Series Site
September 13–October 28, 2023
For many years, Jerome Hiler only showed his films in intimate home screenings. He occasionally presented an illustrated talk, “Cinema Before 1300,” exploring his fascination with medieval stained glass. After a presentation at the Harvard Film Archive in 2017, Haden Guest proposed creating a digital version of the slide lecture, which is screened here for the first time. Complementing it are two programs of Hiler’s layered, luminous experimental films, which have recently come into BAMPFA’s collection, as well as Music Makes a City, reflecting another of his passions. Hiler recounts, “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.”