Sweet Magic The Preservation of Helen Hill’s Cinema

If any good can be said to have come from this terrible loss of a glorious life, it is the immediate response to Helen Hill’s creative legacy. While we often hear of independent filmmakers whose work is lost after their death, barely two months after Helen’s funeral all of the animated films in her family’s possession were preserved. A group of archivists, filmmakers, and the ever generous Colorlab, came together to help the family preserve the works and make new prints for the many festivals and memorials craving to screen films in tribute to this great artist and light-filled person.

—dan streible, “in memoriam: helen hill”

Helen Hill’s films deserved preservation. However, numerous circumstances led to this realization. Scholars should use her work and life as bases to explore the orphan film movement (OFM) as it relates to dynamics of industry, scholarship, and filmmaking— this article attempts this task. Hill’s death has unfortunately prompted an overdue investigation of the OFM and the nature of orphan filmmaking. Filmmakers do not set out to create orphan films, but this does happen, and it needs critical examination. To accomplish this goal, this article examines Hill’s work holistically and the OFM as a multifaceted actor (i.e., a mix of archivists, preservationists, scholars, collectors, and artists with a core agenda to save orphan films). Not only does Hill’s work as a topic warrant attention but also the actors within the OFM require attention. While this article cannot do both in earnest, it does point out the need for additional scholarship.

During her lifetime, Hill was a relatively unknown filmmaker. She grew up in Columbia, South Carolina, graduated from Harvard University, and later attended a graduate animation program at California Institute of the Arts (Cal Arts). Despite opportunities to pursue a lucrative Hollywood career, she operated within fields of educational, community-oriented, and experimental filmmaking.¹ She lived in Halifax and joined the Atlantic Filmmakers Co-op, worked as a freelance animator for CBC-TV’s educational series StreetCents, and drew storyboards for the National Film Board of Canada. In the early 2000s, she moved to New Orleans with her husband, Paul Gailiunas, and son Francis Pop, where she taught animation at the New Orleans Video Access Center and established the New Orleans Film Collective. As will be discussed, following Hurricane Katrina, Hill and her family moved to her parents’ house in Columbia. While there, she fortuitously connected with Dan Streible and later presented her self-restored home movies during the 2006 Orphan Film Symposium at the University of South Carolina. Tragically, only months later, in January 2007, an intruder entered her family’s New Orleans home, fatally shot Helen, and wounded her husband as he was protecting their young son.

Hill’s abrupt death placed her films at risk and mobilized key OFM advocates—including Dan Streible, Dwight Swanson, and others—to preserve her work. These efforts culminated in the Helen Hill Collection at Harvard Film Archive; a compilation DVD, The House of Sweet Magic: Films by Helen Hill (named for her first film, which she made at age eleven); and the National Film Registry’s (NFR) canonization of Scratch and Crow (1995) in 2009. To be clear, many individuals and institutions beyond the orphan film community have memorialized Hill’s creative and personal contributions. Thus OFM advocates have only partially shaped Hill’s legacy. Indeed, her violent death in the context of Hurricane Katrina made national headlines and elicited an outpouring of tributes within New Orleans and among Hill’s family, friends, and fellow artists. Certainly her work’s circulation and its impacts outside the orphan community and the film preservation field merit attention. Nevertheless, OFM advocates— through acts of preservation, memorialization, and canonization—indelibly informed her work’s trajectories and meanings. Following their preservation, reproduction, and canonization, Hill’s films have been exhibited and distributed in multiple formats and environments.²

With shared interests in saving and recuperating orphan artifacts and practices, the OFM’s imperatives have largely resisted critical inquiry, but Helen Hill’s orphan film-making evokes these questions. Therefore this article examines connections between Hill and the OFM and argues that her work and its preservation offer critical insights into the OFM’s interests and ideologies. Employing a contextual framework— informed by film scholars including James Powers, Scott MacDonald, Michael Zyrd, and Erika Bolsom—this study addresses factors that, according to Bolsom, have been “too often overlooked despite their status as important processes through which meaning and value are produced.”³ Accounting for institutional contexts that shape meanings, this lens is especially appropriate for analyzing Hill’s cinema, its trajectories, and its meanings. To illustrate, although she was relatively unknown during her filmmaking career, the tragic circumstances surrounding Hill’s death—in connection with Hurricane Katrina— have endowed her work and legacy with historical and national importance. By activating these discourses in relation to preservation-oriented interests, OFM advocates have elevated Hill’s significance within broader cultural institutions and canons (e.g., the NFR). Therefore Hill has become an important OFM figurehead capable of promoting and reaffirming these interests within and beyond the niche orphan community.

The first part of this article outlines the OFM and its agendas in connection with Hill’s interstitial cinema. Situating Hill’s cinema as interstitial—in terms of her personal and do-it-yourself (DIY) filmmaking techniques, largely nontheatrical exhibition practices, and participation with multiple collectives and institutions—offers a productive basis to discuss her work’s preservation and its implications. As will be discussed, her interstitial cinema and connections with the orphan film community poised Hill as an orphan filmmaker whose films needed and deserved preservation. At the same time, analyzing Hill as an orphan filmmaker points to cultural hierarchies underlying the OFM’s preservation-oriented agendas. To critically address these cultural hierarchies, the second part of the article draws on interviews and pertinent scholarship to examine efforts by OFM advocates to memorialize and canonize Hill’s work. Charting these processes reveals the OFM’s and the NFR’s institutional connections and shared interests. More importantly, critically analyzing Scratch and Crow’s selection in contrast with other selected orphan films (e.g., home movies) reflects aesthetics and sensibilities that resonate with the NFR’s criteria of authenticity and heritage.

THE ORPHAN FILM MOVEMENT: DEFINITIONS AND IMPERATIVES

The orphan concept became a crucial rallying cry in the 1990s as American film preservationists and archives lobbied for public funding and federal legislation to protect abandoned films as part of national film heritage.⁴ As Caroline Frick explains, the orphan metaphor’s emotional appeal initiated a “full-blown popular movement” sustained by a passionate lobbying force of “self-proclaimed ‘orphanistàs.’ ”⁵ In 1999, Streible founded the Orphan Film Symposium at the University of South Carolina, and he claims, through these events, “partnerships have become regular enough and so tied to the niche of orphan films that [the OFM] description is clearly apt.”⁶ Even though the OFM’s formal status as a movement may be questionable, the term denotes the orphan concept’s appeal to a range of scholars, artists, professionals, and institutions with shared interests in orphan cinema.⁷ For instance, during the 2006 Orphan Film Symposium, Jan-Christopher Horak— director of the UCLA Film & Television Archive— described “a palpable sense of excitement” and explained that “more than one participant predicted the opening of a whole new field.”⁸

Evidenced by Horak’s enthusiastic statements, the OFM and its agendas have elicited emotional rhetoric—which has obscured more critical lines of questioning. Hill is an exemplar case study to pursue these critical questions, but it is important to foreground why the OFM’s interests warrant this analysis. For instance, implicit to Hill’s vaunted position is the attendant sidelining of other media forms, practices, and creators. Thus closely analyzing Hill’s work and its trajectories reveals cultural hierarchies associated with the OFM’s preservation-oriented agendas. Writing in 2009, Streible offered two definitions of orphan films: the first as “a film whose rights holder/s (if they exist) have abandoned its care or are unaware of the legal claim they have on it” and the second as a gamut of alternative cinematic practices “unseen or not part of the universe of knowledge about moving images and media practices.”⁹ Describing imperatives to recover “unseen” parts of the universe of all types of media, this second definition implies the field’s widening directives. New directions in orphan research focus on sound recordings, video technologies, TV, video games, and other formats. Although the Orphan Film Symposium regularly features presentations about these materials, the orphan concept remains closely tied to film-specific artifacts and practices.¹⁰ Logically, material film is particularly important, because the OFM emerged from the film preservation field. However, critically examining Hill’s cinema illuminates the OFM’s continued investment in film-specific practices and raises questions about the nature of orphan filmmaking.

Over the past decade, a flourishing body of literature has generated robust orphan cinema taxonomies. A cursory glance at recent orphan literature is illustrative: Prelinger’s The Field Guide to Sponsored Films (2006), Ishizuka and Zimmermann’s Mining the Home Movie (2008), Hediger and Vonderau’s Films That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media (2009), Acland and Wasson’s Useful Cinema (2011), and Orgeron, Orgeron, and Streible’s Learning with the Lights Off: A Reader in Educational Film (2010). These works classify discrete orphan materials according to function (e.g., educational, industrial), context of production (e.g., amateur, home movies, student films), or sources of funding (e.g., sponsored films). For instance, Ishizuka and Zimmer-mann’s edited volume situates home movies as crucial artifacts capable of producing nuanced histories on multiple scales (e.g., local, regional, and national). Ultimately, this literature challenges dogmatic historical narratives and offers more critical approaches that account for contexts that have traditionally been overlooked in moving image studies.

Absent from this literature’s organizational schemas is authorship. Such an omission is logical—orphan research has aimed to challenge auteur-centric moving image canons, and more importantly, filmmakers do not set out to create orphan films. With agendas relating to preservation, orphan research generally situates orphan genres and materials (e.g., found footage, home movies, industrial films) within historical, social, and/or cultural contexts. However, as will be discussed in greater detail, a number of artists have played active roles in the OFM. For instance, Streible has described Bill Morrison as the “cine-poet-laureate of the orphan film movement.”¹¹ By situating Hill as an orphan filmmaker, this article addresses the sanctification of particular filmmaking practices in connection with the OFM’s imperatives.

For example, in his contribution to Old and New Media after Katrina, Streible articulates Hill’s cinema in relationship with New Orleans and asserts that her artisanal style in combination with her recurring themes of anarchism, anticommercialism, and community collaboration fosters a life-affirming affect characteristic of utopian cinema.¹² According to Streible, utopian cinema necessitates participation in a collective that “shares its tricks of the trade, comprised of people whose films are made for an audience of family, friends, and lovers as often for festival exhibition.”¹³ Thus this classification denotes film-specific techniques and practices that— due to their ephemerality and highly niche status— are vulnerable to marginalization and/or degradation. However, in contrast to orphan materials and genres (e.g., found footage, home movies, industrial films), this category of cinema involves creative filmmaking practices—albeit with varying degrees of professionalism and institutionalization. Ultimately, as a valorization of these specific creative practices, this “utopic” designation reflects cultural hierarchies associated with the OFM’s preservation-oriented agendas. At the same time, positioning Hill’s cinema in relation to post-Katrina New Orleans elevates its historical significance on a national level.¹⁴ To this end, the tragic circumstances surrounding Hill’s life story extend her cinema’s importance beyond the niche orphan community.

