Helen Hill - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Helen Hill was an American animation

Animation

Animation is the rapid display of a sequence of images of 2-D or 3-D artwork or model positions in order to create an illusion of movement. The effect is an optical illusion of motion due to the phenomenon of persistence of vision, and can be created and demonstrated in several ways...

filmmaker and social activist who lived in New Orleans, Louisiana

New Orleans, Louisiana

New Orleans is a major United States port and the largest city and metropolitan area in the state of Louisiana. The New Orleans metropolitan area has a population of 1,235,650 as of 2009, the 46th largest in the USA. The New Orleans – Metairie – Bogalusa combined statistical area has a population...

.

In the pre-dawn hours of January 4, 2007, Hill was murdered by a random intruder in her New Orleans home. Her death (which was one of six murders in New Orleans that day), coupled with the murder a week before of well-known New Orleans musician Dinerral Shavers

Dinerral Shavers

Dinerral "Dick" Shavers was a jazz drummer and educator from New Orleans, Louisiana.Shavers was best known musically as a founding member of the Hot 8 Brass Band...

, sparked widespread civic outrage in New Orleans, and inspired thousands to march against the rampant and continuing post-Katrina violence in New Orleans. This "March Against Violence on City Hall" drew significant press coverage throughout the United States and the rest of the world.

Biography

Helen Hill was a native of Columbia, South Carolina

Columbia, South Carolina

Columbia is the state capital and largest city in the U.S. state of South Carolina. The population was 129,272 according to the 2010 census. Columbia is the county seat of Richland County, but a portion of the city extends into neighboring Lexington County. The city is the center of a metropolitan...

, where she lived until graduating from Dreher High School in 1988. She identified herself as a Southerner (though after marrying her husband Paul Gailiunas, a Canadian citizen originally from Edmonton, Alberta, she later became a dual US-Canadian citizen), and had deep roots in her home city of Columbia. Her mother, Becky, named her Helen Wingard Hill after her own mother, Helen Addison Wingard, another Columbian.

Helen Hill began creating short animated films at age eleven. After the documentary filmmaker Stan Woodward visited her fifth-grade class, she made a stop-motion Super 8 film that she entitled The House of Sweet Magic (1981). Made on a tabletop at home, it shows a toy dinosaur attacking a gingerbread house. That same year she and her classmates (Shack Allison, Kevin Curtis, Cissy Fowler, Brannon Gregg, and Creighton Waters, assisted by Susan Leonard of the South Carolina Arts Commission and teacher Penelope Rawl) made another Super 8 movie as part of a statewide filmmaking-in-the-classroom initiative. Quacks, a live action film with a musical track recorded separately on audiocassette tape, is a comic vignette featuring a person in a duck costume interacting with school children at their bus stop.

Hill earned her A.B. at Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

in 1992, where she majored in English and minored in Visual and Environmental Studies, the academic department housing film-making. While at Harvard she made the 16mm animated short "Rain Dance" as well as two other animated films.

After graduating from Harvard in 1992, Hill and fellow Harvard '92 classmate Paul Gailiunas -merely a close friend at the time- headed to New Orleans for the summer, drawn to the city's vibrant arts and music culture and its progressive social sensibility. That summer they fell in love, and Hill and Gailiunas were married in Columbia, SC two years later.

Hill further developed her artistic work while completing her Masters of Fine Arts degree at California Institute of the Arts

California Institute of the Arts

The California Institute of the Arts, commonly referred to as CalArts, is located in Valencia, in Los Angeles County, California. It was incorporated in 1961 as the first degree-granting institution of higher learning in the United States created specifically for students of both the visual and the...

. Upon her graduation from CalArts in 1995, she moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia

City of Halifax

Halifax is a city in Canada, which was the capital of the province of Nova Scotia and shire town of Halifax County. It was the largest city in Atlantic Canada until it was amalgamated into Halifax Regional Municipality in 1996...

, Canada where Gailiunas was attending Dalhousie University

Dalhousie University

Dalhousie University is a public research university located in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. The university comprises eleven faculties including Schulich School of Law and Dalhousie University Faculty of Medicine. It also includes the faculties of architecture, planning and engineering located at...

