Helen Hill at the Harvard Film Archive
by Amy Sloper
The Harvard Film Archive has been the home for Helen Hill’s work since 2007. The story of the material’s arrival to the archive, and the spirit of collaboration and innovation that characterized this process has been well documented, as has her introduction to the archival community through Orphans. The preservation history of Hill’s ten most well-known titles and her home movie reels has also been documented, though we at the HFA hope to gather this information in one place in the coming months to facilitate easier research access to this information. (Stay tuned to the HFA’s Helen Hill Collection page for those details!)
Perhaps we take this for granted, but the mere presence of material within an archive, with clear processes for access, can have a profound effect on the placement of that material within larger cultural conversations. Preservation of unique films benefits this inclusion even further. So can an active willingness to share, by both the copyright holder and by the archives. With the blessing of Hill’s family, the HFA has striven to maintain Helen’s lived values, much like the Orphan Film Symposium has, by making materials easily available for loan and viewing. And to what end? Within the academic sphere we find many excellent examples, and I’ll just cite the most recent instance: Ann Major’s article “Sweet Magic: The Preservation of Helen Hill’s Cinema,” in the Spring 2019 issue of The Moving Image.
It’s more difficult to precisely characterize the ways the materials have permeated culture beyond the academic sphere, but we can lean on the statistics for some help. Since the start of the HFA’s thirteen year collaboration with Helen Hill, our “Helen Hill Shorts Program” has been loaned over 50 times to venues such as the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, the Museum of Modern Art, Flex Fest, and Chicago Filmmakers. Additionally, her films are available for viewing on a Vimeo page dedicated to her work created by Paul Gailiunas, and increasingly also on the HFA’s Helen Hill Collection page. In the coming year, we will also be making available a DCP of the shorts program. So we can safely say that Helen’s creative embodiments of “self expression, collaboration, generosity, liberal spirituality, activism, love, play, community, and connection” have touched the minds of too many to count.
— Amy Sloper
Rain Dance (Helen Hill, 1990). HFA item #11552
Digital scan from 16mm created at Harvard Media Preservation Services March 2020, color grading done by BB Optics May 2020.
Preservation report on the 2007 preservation done by Bill Brand, BB Optics, Colorlad, Paul Gailiunas, Matthew Butterick, and NYU students Sarah Resnick, Joshua Ranger, Lauren Sorensen, and Loni Shibuyama.