Thursday August 6 * 7pm * $10-20 * TICKETS

Helen Hill was an experimental animator, filmmaker, educator, artist, writer and social activist who lived her last years in New Orleans, Louisiana. Featuring puppets, hand-drawn animation, found footage and hand-processing techniques, Hill's short films—including Bohemian Town (2004), Madame Winger Makes a Film: A Survival Guide for the 21st Century (2001) and Mouseholes (1999)—have been screened at festivals all over the world. She is also the author of a lavishly illustrated and self-published book called Recipes for Disaster which compiles techniques for hand-processing film. This modest, spirited compendium became essential in the film/art classroom and continues to inspire amateur and experimental filmmakers around the world.

Tragically, Helen Hill was murdered by a random intruder in her New Orleans home in the early morning of January 4, 2007, one of six murders in New Orleans in a single twenty-four-hour period. 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 organized and donated by Paul Gailiunas to the Harvard Film Archive that same year. Shortly thereafter, guided by the coordination efforts of Dan Streible, ten of her films were preserved by Harvard and Colorlab. One title, Rain Dance (1990), was preserved at Colorlab, under the direction of Bill Brand as an NYU MIAP project, and all were put back into distribution in late 2007.

In December, 2009, the Library of Congress named Hill’s film Scratch and Crow (1995) to the National Film Registry, a list of aesthetically, historically and culturally significant American motion pictures. The Library’s news release stated: "Helen Hill’s student film was made at the California Institute of the Arts. Consistent with the short films she made from age eleven until her death at thirty-six, this animated short work is filled with vivid color and a light sense of humor. It is also a poetic and spiritual homage to animals and the human soul."

Thanks to the Harvard Film Archive for making the screening possible.