Listen to the audio version of this essay on Soundcloud. (Listening time: 9 minutes 44 seconds)
Callum Hill’s camera often drifts up. It lifts not to the heavens, but to more earthbound points of light, sometimes no higher than the ceiling: a buzzing fluorescent tube in ‘E-Minor’ (2024), a solitary bar hanging over the entrance of a prayer room within the Tate Britain in ‘Crowtrap’ (2018), and a honeycomb fixture in Mexico City’s Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in ‘Solo Damas’ (2016). There is a searching quality to these shots, all of which are handheld, as if the camera is trying to read the lights, perhaps in the way that ancient philosophers studied the stars. In Hill’s films, one gets the sense that these lowlier points of light contain cryptic knowledge. The camera lingers on them. It even seems to squint.
Constellations are ways of making meaning, of drawing imaginary lines between celestial bodies whose positions we refuse to believe are merely the result of chaos. They insist, rather, that there is significance to the stars, not to mention the sounds and images that appear before us like signs, that reveals a secret logic to life on earth. Hill, however, is not in the business of divination. Instead, her films look backward in time, sifting through the ruins of modern life. In a Benjaminian fashion, they gather the traces of what Hill describes, in ‘E-Minor’, as “erratic clues of how we got here,” which, in that film, may mean: snippets of people uttering words beginning with the letter E: “empty, extraordinary, emergency”; a memory Hill recounts of a tile featuring the face of a clown in her grandparents’ Staten Island basement; home movie footage of a man atop a mound of dirt in what would later become Battery Park City, the Twin Towers jutting out in the background; a chicken cutlet sizzling in a bath of hot oil; a boy in a VR headset swiping at invisible targets. “Just because you can’t see something, it doesn’t mean it’s not there,” reads a line of text across a black screen. For the viewer, this is as instructive as it is descriptive. Look deeper, the films insist.
‘E-Minor’, Callum Hill, 2024 .
Hill’s works travel widely in space and in time. They reach as far back as the prehistoric megalith of Stonehenge and the Aztec waterways of Xochimilco (sow·chee·meel·ko), to the contemporary tragedy of the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017. There is no guide, so to speak, but, instead, resonance, attraction, and heat. “Heat transference, emotional transference,” she murmurs several times in ‘Crowtrap’, as though historical events, words, feelings, and songs, could rub against and even ignite one another—that’s how densely layered they are. In ‘The Poetics and Politics of Everyday Life’, Kristin Ross describes a similar logic: for her (reading Fredric Jameson), the private eyes of post-1968 French detective fiction are a kind of “social optic [that] apprehends the context that articulates historical events with each other and with the present.” Their perspective “[makes] vestiges of older times emerge without the least excavation, a moving decor of urban events, more or less recalled, instantaneously, as the product of a glance.”[1]
In Hill’s films, the result is disorienting, to say the least. (I recommend watching each film at least three times.)
‘Crowtrap’, Callum Hill, 2018
But why should history be laid out neatly, when its events have been so messy, so violent? Hill is charting no less than “a history of human error,” as she gravely intones in ‘E-Minor’. The line recalls Walter Benjamin’s famous dictum on history, which appears also in the epilogue to Jameson’s ‘The Political Unconscious’: “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” [2] Even the practices that seem most benign, the most timeless, like the seasonal burning of heather in ‘Crowtrap’, or the pilgrims gathered for the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe in ‘Solo Damas’, conceal historical harms – the former the reshaping of the English moorland, the latter the demise of the Aztec civilisation through the apparition of the Virgin Mary to a Mexican peasant in 1531. Meanwhile, a coal yard in ‘Crowtrap’ is encased by relocated segments of the Berlin Wall, and Hill pauses to study the remains of a wheat-pasted poster and the faded graffiti on its surface. She seems to peer through the image to the barbarism that underlies it; like the detective Ross describes, she finds the past inscribed on the verso of the present, both sides visible like a page held up to the light.
Fire appears regularly in Hill’s films, both metaphorical and literal, both purifying and destructive. In ‘Crowtrap’, she describes Mary Richardson, a suffragette who in 1913 slashed a Velázquez painting in the National Gallery, as “apparently a fascist but most importantly an arsonist.” The politics may be murky, but what is brilliantly clear is the act itself: the fire, the blade that sliced into the rounded back of the Rokeby Venus. As Hill muses on Richardson’s deeds, she traverses the gallery containing the works of J.M.W. Turner, and corrodes the film with bleach and cleaning agents, leaving streaks like paint or bloodstains on the surface of the image. Richardson’s rage matches the anger with which Hill admits she began the film. An anger that finds its way to other fires. In ‘British Summer’ (2017), which was shot at the same time as ‘Crowtrap’, the spectre of Grenfell looms like ash in the air, while revelers gather for the Summer Solstice at Stonehenge, blithely unaware of or unwilling to face the nearby disaster. Fires can be ignored, and they can also conceal. The burning heather of ‘Crowtrap’ becomes, in Hill’s view, the sign of a complicit act: “a controlled cleansing – of the past.”
A slower burn occurs with ‘Solo Damas’s’ scenes from the Island of the Dolls, on Teshuilo Island. There, as legend goes, Don Julian Santana Barrera, who had abruptly left his family behind in Mexico City, discovered a girl’s body washed ashore, then shortly after, a doll. Santana Barrera found more dolls and strung them up in trees, eventually amassing hundreds of morbid ornaments. Santana Barrera drowned on the island in 2001, but the dolls remain. Hill films their plastic cheeks blistered by sunlight, their chubby limbs darkened. A fire burns in the distance amid an eerie quiet. There’s far more mystery than clarity, but that may have also been the case in Santana Barrera’s time, even to himself. “Perhaps the belongings we left behind are meant for someone else,” Hill surmises in voiceover.
‘Solo Damas’, Callum Hill, 2016
What are we to make of all these traces, still smoldering from recent and distant fires? What of our detective-historian? One answer is Hill herself. She puts herself in her films, her voice a constant presence, and her image sometimes in frame, like when she’s being irradiated by the blue light of a tanning chamber in ‘Crowtrap’. We are with her as she travels, and gets snagged by elements of the past, like the clown tile excavated from memory, then literally retrieved: an image from underground, brought up to the light. But this shared, wretched past is not Hill’s alone. It belongs to all of us. Hill refrains from explanation—the cognitive map is far too complex to comprehend all at once. Instead, she compels us to do the far more difficult task of noticing, as she describes in ‘E-Minor’, the “watchtowers and looming signs.” To figure out, for ourselves, the signs of how we got here. First step: follow the fire.
_______________________________________________________________________
[1] Kristin Ross, ‘The Poetics and Politics of Everyday Life’ (Verso: New York and London, 2022), pps. 238 and 227.
[2] Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn (Schocken Books, New York. 2007), p. 256
_______________________________________________________________________
Genevieve Yue is an associate professor of Culture and Media and director of the Screen Studies program at Eugene Lang College, The New School. She is co-editor of the Cutaways book series at Fordham University Press, a member of the October advisory board, and an independent film programmer. Her essays and criticism have appeared in ASAP/Journal, Film Comment, Film Quarterly, Grey Room, MUBI Notebook Magazine, October, Representations, Reverse Shot, The Times Literary Supplement, World Records, and elsewhere. She is the author of Girl Head: Feminism and Film Materiality (2020), and is currently working on two book projects: one on trains and cinema, and the other on the material history of Hollywood.
