The Films of Hilary Harris

Films:
Longhorns (1951) 4 min B&W
Highway (1958) 5 min B&W
9 Variations on a Dance Theme (1966) 13 min B&W
Organism (1975) 19 min colour

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For the first class in the second semester of our “Film: The Twentieth Century Art” course, our professor Doug Davidson had programmed a series of short films and feature film clips under the banner of “Film and the Other Arts”, with a focus on cinema related to dance and movement. The program included clips like the ballet sequence from An American in Paris, or classic experimental shorts in their entirety, including Oscar Fischinger’s Composition in Blue, Norman McLaren and Grant Munro’s Canon, Ed Emshwiller’s Dance Chromatic and Francis Thompson’s N.Y. N.Y. Each film clip or short ended with audience applause, except one: Hilary Harris’s 9 Variations on a Dance Theme, which I thought was the best film that day.

I was millimetres away from putting my hands together, until I saw that no one else was clapping. Why did I choose not to clap? Perhaps because then I would have been forced to defend myself. At the time I was so brain dead from working overnight shifts at UPS that I barely had the capacity to form a sentence. I don’t know why I should’ve been so timid about it, because the experimental films of Hilary Harris (1929-1999), as seen in this grouping, are very accessible, and each simple extrapolations of one central idea.

Organism is a pre-cursor to Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi in its time lapse photography. We view accelerated footage of New York City life, commuters, cars, and the shadows of the Empire State Building, all going through their daily life cycles. These sequences however are intercut with microscopic footage of blood cells, while unknown voices on the soundtrack discuss biology. As per the film’s namesake, the city itself resembles a living being. The people and the cars are the cells coursing through its concrete veins. It is also shares with his previous work the tendency to turn inanimate, non-sentient things into living beings.

Highway, with its jazz-scored edits and zooms, is a dry-run for Organism, as its soft-focus images of nighttime traffic lights resembling a bloodstream. Longhorns, which humourously twirls around two longhorns against the relief of marshland and majestic skies, is the most abstract of this group, as it creates its own subject, while the others make life out of “found” environments. In this early film, like its later companions, images fade out and in, as if to suggest these movements are all part of a cycle, with Cyril Jackon’s drumming on the soundtrack suggesting “a life ritual”.

If these films bring movement to things, one is tempted to say that 9 Variations on a Dance Theme instead deconstructs movement, in how it sometimes breaks down the rhythm to analyze it more. As the title suggests, Bettie de Jong performs a dance routine in her studio nine times: each new sequence from a different cinematic approach. But because her dance begins and ends in a cyclical position, and is repeated nine times, it is suggested that the dance itself is as much a perpetual living rhythm as Harris’ other film subjects.

I am reminded of why I was so taken with this film in class many years ago. A deceptively simple concept becomes a mesmerizing study of movement and a seemingly infinite number of choices at one’s disposal. As with his other works collected here, 9 Variations builds to a crescendo of propulsive, dazzling editing, as the visuals become more dense, abstract.

These films were viewed for this piece thanks to the Mystic Fire DVD, The Films of Hilary Harris, which includes these four films along with slides about the filmmaker and a filmography. There is also a half-hour 1964 episode of Camera 3, in which Harris is interviewed about his films, while sitting next to Amos Vogel from Cinema 16! He even mentions working on a film, which would become Organism ten years later. This program also features clips from his works, including Highway, and Harris’s Oscar-winning documentary, Seawards the Great Ships (1961). The sequence from his documentary film has the same rhythmic editing and interesting framing one would witness in his other films on display here, as if to suggest that his experimental films aren’t as abstract as we may think, especially Organism. Ultimately, that film is a documentary about us, and our rituals.