Medical School. Hill continued to create films and teach film animation at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (now NSCAD University) and at the Atlantic Filmmakers Cooperative (AFCOOP). Hill and Gailiunas lived in Halifax's culturally diverse but economically depressed North End

North End, Halifax

The North End of Halifax is a neighbourhood located in the urban core of Nova Scotia's Halifax Regional Municipality, occupying the northern part of the Halifax Peninsula.-Geography:...

(which she paid tribute to in her 2004 film Bohemian Town).

On December 17, 2000, the couple returned to New Orleans with their cat Nola and their pot-bellied pig Rosie, settling in the Mid-City

Mid-City New Orleans

Mid-City is a neighborhood of the city of New Orleans. A subdistrict of the Mid-City District Area, its boundaries as defined by the City Planning Commission are: City Park Avenue, Toulouse Street, North Carrollton and Orleans Avenues, Bayou St. John and St. Louis Street to the north, North Broad...

district. On October 15, 2004, Hill gave birth to their son, Francis Pop.

Hill continued to teach animation through the New Orleans Video Access Center (NOVAC) and through the New Orleans Film Collective, which she co-founded with other members of the local film community.

In August 2005, Hill and family were temporarily displaced and lost most of their possessions due to the Hurricane Katrina

Hurricane Katrina

Hurricane Katrina of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season was a powerful Atlantic hurricane. It is the costliest natural disaster, as well as one of the five deadliest hurricanes, in the history of the United States. Among recorded Atlantic hurricanes, it was the sixth strongest overall...

levee failures

Levee failures in Greater New Orleans, 2005

In 29 August 2005 there were over 50 failures of the levees and flood walls protecting New Orleans, Louisiana, and its suburbs following passage of Hurricane Katrina and landfall in Mississippi. The levee and flood wall failures caused flooding in 80% of New Orleans and all of St. Bernard Parish...

, which flooded their Mid City home along with some 80% of the city. She relocated to Columbia, South Carolina

Columbia, South Carolina

for a year, where the family was in the company of relatives. Despite the slow rebuilding process in the post-Katrina months, Hill persuaded her husband, in part by rallying friends to participate in an ingenious postcard campaign, to return to New Orleans with their son. She continued both her art and her activism, which was focused on helping local grassroots endeavors aimed at rebuilding the city. She was a visiting artist at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts

New Orleans Center for Creative Arts

New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, or NOCCA, is a professional arts training center for secondary school-age children. NOCCA is located in New Orleans, Louisiana. The school offers instruction in creative writing, dance, media arts, music, theatre arts, and visual arts, with a summer culinary...

Death

Helen Hill was murdered about 5:30 in the morning on January 4, 2007 by an unknown intruder in her home in the Faubourg Marigny

Faubourg Marigny

The Marigny is a neighborhood of the city of New Orleans. A subdistrict of the Bywater District Area, its boundaries as defined by the City Planning Commission are: North Rampart Street and St...

neighborhood. Her husband was shot three times and survived; their toddler son was uninjured. Shortly before, the alleged intruder had attempted a robbery of a bed and breakfast just a few houses down the street, and the police were questioning the owners when they heard gunshots at Hill's house.

As of January 2011 the New Orleans Police Department has made no arrests in the case, despite a $15,000 Crimestoppers reward being in effect for any information leading to an indictment.

Hill's murder was one of a spate of killings in the first week of 2007 in New Orleans, prompting civic outrage that culminated in a march on City Hall on January 11, 2007.

Film and artwork

In filmmaking technique, Hill took much of her inspiration for two-dimensional silhouette puppets from animation pioneer Lotte Reiniger

Lotte Reiniger

Charlotte "Lotte" Reiniger was a German silhouette animator and film director.- Early life :Lotte Reiniger was born in Berlin-Charlottenburg, German Empire, on June 2, 1899...

. Hill's films also incorporated many other animation techniques, such as three-dimensional stop motion, three-dimensional puppets, cel cycles, and drawing-on-film. In the mid-1990s, Hill became attracted to more do-it-yourself methods of filmmaking, such as hand processing and tinting or toning images by hand. In 1999 and 2000, she attended Phil Hoffman's Independent Imaging Retreat in Mount Forest, Ontario

Mount Forest, Ontario

Mount Forest is an unincorporated community located on the junction of the 6 and the 89 in the township of Wellington North, Ontario. The town's motto is "High, Happy, Healthy", which can be seen on the water tower when approaching the town from the south....

