Words of Mercury

"WORDS OF MERCURY is my loving farewell to color reversal 16mm film. The Bolex camera, which has served me so well for over fifty years, became a container for a process of distillation. I wanted to extract as much as I could from my remaining rolls of Ektachrome 7285. Film emulsion is so rich with latent colors and images, it was a simple decision to make a film of superimpositions which were all shot in the camera. Anyone who has tried this knows how difficult and sometimes cruel the process can be. In the past, I had renounced it more than a few times in defeat. It's especially hard when shooting four or more layers. But I had my inspiration from a lifetime of musical listening to polyphonic choral music from the middle ages and renaissance - so many pieces in four to six voices. As it developed, only the passages I shot in four layers were satisfying to me, even though all four might not be perceived on the screen since some were sub-visual and some imitated other layers. [...] The film takes a journey from darkness and a bare world through the seasonal spreading of seeds to a place almost choked and repugnant with color - a place that invites death. The final couplet from Shakespeare's LOVE'S LABOR'S LOST speaking of the place of death, supplies me with my title. I seem to make the same film again and again in different ways." -- Jerome Hiler, https://canyoncinema.com/catalog/film/?i=4579