More importantly, Scratch and Crow’s inclusion in the NFR illustrates how the OFM’s hierarchies manifest in broader cultural canons. In 2009, key orphanistàs—Dan Streible and Dwight Swanson—with support from other OFM advocates, successfully lobbied for Hill’s student film to be inducted into the registry. The NFR— funded by the Library of Congress— has come to represent an important site for the canonization of orphan material. Streible addresses the relationship between the Library of Congress, the National Film Preservation Board (NFPB), and the OFM, explaining that although “a conservative institution by nature, the Library of Congress is perhaps the most active purveyor. Its National Film Registry now names as many orphan films to its annual list as it does Hollywood features.”¹⁵ As will be discussed in greater detail, Scratch and Crow’s selection involved hegemonic power exchanges among OFM stakeholders and NFPB representatives and ultimately elevated Hill’s aesthetics as national heritage.

HILL’S CONNECTIONS WITH THE OFM

Only under fortuitous conditions did Helen Hill connect with the orphan film community. After Hurricane Katrina, Hill and her family relocated to her parents’ home in Columbia, South Carolina. While there, she contacted Dan Streible—then a professor at the University of South Carolina—for help restoring her flood-damaged Super 8mm home movies of pre-Katrina New Orleans.¹⁶ Subsequently, Streible, who has played a crucial role in adopting Hill, invited her to the 2006 Orphan Film Symposium in Columbia. Prior to the symposium, she was largely unaware of the orphan film community. For example, in a video interview captured during the event, she struggled to define the symposium, stating,

It seems to be a symposium for filmmakers, film preservationists, and film professors and all kinds of people interested in abandoned films. I’m still trying to get a hang of it. It seems to be a film festival and an academic conference, it’s very nice that way.¹⁷

Figure 1.

Image of Hill’s damaged home movies during Orphans 5. Kara Van Malssen, “Preserving the Legacy of Experimental Filmmaker Helen Hill,” SOIMA in Practice, 2008, http://soima.iccrom.org/united-states-experimental-film-preservation/#more-248.

Not only did Hill’s DIY restoration project resonate as a powerful artifact of Katrina but its providential connections with the Orphan Film Symposium added another layer of meaning. For Hill’s screening, Alfonso Alvarez— an experimental filmmaker and expert optical printer— blew up one of her self-cleaned Super 8mm home movies (Figure 1).¹⁸ Originally an 8mm home movie of children playing on the streets of pre-Katrina New Orleans, the distortive effects of water damage and the film’s restoration produce a palimpsestic and ghostly artifact— one that testifies to Hurricane Katrina’s natural and national catastrophe. Thus this footage represented an intriguing project for film preservationists and scholars alike.

Despite her circumstantial and brief connections with the orphan community, Hill’s involvement was impactful. During the event, she forged relationships with a number of OFM-associated preservationists, archivists, and scholars, including Dwight Swanson (founder of Home Movie Day) and Bill Brand (preservationist at BB Optics). For example, following the symposium, Hill worked with Swanson to program the first Home Movie Day in New Orleans. This event included a powerful slate of locally made New Orleans amateur works, such as George Ingmire’s Think of Me First as a Person (2006)— which was selected only months later for inclusion in the NFR.¹⁹ Moreover, Kara Van Malssen, a student of New York University’s (NYU) Moving Image Archiving and Preservation graduate program, later collaborated with Hill on her restoration project and published an article about this process titled “Preserving the Legacy of Experimental Filmmaker Helen Hill.” Hill’s circumstantial involvement with the orphan film community— connections that accrued even more significance after her death— certainly mobilized OFM-affiliated individuals and institutions to preserve her work.

Streible’s letter to the editor of The State in Columbia expressed a sentiment felt by many individuals within the orphan film community and beyond:

Those who saw her speak about and show these precious fragments at the final screening of the Orphan Film Symposium were moved. We had been lucky to have filmmaker Helen Hill in our midst for the four days of screenings and talks about the preservation, study and creative use of archival films. She made many fans during the festival, some Columbians and many from across the country.²⁰

Ultimately, the immediacy of Hill’s death and its violent circumstances compounded the poignancy of her work and the stakes for preserving it. In her piece about Hill, Van Malssen stated that “the quick and efficient response of the film preservation community to Helen’s initial struggle with recovering her Katrina-damaged films, and later to preserving her life’s work, is a testament to the impact she had on us.”²¹ Although cited as the “film preservation community,” these specific preservationists have been associated with the OFM. For instance, Van Malssen and Dwight Swanson have attended the Orphan Film Symposium, and these two individuals, along with Paul Gailiunas, led efforts to restore Hill’s damaged home movies. Furthermore, after Streible collected Hill’s 16mm animation films, he contacted Russ Suniewick—owner of Colorlab and regular symposium attendee—to quickly create master preservation copies. In addition to her relationships with preservationists, Hill’s association with Harvard provided her collection a logical archival home. The Helen Hill Collection at the Harvard Film Archive includes ten of Hill’s 16mm animated films as well as The Florestine Collection— which Gailiunas completed in 2011 by using her storyboards.

Although Hill’s films were not literally “orphaned” at the time of her death, she did not have duplicate prints and stored her work in her flood-prone New Orleans home. Consequently, quick preservation and archival efforts were justified, in part, as an urgent measure to save these materials from hazardous conditions. Thus, as will be discussed, this project fulfilled the OFM’s preservation-oriented agendas. Through these efforts, OFM advocates and Helen’s family could reproduce and circulate her films in new formats and contexts. In 2008, Peripheral Produce published a compilation DVD (Figure 2). Her work has also been screened during various film festivals and events, and recently, Gailiunas created a Helen Hill Vimeo channel.²²

Figure 2.

Cover of Hill’s compilation DVD. Peripheral Produce, 2008.

