Henry Hills' 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, Tony Oursler, Carolee Schneemann, and Fiona Templeton, Hills' 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
KING RICHARD is a portrait of New York avant-garde playwright Richard Foreman in his Ontological-Hysteric Theatre. A charming yet revealing interview on the set by pre-teen protagonist Emma Bee Bernstein is interwoven with footage focusing on the periphery of a recent production--the elaborate set design and lighting, the non-speaking supporting cast (the so-called "stage crew") with their frantic movement patterns, typical props and recurrent imagery, all shot & edited in a disruptive manner to mimetically compensate for the loss of actual presence.
Though it may sound odd for a work which has never left the digital realm, I think of KING RICHARD as a totally hand-made piece. Probably because I fidgeted with it for so long, even carrying it with me on a LaCie drive whenever I left town. I had shot the interview in 1997 after a performance of BENITA CANOVA and the performance footage not until the final dress rehearsal of COWBOY RUFUS RULES THE UNIVERSE in 2004. I first assembled them as two separate strands, suffering over every frame, tweaking density/saturation/contrast/brightness/direction/orientation, analyzing Foreman's rhythms and creating my own, building and eliminating patterns of repetition, downloading thousands of relevant images from Google, synching the performance footage to every combination of Foreman's sound loops on Ubu.com, expanding and shrinking my ingredients (like baking bread), then interweaving (like a tapestry), chipping away the unnecessary, to create the right nuance of movement and thought, emotion and motion.
EMMA'S DILEMMA stars Emma Bee Bernstein, with Jackson Mac Low, Eduardo Allegria & dancers, Fiona Templeton, Richard Foreman, Ken & Flo Jacobs, Roberto Juarez, Kenny Goldsmith, Susan Howe, Tony Oursler, Cheryl Donegan, Felix Bernstein, Keith Sanborn, Julie Patton, Susan Bee, Carolee Schneemann, Lee Ann Brown, & Charles Bernstein
In NERVOUS KEN, experimental film legend and long-time Tribeca resident Ken Jacobs is "interviewed" by an urbane 12-year old from the Upper West Side, Emma Bernstein. Envisioning an exploration of the nature of listening (of apprehending or not, remembering or not, & creating meaning) and of the repetitions & variations of verbal expression and its accompanying often-emphatic physical gesturing as a basis for making visual music, Henry Hills employs the full range of temporal manipulation available within the digital realm, exploiting the unique corners which differentiate DV from 16mm, though including frequent references to themes & techniques from Jacobs' own work within the arcanum of film. The "musical score" is derived through permutations of the sync track. This is the first released section from the ongoing series, EMMA'S DILEMMA, which follows its protagonist through numerous encounters with a range of artists in a search for identity spanning her entire teen years.
I think of my work as residing within, if there is such a thing, the genre of perceptual studies. Believing such modeling to be more developed in music & writing, my major peer stimulation has come from improvised music & "language" poetry. My field-structured 80's films (KINO DA!, RADIO ADIOS, MONEY), which force an active attentiveness through extremely condensed, relentlessly focused montage, explore ways speech is perceived--fragments completed in the mind, physical gestures & meaningful pauses substituting for words. EMMA'S DILEMMA is a renewal & extension of that impulse with an intensive rather than extensive editorial approach. Working digitally, I try to use new tools in new ways, often subverting intentions of the engineers: altering speed, direction, orientation, density, color balance; employing repetition with or without variation. Complex cuts are made into single objects which can then be manipulated. I am especially interested in improvisation. Shooting is almost always improvisatory, gathering interesting possibilities for montage. My editing strategy is to immediately overcome profilmic illusions; I begin by putting the shots in reverse order, decontextualizing them to identify fragments with defining charisma to then juxtapose & refine. Finally, though, the internal spirit of the composition takes control and leads me where it will.
