Henry Hills
Experimental Filmmaker
Experimental Filmmaker
Plagiarism (1981) Begins jokingly proclaiming, “I’ll make my Ernie Gehr film,” a major preoccupation of my generation in the late 70s/early 80s, & then this very raw other thing proceeds to unfold, raw because I only had enough money (a loan from Abby Child) to do 4 shoots never having done sync & using outdated film stock from Rafik & an unfamiliar, undependable camera & trying to keep everything together & everything going wrong, yet determined to make concrete the ideas I had been abstractly developing over several years with whatever I got back from the lab no matter & so abandoning all caution to open a new area, I decided who could possibly talk better than poets? Edited in Times Square.
Starring Bruce Andrews & Charles Bernstein, co-editors of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine; James Sherry, editor of ROOF; & the late Hannah Weiner, author of Clairvoyant Journal, reading from the notebooks that later became Little Books/Indians.
“Hills’ early films are dense landscape montages whose passages achieve a precise shuffle effect not unlike Charles Sheeler’s Cubist-influence paintings. His recent works, Radio Adios and Plagiarism, are no less kinetic--using sync sound and Burroughs-like cutups in a manner that underscores his interest in jazz and sound poetry.”
—J. Hoberman, The Village Voice