In addition to Hill’s personal relationships with OFM advocates, her abrupt death positioned her as an orphan filmmaker whose precarious films needed preservation. Her legacy in connection with post-Katrina New Orleans placed a great deal of attention on her previously unknown work and initiated preservation efforts. To be clear, Hill was neither an amateur filmmaker nor an idiosyncratic artist—she was affiliated with multiple universities, received fellowships, and was involved with a number of small-gauge and animation filmmaking institutions.²³ Thus, although Hill never set out to be an orphan filmmaker, her tragic death and particular mode of cinema unfortunately positioned her as one. Framing Hill’s cinema as interstitial reveals why her work needed substantiation through preservation, memorialization, and canonization.

HILL’S INTERSTITIAL CINEMA

Accounting for liminal modes of production and intersecting taxonomies, the term interstitial holistically describes Hill’s cinema. For this article, framing Hill’s cinema as interstitial aptly illustrates why her work needed preservation. Within film scholarship, interstitial has been primarily associated with diasporic, exilic, transnational, and migrant cinemas. In his theorization of “accented cinema,” Hamid Naficy employs the term to describe diasporic, exilic, and/or multinational filmmakers and their liminal production contexts, geopolitical conditions, and subjectivities.²⁴ Interstitial, in the context of accented cinema, refers to particular authorial subjectivities and positionings among and between various production, exhibition, and distribution networks. The more general definition of interstitial as “in-betweenness” accurately, albeit imprecisely, characterizes Hill’s cinema. This interstitial category accounts for her myriad cinematic techniques (e.g., DIY animation, small-gauge practices, and incorporation of home movies); her film-specific exhibition practices; and her engagements within informal and formal institutions, networks, and collectives (e.g., the Atlantic Filmmakers Co-op and the New Orleans Film Collective). More importantly, the concept addresses the suspended state of Hill’s filmmaking career after it was abruptly and tragically cut short. Therefore the term interstitial is also a productive framework for conceptualizing Hill’s status as an orphan filmmaker.

Testifying to her nebulous cinema, John Canemaker—an animation professor at NYU— stated during the Orphan Film Symposium’s 2008 tribute that “several animation websites claimed her as his or her own, an animator, but Helen was a total film-maker.” Indeed, on a memorial website created by Hill’s family and friends, hundreds of individuals posted loving memories, poems, stories, videos, and songs reflecting her involvement with many formal and informal institutions and networks beyond the OFM.²⁵ For instance, her family described her as a “visionary Luddite pixilator”— a playful characterization of her film-purist approach and her artisanal hand-drawn, hand-cut-out, and stop-motion animation techniques.²⁶ Moreover, Hill did not duplicate her films on digital or celluloid formats. Thus, even though her work was not literally orphaned at the time of her death, her films were nonetheless in a precarious position. For instance, Katrina flooding damaged most of her home movie reels. Her 16mm animated short films, a number of her self-restored New Orleans home movie reels, and any other home movie footage that could be restored have been preserved and archived.

Hill’s preserved artistic oeuvre, in its entirety, is difficult to classify within singular paradigms. To illustrate, Hill’s primary artistic inspiration was Lotte Reiniger— a German animated filmmaker who pioneered Silhouettenfilm, which entails cutting out images and painstakingly moving them around from shot to shot so as to create the impression of movement. According to film historian Harriet Margolis, Reiniger worked within the “Berlin avant-garde milieu,” but because her films (e.g., The Adventures of Prince of Ahmed [1926] and Hansel and Gretel [1955]) adapted “nonthreatening” stories, myths, and operettas with feminist critiques, she resists easy classification within avant-gardeparadigms.²⁷ Like Reiniger’s “nonthreatening” yet critical adaptations, Hill’s experimental animation fostered whimsical aesthetics and activist sensibilities that distinguish her work from more avant-garde traditions.

In addition to animation, Hill shot home movies, and, according to Van Malssen, she “preferred to document lives of her friends and family, both the day-to-day and the important occasions.”²⁸ Home movies, in the digital age, have been shot on digital formats, but Hill—as a Luddite film purist—always used her Super 8mm camera. She often incorporated this footage into her 16mm animated films and manipulated these reels using experimental techniques. For instance, Mouseholes (1999)— a personal memorial to her deceased grandfather— includes her 8mm childhood home movies. Likewise, Madam Winger Makes a Film: A Survival Guide for the 21st Century (2001) incorporates 8mm footage of her husband, son Francis Pop, and pet pig Rosie. She also employed experimental techniques to manipulate her 8mm home movies. For instance, her 8mm short Your New Pig Is Down the Road (1999) uses hand-processing techniques to create a vibrant experimental aesthetic. At the same time, it functions as a love letter introducing her new pet, Rosie, to her husband. Consequently, the film blurs lines between home movies and experimental cinema. Although Hill exhibited her animated films at niche festivals during her lifetime, she screened shorts like Your New Pig Is Down the Road more informally. Nevertheless, Hill’s multivalent cinema—including her 16mm animated shorts, Super 8mm home movies, and films that variably incorporate and combine these techniques and formats—has been archived and even included on her DVD.

