Programme 2

Words of Mercury
Jerome Hiler, 2010-2011, 25 min

Marginalia
Jerome Hiler, 2016, 23 min

Bagatelle I
Jerome Hiler, 2016-18, 16 min

Ruling Star
Jerome Hiler, 2019, 22 min

Jerome Hiler explains that, just as it happens in the cinema, technical standardisation visually weakens the art of stained glass. The light reflected by the moon, traditionally considered as ‘the first film’, passes on the light reflected by the stained glass on to the metals and polished marble floors of the cathedrals. This, in turn, sends the light back to us which rebounds on the cinema screen, emitted by the 16 mm projector. In his recent films, Hiler tirelessly seeks the same natural, organic power as the interaction of light and shadows in stained glass. He unfolds the levels of multiple functions by cutting from some scenes to others, where both occasionally contain multiple exposures made inside his Bolex camera. He develops and reveals the compositions progressively, almost always tracing steady movements, until the energy of the overlays is spent. This moment defines the gradual disappearance and the definitive fade-out of the shot. He merges the images by hand, immersing them frame by frame in a dark powder mixed with water. Hiler affirms that black renews vision: like blinking refreshes our sight, just like astrophysicists might study dark matter as a cohesive element that holds the cosmos together. The areas of darkness make it possible to join, mix and solidify its layers.

Aside from stained glass, Hiler’s cinema demonstrates a strong involuntary influence from music. My knowledge of medieval, renaissance and baroque music tells me that his use of choir and double choir, narrations in a solo voice and instrumental arias in St. Matthew Passion by Bach reveals a glimpse of a hypothetical analogy with the structural principle that would guide a type of cinema that was not a million miles from his floating constructions, his visual fantasies and his open forms. Hiler’s recent films interweave the long chaining of multiple exposures with short static takes from a single layer, which clear the view, making it more receptive to the next group of overlays. P. Adams Sitney compared this contrapuntal pace from Words of Mercury to how the Notre-Dame composers in the 12th and 13th centuries changed from Latin verses sung in complex polyphony to verses sung as a plain chant. By filming each 30-metre reel up to four or five times in a meticulous, dedicated process involving hope and revelation, memory and oblivion, discovery and chance, the film-maker transforms objects, places and persons into light images. Introducing the tripod into his cinema helped keep the rhythm constant as the layers move forward, appear and disappear around the different groups of voluble colours, shapes and motifs, articulating them to make each fade seem spontaneous.  

Alongside the impression of ductility this gives to varied materials crossing the screen, the interaction between the elements in each layer gives a strange illusionist effect, as if a sorpasso occasionally happened between the overlays’ different levels of activity, bringing the background into the foreground or pushing back something that seemed to be practically touching the screen. The resonances between the landscapes he filmed and the patterns drawn by the tampered film give this same feeling of vagueness in Marginalia or Bagatelle I. The former imagines a hypothetical electrical fault that makes writing disappear in a world which has forgotten calligraphy. As in perilous echoes, the scratched film resounds in marine energy flows —the crests of the waves— or subsides to the camera’s gestural writing —the twists of the hand or the wrist. The strokes of italics take us back to learning handwriting, words that were noted in the margins of ancient texts printed on the screen. The film-maker only scratches the surface of the black and white film —in colour it would merely look like a blue line, similar to the unwanted scratch caused by a projector— just like he scratched his stained glass, letting each white line reveal the projection’s pure beam of light. 

In Bagatelle I, natural elements, with their particular cadences and their light movements, alternate with the Brownian motion of the affected film. The fine branches of the winter trees dating from the past, doubtlessly absent in leafy San Francisco, or the recurring sheaves of wheat, alternate with the stem-like scratches, through which we also feel the reverberation of claustrophobic desperation when faced with the disappearance of the intrinsic qualities of the reversible film —Ektachrome 100D and Tri X— that Hiler used to film these movies, with the exception of Ruling Star. The implicit state of confusion derived from learning the specific nature of the film’s colour spectrum in negative —with the consequent impossibility of scratching the film’s surface— creates an explicit reference to solar vision in this work, where the star is seen as an inner guide in periods of uncertainty. In the dynamic movements of Hiler’s somatic camera, capable of expressing the rhythms of his line of thought, we see the lasting footprints left by his training as a painter, taking the body towards the abstract of action painting and tracing curves as broad as his arm could reach. Like never before, cinema is managing to move the beat of the psych.

Francisco Algarín Navarro