Subtle

The films of Henry Hills exemplify a kind of cinematic sleight of hand. They accomplish certain perceptual tricks that, upon inspection, are profoundly logical, grounded in the basic physical facts of sound and image. His filmmaking has been analogically connected to his work as a materialist poet, and now with Subtle, Hills turns his style of radical compression to language itself, specifically the presence of subtitles on foreign-language films.

Beginning with a countdown, Subtle turns immediately to the spoken presence of numbers in films, followed by a brief consideration of the act of reading. Books give way to written equations, obscenities, the simple act of saying “I don’t know.” All these gestures are composed of language but are also speech acts, instances in which words, spoken as well as written, perform a kind of supporting role. The naming of emotions, or deictic words such as “this” and “now,” exist as dialog but also impress themselves onto the diegetic worlds as function, direction, timekeeping.

But words have a way of combining into sentences, and sentences tend to form into concepts. As Subtle progresses, Hills presents much more complex and abstract phrases, relating to the nature of filmic and linguistic reality as well as the place of human subjectivity and consciousness. From fragments of spoken language, Hills builds a brief cosmology, moving from mere pointing and counting into philosophical and theological territory. Words do not merely float on the surface of the image but conjure a network of new intelligibility. Subtitles are embossed on the surface of the film, but language itself is embossed on the fictional universe. The difference between “subtle” and “subtitle,” after all, is that ineffable something – the “it.” (Michael Sicinski)