Over the past decade, Hill’s work has screened at many special events and festivals. For instance, in 2009— months after Hill’s induction into the NFR— the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) exhibited some of her home movies as part of its annual To Save and Project festival. MoMA’s press release described the program:

For the first time in To Save and Project, we dedicate an entire program to home movies, offering an exciting glimpse into the private lives of Alfred Hitchcock and Joan Crawford; the New Orleans films of Helen Hill; small gems from Nashville’s Country Music Hall of Fame; and three home movies that have been named to the National Film Registry: Wallace Kelly’s Our Day (1938), Robbins Barstow’s Disneyland Dream (1956), and George Ingmire’s Think of Me First as a Person (1960s–1970s/2006).²⁹

This screening framed Hill’s work and legacy in an institutional context and—by programming her home movies with those of major Hollywood icons—positioned her films in a mainstream lexicon. For instance, MoMA curator Kate Trainor explained that she chose Hill’s movies because they document “the devastation and the damage that occurred to her films being in the flood.”³⁰ Thus her actual home movies—as testaments to Hurricane Katrina and Hill’s tragic yet remarkable life story— have been poised as historically significant. Moreover, in May 2014, the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, Texas, showcased a program titled Handmade Bohemia: The Films of Helen Hill as part of its Experimental Response Cinema series.³¹ Although, during her lifetime, Hill showed her work at niche festivals and in other informal settings, her animated films nonetheless fit within popular experimental contexts.

These various exhibitions and screenings illustrate how Hill’s interstitial cinema has been classified and contextualized following her work’s preservation and canonization. As will be discussed, to canonize her work, OFM advocates leveraged the multiple potential meanings of Hill’s interstitial cinema (i.e., as experimental films and as evidence of historically significant events) in relation to preservation-oriented imperatives.

ADOPTING HILL AS AN ORPHAN FILMMAKER

As previously stated, a number of filmmakers have engaged with the OFM. In addition to Bill Morrison, Streible has cited documentarian Gregorio Rocha as an influential OFM advocate, asserting that “[in] ideal cases, an Orphanistà such as Rocha brings to found footage a scholar’s knowledge, an archivist’s understanding of material, and the interpretive vision of an artist.”³² This professional boundary crossing characterizes a number of OFM advocates. For example, Zimmermann and Ishizuka are film scholars who also work as archivists and curators. Like these boundary-blurring scholars/practitioners, filmmakers and other artists who work with orphan materials and/or participate in preservation and archival activities have informed directions in the orphan field. Thus these artists have advocated OFM-associated interests and agendas—all of which are represented in their films’ aesthetics and critical aims.

In her article “Orphanistà Manifesto,” Emily Cohen examines Morrison and Rocha’s avant-garde aesthetics through the lens of OFM-related interests. She contends that they are indicative of a contemporary milieu of creative “orphanistàs” concerned with “breathing new life into film preservation.”³³ Indeed, Morrison and Rocha’s reap-propriations, deconstructions, and treatments of found footage ultimately reconceptualize histories, stereotypes, and cultural imaginings.³⁴ Implicitly, their creative processes necessitate substantial engagement with film preservation and archival practices, and this labor manifests in their respective avant-garde aesthetics and revisionist aims.³⁵ To illustrate, Morrison’s The Film of Her (1996) is about a film archivist who stumbles upon a collection of paper prints of nitrate films in the Library of Congress. His most acclaimed title, Decasia: The State of Decay (2002)— inducted into the NFR in 2013— transforms nitrate reels of silent film footage, which he obtained from the University of South Carolina’s Moving Image Research Collections, into a surreal and aesthetic meditation.³⁶ Similarly, in Los Rollos Perdidos de Pancho Villa (The lost reels of Pancho Villa, 2003), Rocha reflexively captures his role as a film archeologist trying to recover precarious material artifacts. Ultimately, Rocha’s ethnographic reflexivity and Morrison’s visual poetics critically address themes associated with the OFM’s manifold agendas—including heritage, history, ephemerality, and memory.

Hill’s DIY preservation differs from Morrison and Rocha’s more institutional activities (e.g., archival research). Whereas their films generally critique institutionalized histories and recuperate marginalized accounts, Hill’s self-restored home movies—in the context of the Orphan Film Symposium—represented an authentic artifact of Katrina. Comparing Hill with other OFM-affiliated filmmakers—specifically Bill Morrison—sheds light on orphan filmmaking and its implications. As a prominent OFM advocate, Morrison has championed and been championed within the orphan film community, but his critical poetics and techniques can also be firmly situated within avant-garde cinematic traditions. For instance, writing about these techniques, Vicky Smith asserts that “the reflexive interrogation of the film medium that takes place in direct-on-film animation reveals the procedure and the plastic possibilities of film’s condition (as kinetic, carrying emulsion, consisting of frames, regulated by a shutter, etc.) and the ways in which the cinema apparatus may be interfered with.”³⁷ By adopting structural-materialist approaches to found footage, Morrison renders its material construction and transformation open to critical interpretation. For Decasia, Morrison employs the subject of silent film degradation to offer a metaphysical meditation on death and decay. As such, his work engages with filmic materiality in ways that relate closely to the pejoratives of canonical structural-materialist avant-garde cinema— represented by 1970s experimental filmmakers like Stan Brakhage and Bruce Connor.³⁸ Commenting on the underlying meanings of Decasia’s materialist aesthetic, Morrison explained, “Like our own bodies this celluloid is a fragile and ephemeral medium that can deteriorate in countless ways.”³⁹

Hill similarly employed structural-materialist practices (e.g., drawing on film, directly placing objects on film, staining film emulsion), but her work defies such comfortable classifications. For instance, Madame Winger Makes a Film follows a stop-motion puppet, Madame Winger (voiced by Hill’s godmother), as she demonstrates how to operate small-gauge cameras, use at-home processing, and employ animation effects (e.g., stop-motion animation, draw-on-film practices). In contrast to Morrison’s cerebral cinema, Hill performs DIY labor by playing with the “plastic possibilities of film’s conditions.” This DIY ethos manifests in her artisanal animation techniques, whimsical aesthetics, and critical aims. To illustrate, she created Madame Winger as a companion to her Recipes for Disaster: A Handmade Cookbooklet (1999)— a compilation book of handmade filmmaking techniques from fellow artists.⁴⁰ The film not only incorporates orphan-designated materials like home movies but also functions as an instructional film—an important orphan genre. In recent years, Madame Winger has even been screened in conjunction with local filmmaking workshops.⁴¹ Furthermore, although more performative than Morrison’s revisionist agendas, her films still reflect an anticapitalist critique. In the film, Madame Winger states, “You don’t need to keep up with the latest technology to make a good film; you just need a good idea.”

