Jerome Hiler Retrospective at Berkeley Art Museum This Month

STILL: JEROME HILER’S WORDS OF MERCURY (2011), FEATURED IN THE PROGRAM ILLUMINATIONS: JEROME HILER. SOURCE: BERKELEY ART MUSEUM/PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE.

Since September, the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive has hosted a retrospective of the work of experimental filmmaker, painter, and stained glass artist Jerome Hiler. The show runs through October 28th, 2023, and is co-sponsored by Canyon Cinema.

This program is particularly precious considering the previous availability — or lack thereof — of Hiler’s films. Until this point, Hiler typically showed his films in intimate home screenings. Recently, BAM/PFA acquired Hiler’s works of avant-garde cinema for their collection, and now present them in conjunction with his stained glass work and visual art at large. Hiler noted the connection between his stained glass and visual work, and his filmmaking, writing for BAM/PFA’s program notes:

I work in stained glass. Though, in recent years, I have put more of my efforts into filmmaking, I’ve found myself transferring physical techniques, such as painting and abrading, to my film work. But from my earliest film efforts over fifty years ago, I drew inspiration from the idea that my films were to be like stained glass glowing in a space of sacred darkness. I knew that both my film work and stained glass itself were based on a discontinuity given an illusory wholeness by the blessings of light. In our time, we have seen cinema rise and fall in a comparable period. Also, technological developments that have replaced film, to my eyes, have appreciably downgraded visual interest. I am still a filmmaker. I shoot film out of love for film. I am loyal to my loves. Not only to film, but to the light of the projector—and the soft, reflective light of the screen. This is hardly a match for the glorious starlight that flows through glass, but it echoes the reflected light of the moon, that first of all films and most beloved of all revivals.

Despite Hiler’s resistance to showing his films publicly in the past, he and his partner Nathaniel Dorsky were nonetheless key members of the underground film community in New York City in the 1960s. Notably, Hiler worked at the Film-Makers’ Cooperative and was the first projectionist for Andy Warhol’s The Chelsea Girls (1965) — a now-iconic avant-garde feature that, decades later, proves distinctly emblematic of the era’s downtown scene and its colorful figures.

Hiler and Dorsky also appear in the work of Warren Sonbert, whose catalogue of experimental films, dating back to the 1960s, is exclusively represented by Gartenberg Media Enterprises. Notably, Hiler and Dorsky show up in the final sequence of Sonbert’s THE TENTH LEGION (1967), which depicts the filmmaker’s college-age friends at work and play, wandering the streets of New York City, lounging, shopping, and posing for the camera. As evident in the clips excerpted below, THE TENTH LEGION stylistically exemplifies Sonbert’s masterful use of a constantly moving hand-held camera trailing his teenage protagonists in choreographed fashion, as well as chiaroscuro lighting effects in interior scenes. THE TENTH LEGION is currently available on a worldwide basis as a DSL download from GME.

Hiler and Dorsky also appear alongside eminent Hollywood filmmaker Douglas Sirk in the final moments of Sonbert’s NOBLESSE OBLIGE (1981). The film is, to quote GME President Jon Gartenberg, “a masterfully edited work that features imagery… of protests in San Francisco following the murders of Mayor George Moscone and Councilman Harvey Milk at the hands of Dan White. Sonbert modeled the structure of this film on Sirk’s TARNISHED ANGELS.” Sonbert’s montage films, including NOBLESSE OBLIGE, will be available as DSLs from GME in 2024.

Hiler and Dorsky’s appearances in the aforementioned Sonbert films can be viewed here: