Jerome Hiler

Having started in New York during the New American Cinema movement, Hiler and his partner Nathaniel Dorsky moved in 1971 to San Francisco, where for many years his work was shown in the context of private salon screenings.

Hiler's work makes use of vivid colors, musical rhythms or structures, and layered superimpositions edited in camera.

He followed Jonas Mekas's column in The Village Voice and travelled into Manhattan to attend screenings at the Bleecker Street Cinema.

[2][3] After graduating high school, Hiler moved into a storefront in the East Village and took a job as a runner on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

He met filmmaker Gregory Markopoulos, who had cast a friend of Hiler's in The Illiac Passion, and moved into his Greenwich Village apartment.

[7] The two were projectionists and programmers at the local branch of the Sussex County Area Reference Library, which commissioned them to make an industrial film.

[2][7] Hiler re-established his practice of holding regular private screenings of his work; however, he did not complete or release any films for many years.

Named after a large rock with the word "acid" on it which appears in the opening, the film exists only as its original print and did not receive distribution.

Around this time, Hiler began releasing films regularly, motivated to work his footage into fixed form after seeing the difficulty of dealing with unedited reels left behind by other filmmakers after their deaths.

[1][2] Wheeler Winston Dixon has described Hiler's films as works in which "everyday objects, places, things and people are transformed into integers of light, creating a sinuous tapestry of restless imagistic construction.

"[1] An Artforum review of Words of Mercury by P. Adams Sitney described him as part of the "rare company of significant if almost invisible filmmakers of the American avant-garde cinema.