, Canada, to develop her hand-processing technical skills. Hand-crafted film techniques found their way into her film work, most notably in Mouseholes (1999) and Madame Winger Makes a Film (2001).

In addition to her body of work in film, Hill took on other roles from time to time, curating The Ladies' Film Bee program at the 2000 Splice This! Super 8 Film Festival (Toronto) and compiling/editing a reference book of hand-crafted film techniques (Recipes for Disaster: a Handcrafted Film Cookbooklet 2001, revised 2004). After Hurricane Katrina, Hill's interests in film expanded into archiving, and she gave several lectures at CalArts and other schools promoting do-it-yourself techniques for archiving and restoring motion picture film. The moving image archivist Kara Van Malssen worked with Hill as part of her New York University master's thesis, Disaster Planning and Recovery: Post-Katrina Lessons for Mixed Media Collections.

Hill was an award-winning filmmaker and was featured in several high-profile film festivals (such as the Ann Arbor Film Festival

Ann Arbor Film Festival

The Ann Arbor Film Festival is an annual film festival held in Ann Arbor in the U.S. state of Michigan. Established in 1963, it is the third-oldest film festival in North America ; and the oldest experimental film festival...

). In 2004, she was awarded a Media Arts Fellowship Grant by the Rockefeller Foundation

Rockefeller Foundation

The Rockefeller Foundation is a prominent philanthropic organization and private foundation based at 420 Fifth Avenue, New York City. The preeminent institution established by the six-generation Rockefeller family, it was founded by John D. Rockefeller , along with his son John D. Rockefeller, Jr...

for her achievements in film. She used this award to begin production on The Florestine Collection, an animated film inspired by a collection of about 100 hand-sewn dresses she found in a garbage pile in New Orleans in 2001. This film is still in production, being completed by Paul Gailiunas and friends.

In 2007, Harvard Film Archive established the Helen Hill Collection, a repository of films, drawings, photographs, art works, writings, music, and ephemera. Ten of Hill's animated and experimental works are available for archival loan and exhibition as a compilation reel of 16mm film prints.

In March 2008, New York University organized "Anywhere: A Tribute to Artist and Activist Helen Hill," an evening of newly preserved work by and about Hill. The screening opened the 6th Orphan Film Symposium in New York. NYU's Department of Cinema Studies, the University of South Carolina's Film Studies Program, and the Nickelodeon Theatre presented the inaugural Helen Hill Awards to filmmakers Naomi Uman and Jimmy Kinder for their works "affirming Helen Hill's artistic legacy, lived values, and everyday passions."

On December 30, 2009, the Librarian 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 11 until her death at 36, 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. http://www.loc.gov/film/NFR2009.pdf

Filmography

The House of Sweet Magic (1981)
Quacks (1981, with classmates at Brennen Elementary School)
Rain Dance (1990, reconstructed 2007) Preservation History
Upperground Show (1991)
Vessel (1992)
No Smoking in the Theater (1995)
The World's Smallest Fair (1995)
Scratch and Crow
Scratch and Crow
Scratch and Crow is a student film by Helen Hill made at the California Institute of the Arts. Consistent with the short films she made from age 11 until her death at 36, this animated short work is filled with vivid color and a light sense of humor...

(1995)
Tunnel of Love (1996)
"Fast Fax" for CBC-TV’s StreetCents (1997–1998)
I Love Nola (1998)
Your New Pig is Down the Road (1999)
Mouseholes (1999)
Film for Rosie (2000)
Madame Winger Makes a Film (2001)
Five Spells (2001)
[New Orleans Video Access Center poetry project film] (ca. 2002–05)
Termite Light (2003, with Courtney Egan)
Rosie Wonders What to Wear (2003) Gothtober
film for Haley Lou Haden's By Bread Alone (ca. 2003)
film for Haden's puppet theater One Life, Magic Cone (ca. 2003)
Gothtober Baby (2004) Gothtober
Bohemian Town (2004)
Halloween in New Orleans (2005) Gothtober

16mm blowup, flood-damaged Super 8 home movies (2006) Audio, Helen Hill introducing this film
Cleveland Street Gap (2006, with Courtney Egan)
A Monster in New Orleans (2006) Gothtober
More than forty Super 8 films, home movies (early 1990s - January 2007)
The Florestine Collection, a film by Helen Hill, completed by Paul Gailiunas; in post-production for scheduled completion in 2010.

