Beginning with black, the potential, adding only the basis of the film phenomenon, the film ritual, the concepts of causation, and primordial semiotics, the work is an annunciation. –L. H.
A naive look at Southern California by an outsider, and/or an essay on displacement through the disjunction of Californian images and off screen voices. Where is the location of these voices, here or there? Are the images near or far in relation to the voices? Are the images commenting on the...
In the 1970s, Californian artist Louis Hock created a number of studies in the effects of pure colour. The late 1960s saw the rise of the ‘colour field’ vogue which arose in abstract painting in reaction to the emphasis on individual expressive gestures in Abstract Expressionism. ‘Colour...
At first viewing PACIFIC TIME appears to be a departure from the more abstract and more purely visual delights of Hock's preceding efforts. Considerably longer, it employs actors, dialogue and 'plot.' Upon closer examination, however, it proves to be of a kind with his earlier output - only more...
September 23, 1973: A motion picture camera shooting through a portal in a church began accumulating images of an adjacent Arlington, Texas shopping plaza at the rate of 1 frame per hour, 24 hours a day. September 22, 1974: The camera was stopped. Meteorological fluctuations, this planet's...
The film does not end, is never rewound, and each frame is seen twice in a single viewing: a palindrome illustrating the Chicago "elevated," the backbone of the city, shuttling its oblivious passengers to death. "Hypnotic study in motion." – Nora Sayre, The New York Times Note: Shown head to...
A 26-minute metaphorical narrative in which the character is left alone at his post indefinitely to ponder the existential. In his hopefulness he resorts to a mystical exploration.
A single thread of 16mm film runs through three side-by-side projectors, all aimed at the same wall. Twenty-two and a half second elapse between the time when the first and the second screen images appear and the same amount of time passes between the appearance of the same silent image in the...
"La Mera Frontera" is a meditation on the border and memory which takes as its point of departure the last battle between the United States and Mexico. In 1918, neighbors from the border towns of Nogales, Arizona and Nogales, Sonora shot at each other for a day. Among the many citizens who lay dead...
Film sketches constructed over the past five years investigating temporal composition via single frame-time lapse techniques: light struck metronomes, 20th century dust from a Mayan dream, horology complete with coordinates, Kodak vs. Timex. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2012.
In a completely dark gymnasium, Louis Hock unspooled dozens of feet of 16mm color print stock along the different dimensions of the space, laying equal lengths of gnarly twine on top of it. One brief flash of the gymnasiums lights later, the resulting film functions as an abstract map of the...