Figure 3.

Madame Winger, in Helen Hill’s Madame Winger Makes a Film (2001).

Hill’s DIY ethos is a defining characteristic of her cinema—one emphasized by OFM advocates and other intermediaries. In his published memorial, Streible states that after commercial labs cited her flood-damaged reels as beyond repair, “returning to her DIY ethic, she worked on them herself.”⁴² In addition, Peripheral Produce— distributor of The House of Sweet Magic: Films by Helen Hill—describes her work as “low-budget and do-it-yourself approaches to filmmaking, including super 8, hand-processing, and drawing on film.”⁴³ Madame Winger—which acutely represents this sensibility—is one of Hill’s most recognizable films in the orphan community. An image of Madame Winger projecting a small-gauge film inside her home is even featured on the Orphan Film Symposium website (Figure 3). Moreover, Hill’s DIY ethos and film-purist sensibilities mean that, according to Streible, “more people have seen Hill’s films after her death than during her lifetime.”⁴⁴ As previously stated, although she received a prestigious filmmaking education and participated in niche film festivals and well-known artistic collectives, she did not duplicate her films on digital or celluloid, and very few publications (e.g., reviews, program notes) mentioned her work during her lifetime.⁴⁵

In contrast, although Morrison’s films appeal to niche audiences, his works have received more formal distribution and acclaimed reception. These processes have canonized him as an avant-garde filmmaker. Decasia was exhibited in cosmopolitan theaters and even received critical acclaim from famed documentarian Errol Morris, who asserted that it “may be the greatest movie ever made.”⁴⁶ J. Hoberman also applauded the film, claiming that it represented an especially “rare thing: a movie with avant-garde and universal appeal.”⁴⁷ Moreover, in 2014, Icarus Films—which specializes in rarified and avant-garde cinema—published a compilation DVD titled Bill Morrison: Collected Works 1996 to 2013. Although Peripheral Produce posthumously published Hill’s DVD, this label only represents twenty artists.⁴⁸ Icarus, however, has a larger-scale distribution model.⁴⁹ In essence, even though Morrison is the OFM’s so-called cine-laureate, Hill more accurately represents an orphan filmmaker who needed preservation. For the purposes of this article, Hill’s DIY ethos not only distinguishes her work from avant-garde traditions but also represents authenticity—a quality that resonates with the OFM’s preservation-oriented agendas and, as will be discussed, reflects the NFR’s vision of American film heritage.⁵⁰

PRESERVING AND MEMORIALIZING HILL’S LEGACY

In her critical discussion of orphan film preservation, Caroline Frick asserts that film preservation in the digital age is multidimensional: some policies and institutions are premised on containing filmic artifacts as heritage, and other approaches and initiatives strive to circulate these materials within multiple media environments. She argues that because the orphan metaphor continues to connote conservative notions of preservation and heritage, adopting orphan films risks segregating these materials much like “butterflies pinned in natural history museums.”⁵¹ In contrast, a truly revisionist preservation approach, according to Frick, would liken orphan media to the Little Rascals, who are “out mixing it up . . . in a variety of formats from posh national film theaters, home video (some cheap, some not), online clips, remade versions, and on and on, they are remembered long after they are gone.”⁵² This comparison of pinned butterflies with loosely tethered Little Rascals aptly illustrates the OFM’s often-conflicting preservation agendas. However, Hill’s preservation actualized these multiple agendas—her work was swiftly preserved, but it is also “mixing it up” in multiple media environments.

Since OFM advocates expedited the preservation of her work, Hill’s archive has been cited as an ideal model of preservation. For instance, the Harvard Film Archive website describes the Helen Hill Collection as follows:

In an extraordinary and in many ways model collaboration between Helen’s family, the Harvard Film Archive, New York University’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program, Colorlab, the Orphan Film Symposium, the University of South Carolina, and countless individuals, Helen Hill’s films, including shorts, animation, and home movies, as well as her papers, were quickly organized and donated by Paul Gailiunas to the Harvard Film Archive in 2007. Shortly thereafter, guided by the coordination efforts of Dan Streible, ten of her films were preserved by Harvard and Colorlab.⁵³

Describing Hill’s collection as an “extraordinary” “model collaboration,” Harvard Film Archive celebrates the combined efforts of film labs, preservation professionals, archives, and universities—entities that frequently represent conflicting activities, interests, and agendas. The Helen Hill Collection is indeed an exceptional case study, because many outlier films and practices remain orphaned due to the challenging and time-consuming process of funding such ambitious archival projects. However, through this preservation, Hill’s films circulated much more widely after her death than during her lifetime— thus disrupting her cinema’s original contexts (e.g., noncommercial status, film-specific exhibition). For example, her family initially hesitated releasing her DVD because the format is antithetical to Hill’s film-purist sensibilities.⁵⁴ Consequently, within the orphan film community, part of preserving Hill’s legacy has entailed memorialization.

