Emotive fragments, wayward gestures, and ephemeral music collide in the works of Abigail Child, Laure Prouvost, and Henry Hills. Expressive combinations of image, sound, and language fuse together and jolt in opposition, creating novel sensations and fractured narratives that expand the vocabulary of cinema.

SSS
Henry Hills, 1988, 5m

SSS is composed from footage of movement improvised on the streets of pre-gentrified East Village by Sally Silvers, Pooh Kaye, Harry Shepperd, Lee Katz, Kumiko Kimoto, David Zambrano, Ginger Gillespie, Mark Dendy, and others, painstaking synched to music previously improvised for the project at Noise New York by Tom Cora (cello), Christian Marclay (turntables), and Zeena Parkins (harp). Beauty emerging from rubble. Fantastic 80’s fashions. (Henry Hills)

Money
Henry Hills, 1985, 15m

Money, an extremely condensed work unfolding upon multiple viewings, is a document of the state of contemporary performance practice among poets, musicians and dancers in New York in the early 80’s. Filmed primarily on the streets of Manhattan for the ambient sounds and movements and occasional pedestrian interaction, to create a rich tapestry of swirling colours and juxtaposed architectural spaces in deep focus and present the intense urban overflowing energy that is experience living here. (Henry Hills)

Prefaces
Abigail Child, 1981, 10m

Prefaces is composed of wild sounds constructed along entropic lines, placed tensely beside bebop rhythms, and a resurfacing narrative cut from a dialogue with poet Hannah Weiner. Child tells us, “The tracks are placed in precise and asynchronous relation to images of workers, the gestures of the marketplace, colonial Africa, and abstractions, to pose questions of social force, gender relations and subordination.” This tape serves as a pre-conscious preface to the parts that follow, whose scope and image bank are more narrowly defined. (Abigail Child)

Mutiny
Abigail Child, 1983, 10m

Mutiny employs a panoply of expression, gesture, and repeated movement. Its central images are of women: at home, on the street, at the workplace, at school, talking, singing, jumping on trampolines, playing the violin. The syntax of the film reflects the possibilities and limitations of speech, while “politically, physically, and realistically” flirting with the language of opposition. (Abigail Child)

Mercy
Abigail Child, 1989, 10m

Child masterfully composes a rhythmic collage of symmetries and asymmetries in a fluid essay that forefronts the treatment of the body as a mechanized instrumentÑplacing the body in relation to the man-made landscape of factories, amusement parks and urban office complexes. Vocals performed by Shelley Hirsch. (Abigail Child)

Burrow Me
Laure Prouvost, 2009, 13m

Presented inside an earth-lined burrow, Burrow Me invites us to take part in the story of the inhabitant of an underground lair, built into the Lighthouse space. A small tunnel leads to a screening space, the home of Eva’s child (Eva is a previous character from one of Prouvost’s films); he is the builder of this soily burrow. He tells us his fantastic story using conflicting dialogue, disturbing the meaning of spoken words, subtitles and images. In Burrow Me, Prouvost attempts to create a bond between narrator and viewer, developing a world where the audience’s imagination is at work… Here a place is made where the believable be- comes unbelievable and the unbelievable believ – able. (LUX)

It, Heat, Hit
Laure Prouvost, 2010, 7m

Laure Prouvost's It, Heat, Hit is a staccato composition of fragmentary images, abrupt inter-titles and an urgent, whispered voice-over. Organized according to an oblique and shifting logic, the piece weaves a loose narrative of desire and past trauma while pushing the limits of comprehension and coherence. (LUX)

How to Make Money Religiously
Laure Prouvost, 2014, 9m

Centering on the problems as well as the possibilities of memory and forgetting, the piece addresses the arbitrary distinctions that can be ascribed to power and possession. Prouvost expands her multilayered investigation of the slippages between systems of communication, and conjures diverse interpretations dependent on how one perceives or remembers the story, while considering consumption, desire and the persuasive syntax of Internet scams. (LUX)