous when viewed several decades later; with our MECHANICS OF THE BRAIN, we speed this process up.

Throughout our film we riff on the Pudovkin, its disjointedness and odd structure (starting out in the zoo, then jumping into imagery of brain-damaged orphans and mutilated dogs, then returning to a day at the beach, etc.), its old-fashioned scientific airs, its interesting graphics, its treatment of people and animals as machines, and how images change their meanings over time; an attempt to create the some of the amusing, confusing and disturbing effects on an audience that seeing Pudovkin's film does today. The other rear screen imagery is culled from autopsy footage and a range of sci-fi & horror flicks, both contemporary (RE-ANIMATOR, TERMINAL MAN, DEMON SEED, BRAIN DEAD, THE MAN WITH TWO BRAINS) and classic (DONOVAN'S BRAIN, BRAIN FROM PLANET AROUS). All of this footage was shot directly off of a TV monitor, the degraded imagery thus presented offering a metaphor for memory (with Kim's Video, the famed East Village outlet, serving as the Collective Unconscious).

The choreography was conceived as a critique of Behaviorism, the culmination of Pavlov's work, highly influential in our generation's upbringing and education and now thoroughly discredited. Pavlov's work, whatever we feel about it, is a part of us. What does this say about freedom? Certainly we have all been forced to conceive of the brain as something mechanical, especially since the world takeover by computers and neurotransmitter-manipulating antidepressants such as Prosac. Although, if our brains are merely an extremely complex machine, this machine remains a receptacle for the divine spirit, the source (and destination) of all art.

The film stars dancers Sean Curran, Kate Gyllenhaal, Phillip Karg, Alejandra Martorell, Sally Silvers, and Laura Staton, with narration by Fiona Templeton (reading selected sentences from THE OXFORD COMPANION TO THE MIND). The original music score by John Zorn is available on CD as FILMWORKS VI 1996 (Tzadik 7308).