The Helen Hill Memorial Award—created by the University of South Carolina’s Film and Media Studies Program and NYU’s Department of Cinema Studies in 2008 and presented during the Orphan Film Symposia— has institutionalized her authorial legacy within the OFM’s history. The award serves multiple functions: it celebrates Hill’s cinema and incorporates similar independent media artists— whose work “embodies Helen Hill’s creative spirit, passion, and activism”— into the symposium’s institutional history.⁵⁵ In 2010, for instance, the award was given to two independent animation film-makers, Jodie Mack and Danielle Ash. Jodie Mack’s small-gauge animation techniques particularly resemble Hill’s work, and she has even cited Hill as an important artistic inspiration.⁵⁶ Her animated short musical Yard Work Is Hard Work (2008) incorporates meticulously cut-out magazine images and stop-motion, celluloid-based techniques to produce an exuberant ballet that explores themes of disillusionment and consumerism. Moreover, these ceremonies have thus far included screenings of Hill’s animated films and/or home movies alongside recipients’ films.During the 2010 ceremony, Helen’s family threw a tea party to celebrate her whimsical cinema and even distributed toy viewfinders with 8mm filmstrips of her signature hand-drawn chickens and pigs and cut-out puppets taped inside. The tea party re-created a scene from Mouseholes that shows her grandfather, Pop, greeting his wife, siblings, and parents at a tea party in the clouds (Figure 4). To this end, the ceremonies celebrate and associate Hill’s DIY sensibilities with the orphan film community.

Figure 4.

Pop’s tea party in Helen Hill’s Mouseholes (1999).

CANONIZING HILL: THE NFR’S INDUCTION OF SCRATCH AND CROW

The NFR is charged with representing national film heritage by selecting twenty-five American films with historical, cultural, and/or aesthetic significance every year, but— as previously stated— it has come to represent a particularly important institution for orphan films. The Librarian of Congress— who has the final say on the list— receives recommendations from the public and the NFPB. Even though the NFR’s selections fluctuate with changing congressional interests, NFPB representatives advocate for selections and are associated with various institutions and professional groups—including archives, museums, exhibitors, producers, and critics.⁵⁷ Many OFM-affiliated scholars and archivists, such as Streible, Frick, and Ishizuka, have held positions as NFPB members.⁵⁸

As Frick asserts, the NFR is empowered to select “unaltered” films that “represent best what the Library [of Congress] calls ‘the vibrant diversity of American filmmaking’ and are additionally labeled the nation’s film heritage.”⁵⁹ With an agenda to select unaltered films, authenticity is integral to the NFR’s vision of American film heritage. As Daniel Mauro asserts in his analysis of home movies and the NFR, the “films selected point to the successful campaigning and interests of the advocates, and ‘significance’ may be found in the quality of the arguments that advocates may make in relating the impact or the value of a film.”⁶⁰ However, according to Streible, Scratch and Crow’s selection required very little campaigning. Before submitting it for consideration, Streible contacted Dwight Swanson— an NFPB representative—to request his support.⁶¹ He also directly appealed to Ben Levin and Betsy McLane, NFPB representatives for the University Film and Video Archive. The title was a hasty addition to the NFPB’s screenings in Los Angeles and was suggested for entry under the NFR’s “student film” category.⁶² Clearly Hill’s personal relationships with both Swanson and Streible expedited Scratch and Crow’s selection. Nevertheless, the Librarian of Congress remains uninformed about a given film’s authorial, historical, or cultural context before screenings, and former Librarian of Congress Dr. James Billington found out about Hill’s death after finalizing his selections.⁶³

Considering the film’s limited distribution (especially in 2008), its student classification, and Hill’s relatively unknown status, its straightforward inclusion warrants investigation. Comparing Scratch and Crow’s trajectory with the routes of home movies to the NFR is instructive. Describing the NFR’s 2011 induction of George Ingmire’s Think of Me First as a Person, Mauro explains that “with the backing of the Orphan Film Symposium, the Center for Home Movies (an organization that maintains a relationship with the Library of Congress) and curation by experimental film-maker Helen Hill, Think of Me First as a Person developed public trajectory in the wake of a disaster that led to selection on the Registry.”⁶⁴ By chronicling disability and childhood development over a fifteen-year period, this home movie is a valuable document of experiences frequently marginalized in mainstream cinema. Moreover, its public exhibition in post-Katrina New Orleans, according to Mauro, added value “under the auspices of a nostalgic, familial life now gone.”⁶⁵ Scratch and Crow had even less public exhibition and thus accrued significance through Hill’s personal legacy in connection with post-Katrina New Orleans and OFM advocates’ lobbying efforts.

Indeed, Mauro goes on to explain that home movies have increasingly been inducted into the NFR as “representative or emblematic documents of a historical event or time . . . [that] all began as private expressions or recordings.”⁶⁶ Although advocates (many involved with the OFM) petitioned for home movies like Topaz (1945) and Think of Me First as a Person, these films represent and/or document marginalized histories and developed variable levels of public notoriety prior to their induction.⁶⁷ According to Mauro, these home moves traversed private and public boundaries through acts (by various actors) of collecting, exhibiting, and sponsorship. However, as student work by an unknown filmmaker, Scratch and Crow had very little public notoriety beyond niche cultural segments. Its leap from the margins to a national film canon reflects even more concerted sponsorship. For instance, OFM advocates navigated Scratch and Crow’s (and Hill’s) marginal, orphan status by classifying it as a student film. This student film category, created in 2007, can denote amateur films, experimental shorts, and/or early works of established auteurs. For example, Hill’s home movies/experimental films (e.g., Your New Pig Is Down the Road) lack discrete classifications, but Scratch and Crow is clearly associated with an institution, Cal Arts. At the same time, Hill produced many of her 16mm films (e.g., Madame Winger Makes a Film and Mouseholes) in Canada, with Canadian funding, thereby placing its national status into question.

