The Tree

A portrait of the noble American Elm standing at the center of Tompkins Square Park in the East Village known as “The Hare Krishna Tree” (because the Hare Krishna movement was founded under it in the Fall of 1966, with Allen Ginsberg in attendance). You can see some of the dryads here within if you don’t blink. I had shot a B&W reversal camera roll of this tree as my contribution to the “A Roll for Peter” memorial for Peter Hutton and, happy with the result, pursued it further, adding color negative even. In the mid-1970’s as I was beginning to work in film I started an in-depth study of discontinuous single-frame editing as perceptual enhancement training, a kind of dynamic cubism, making such films as GEORGE on the optical printer, but after a year I could no longer sit for days on end in a darkened room clicking a frame at a time and decided to wait until computers were available to assist me. So this footage, 40 years later, filmed primarily as continuous shots over all four seasons, has been deconstructed into single frames, reconstructed through a variety of scored arrangements, and edited into a composition in Adobe Premiere on my laptop. .

More Texts

Viennale Katalogtext 2019

Dem 2016 verstorbenen Peter Hutton ist eine Baumbetrachtung gewidmet, in der sich die tonlose Magie des Mediums ausdrückt, wie sie auch der große Avantgardist Hutton zu evozieren verstand: von statischen Einstellungen ausgehend einen genauen Blick zu entwickeln, der die Dinge in einem buchstäblich neuen Licht zu zeigen vermag. Kino als Methode der Wahrnehmung von Licht und Bewegung, als Mittel der Weltbeobachtung und hier: als Porträt jener Amerikanischen Ulme, unter der 1966 die Hare-Krishna-Bewegung gegründet wurde. (Roman Scheiber)

Viennale catalogue text 2019

As its title implies, Hills’ latest film focuses on a very specific tree, one growing in New York’s Tompkins Square Park. It is said to be the tree under which the “Hare Krishna” chant was invented, and is as such legendary in the history of spirituality, the Beat movement, and the city itself. Hills shows the tree in all possible states of being: bare branches, green and lush, from up close and far away, in color and in black-and-white. Using frame-by-frame editing, THE TREE moves through multiple visual ideas, becoming by turns semi-structuralist, psychotronic, and a meditative mandala. (Michael Sicinski)
Orig. Title
The Tree
Year
2019
Countries
USA, Austria
Duration
10 min
Director
Henry Hills
Category
Avantgarde/Arts
Orig. Language
No Dialogue
Downloads
The Tree (Image)
The Tree (Image)
Credits
Director
Henry Hills
Concept & Realization
Henry Hills
Available Formats
DCP 2K flat (Distribution Copy)
Sound Format
silent
Frame Rate
25 fps
Color Format
colour, b/w
Digital File (prores, h264) (Distribution Copy)
Festivals (Selection)
2019
Rotterdam - Int. Filmfestival
Wien - Viennale - Int. Filmfestwochen
München - UnderDox, Festival für Dokument und Experiment
2021
Marseille - RISC Rencontres Int. Sciences et Film