Cleveland Street Gap (Courtney Egan and Helen Hill, 2006)

Still thinking about histories of film and the environment.  How would one tell this history? What filmmakers are working at this site of intersection?  Helen Hill’s work seems like an interesting starting point.  The film embedded above includes footage that Hill shot before Hurricane Katrina, marked by the flood waters that filled her home.

Searching around last evening for scraps of her work online (sadly, there are very few), I found an interview with Hill for the Timecode Independent Film Program in New Orleans.  At the time, Hill worked for the New Orleans Video Access Center and the New Orleans Film Collective.  She seems like an incredible teacher who took material and financial limitations as catalysts for thinking differently/creatively about film.

Helen Hill was murdered in her home on June 2007, an event that shifts how we read Hill’s home movies and the assurances scribbled at the end of Cleveland Street Gap.  That same year, the Harvard Film Archive established the Helen Hill Collection, a repository of films, drawings, photographs, art works, writings, music, and ephemera. Ten of Hill’s animated and experimental works are available for loan and exhibition.  Perhaps we can get them to Aberdeen sometime soon…