Moreover, whereas the registry’s home movies imply representative or emblematic significance, student films largely connote importance based on authorial or aesthetic qualities. Other student films on the registry include works by acclaimed Hollywood directors like Martin Brest’s Hot Dogs for Gauguin (1972) and George Lucas’s Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB (1967). These titles are significant as reflections of canonical filmmakers’ origins and milieux. For Hill, this category contextualizes her animated short as representative of experimental, semiprofessional techniques. In turn, Scratch and Crow’s status as heritage is partly bound to its aesthetics. This distinguishes the title from other orphan works on the registry (e.g., home movies, educational films, and industrial films). Thus the title’s uncontested selection— by OFM advocates, NFPB representatives, and Billington—acutely illustrates the OFM’s and NFR’s shared investment in particular aesthetics and sensibilities.

As a student project, Scratch and Crow showcases Hill’s artisanal animation techniques. For instance, it emphasizes the interplay of movement and shadows generated by meticulously cut-out paper puppets— the first scene shows wind and rain blowing a paper cut-out anthropomorphic chicken’s comb and clothes. As illustrated in Figure 5, the film features an imperfectly shaped, yet playful 3-D paper chicken opening up its torso to reveal a cupboard of tiny teapots and trinkets. As previously stated, these DIY techniques resonate with the OFM’s preservation-oriented agendas. For the NFR, these practices connote forms of authenticity especially in distinction from Hollywood’s digital effects. Like Hill’s artisanal techniques, the film’s pastoral themes imply authenticity. In the South Carolina Educational Television network’s (SCETV) documentary Helen Hill: Celebrating a Life in Film, Hill’s mother explains that she made the film as a tribute to her aunt’s farm in Fairview, North Carolina. Scratch and Crow’s imagery—featuring

Figure 5.

Scratch and Crow’s cut-outpuppet.

Figure 6.

Hand-painted chickens and watermelons in Scratch and Crow.

renderings of watermelons, chickens, and eggs (Figure 6)— in concert with its sound track of clucking chickens, rain, and thunder signifies these pastoral sensibilities. The film is also a visual interpretation of one of Hill’s poems, and typewritten cards of the poem intercut throughout. The final title card reads,

If I knew, I would assure you we are allFinally good chickensAnd will rise together, A noisy flock of round, Dusty angels.

This rhetoric poignantly reflects Scratch and Crow’s pastoral themes, which conjure a nostalgic return to a more authentic existence.

When discussing the dynamics of cultural value, Karen Gracy explains that “it is stakeholders with power that establish value, differentiating among a multitude of objects to separate the permanent from the ephemeral,” and she goes on to claim that these stakeholders often work as part of larger institutions with authority to establish value.⁶⁸ As evidenced by Scratch and Crow and the number of home movies on the registry, OFM advocates are diverse stakeholders who influence the NFR’s decisions. However, Scratch and Crow is an exceptional case. Whereas other orphan films on the registry largely document and represent historically significant events, this film’s particular aesthetics and techniques align with the NFR’s vision of heritage. As Mauro’s study illustrates, the registry’s home movies—advocated by OFM stakeholders— accumulated notoriety and values in the public sphere (e.g., exhibitions, screenings). Scratch and Crow’s expedited route circumvented this public circulation. The film’s quick leap from the margins to a national film canon reflects a hegemonic power dynamic between OFM stakeholders and the NFR. Even though Billington was unaware of Hill’s circumstances, Scratch and Crow’s final selection is unsurprising considering its backing by NFPB representatives, its legitimacy as a student film, and its uncontroversial representation of artisanal filmmaking techniques and pastoral themes. To this end, Hill’s aesthetics and sensibilities connote authenticity that the NFR consecrates as American film heritage.

CONCLUSION

Although an independent filmmaker with limited exhibition, reproduction, or publicity during her lifetime, Hill’s abrupt and violent death in post-Katrina New Orleans transformed her legacy into a powerful symbol of American creativity in the wake of a devastating national event. To illustrate, Kate Trainor explained why she selected Hill’s home movies for MoMA’s 2009 To Save and Project exhibition: because of “Helen’s untimely and gruesome death I wanted people to learn about her and her passion for filmmaking.”⁶⁹ The disjuncture between Hill’s interstitial cinema and her legacy’s national symbolism motivated OFM advocates to quickly preserve and reproduce her work. However, reconciling Hill’s tragic yet nationally significant legacy with her interstitial filmmaking necessarily involved substantiating her cinema’s importance. Through preservation and consecration, OFM advocates have activated her work’s significance in relation to preservation-oriented agendas (e.g., national heritage) and film-specific aesthetics (e.g., small-gauge animation, DIY techniques). For this reason, as an OFM figurehead, Hill symbolically reaffirms these interests within and beyond the niche orphan community.

Hill’s sanctification has also influenced the OFM’s imperatives and cultural hierarchies. As previously discussed, the consecration of Hill’s student film entailed hegemonic power exchanges. Moreover, as evidenced by the Orphan Film Symposium’s Helen Hill Memorial Award, artists who resonate with her activism and aesthetics have been enshrined within the OFM’s institutional history. To clarify, Hill’s artistic merit is not in question— her films deserve to be distributed, screened, exhibited, and canonized. To conclude, Hill’s legacy, orphan filmmaking, the OFM, and its agendas warrant further academic attention. More importantly, continued attention to them as a composition will further understanding of each individual component and its relationships.