In 2008, Peripheral Produce, a Portland-based distributor of experimental films, released the compilation DVD The House of Sweet Magic: Films By Helen Hill. The compilation includes: Tunnel of Love; Madame Winger Makes a Film; Scratch and Crow; Your New Pig is Down the Road; The World's Smallest Fair; Vessel; Film for Rosie; Mouseholes; Bohemian Town.

Also, Helen Hill appears in

• Film Farm Dance (2001, Becka Barker)

• Phil’s Film Farm (2002, John Porter; dedicated to Helen Hill)

• Working Portraits (2005, Maïa Cybelle Carpenter)

• Orphan Ist. View (2006, Lauren Heath, Erin Curtis, and Mike Johns)

• [Home Movie Day New Orleans] (2006, Kelli Shay Hicks)

• Interview with Helen Hill at the 5th Orphan Film Symposium (2006, Lauren Heath, Erin Curtis, and Mike Johns), in which she answers the question "What is an orphan film

Orphan film

An orphan film is a motion picture work that has been abandoned by its owner or copyright holder; also, any film that has suffered neglect.-History:...

?"

• Helen Hill: Celebrating a Life in Film (2007, SCETV) Southern Lens, SCETV.org

+ "One Year Later, New Orleans Grieves for Artists," 20-min. report by Noah Adams, All Things Considered, NPR, December 25, 2007. NPR.org audio

+ "Storm of Murder," CBS 48 Hours Mystery (October 13, 2007)

Also,

• Writer Edward Sanders (of the band The Fugs) published "Ode to Helen Hill" (2007), a 3,000-word "biographic poem on the New Orleans filmmaker," in Woodstock Journal.

• Helen LaBelle (1957), an animated film by Lotte Reiniger, was restored by the Deutsches Filminstitut in 2008; the restoration's end credit reads in part: "in memory of Helen Hill (1970-2007), animator and Lotte Reiniger devotee."

• Francis Pop's Hallowe'en Parade (2007, Francis Pop Gailiunas and Paul Gailiunas) is dedicated to Helen. Gothtober

Activism

Helen Hill was a life-long peace

Peace

Peace is a state of harmony characterized by the lack of violent conflict. Commonly understood as the absence of hostility, peace also suggests the existence of healthy or newly healed interpersonal or international relationships, prosperity in matters of social or economic welfare, the...

activist and advocate of several grassroots social justice

Social justice

Social justice generally refers to the idea of creating a society or institution that is based on the principles of equality and solidarity, that understands and values human rights, and that recognizes the dignity of every human being. The term and modern concept of "social justice" was coined by...

causes. Together with her husband, Dr. Paul Gailiunas, she helped initiate the Free Food Organization in Halifax in 1996. This later became a part of Food Not Bombs

Food Not Bombs

Food Not Bombs is a loose-knit group of independent collectives, serving free vegan and vegetarian food to others. Food Not Bombs' ideology is that myriad corporate and government priorities are skewed to allow hunger to persist in the midst of abundance...

, and is still in operation. Also with her husband, she initiated several anti-smoking and anti-tobacco sponsorship campaigns. She was also a vegan and an avid animal rights activist, lending her support to rescue sanctuaries for pot-bellied pig

Pot-bellied pig

The pot-bellied pig is a breed of domesticated pig originating in Vietnam.-Description:Considerably smaller than standard American or European farm pigs, most adult pot-bellied pigs are about the size of a medium- or large-breed dog, though their bodies are denser at 8 to 136 kg...

s and other abandoned pets

Abandoned pets

Abandoned pets are pets that are, for instance, left behind when a home goes into foreclosure or their owner passes away. These animals can be left alone on the property or dropped off at a shelter. While some are left in a shelter, they are typically discovered after the foreclosure process when...

External links

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