Henry Hills

Henry Hills’ Money (1985) is a fourteen minute collage film of split second shots of performances by and conversations with experimental musicians, poets, and dancers in public and intimate spaces of Manhattan.

The indiscriminate and energetic mix of music performances, poets reading from books, and dancing combined with performers’ conversations and the bustle of the streets enacts the mutual conditioning of cultural production with the structures of lived experience. The confluences of lived experience, peculiarly intense in urban areas, form the consciousness for producing music, poetry, and dance which in turn materially constitute culture’s institutions in the superstructure and the subjects produced out of them.

The split second shot technique lifts the performances and conversations from their source coherences into atomized gestures. The atomization emphasizes intrinsic qualities of shots, near stills analyzable by photography aesthetics while simultaneously gesturing toward their implied temporal sequences.