Milk pours from a plastic container into a woman's mouth. The woman swallows it, dribbles it back at the container, and spits it out.

Head

Henry Hills’s Emma’s Dilemma reinvents the portrait for the age of digital reproduction. In a set of tour-de-force probes into the images and essences of such downtown luminaries as Richard Foreman, Ken Jacobs, and Carolee Schneemann, Hills’s cinematic inventions literally turn the screen upside down and inside out. In this epic journey into the picaresque, we follow Emma Bee Bernstein, our intrepid protagonist, from her pre-teen innocence to her late teen-attitude, as she learns about the downtown art scene firsthand. In the process, Hills reimagines the art of video in a style that achieves the density, complexity, and visual richness of his greatest films.

Emma's Dilemma

Writes Donegan: "... The video is the centerpiece of a large project comprised of paintings and video inspired by the Jean-Luc Godard film Le Mépris. This project does not seek to analyze or critique the Godard film, but to use it as a model, as an inspiration, as a 'classical' language through which other stories can be told... I myself 'play' the roles of both Camille (B. Bardot) and Paul (M. Piccoli). In the Godard film, the characters meet over the recreation of Homer's Odyssey as a Hollywood-style film. In Line, my Homer, the representative of the noble, classical past or Father artist, is the American painter Barnett Newman. In the video, the characters struggle over how to recreate one of his classical 'zips.' This abstract expressionist gesture of presence, of affirmation is for them a mark of cancellation, of destruction. Are they wrong?"