MOVIE • 1990

Acid Rock

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"Shot in early 1990 on outdated Ektachrome reversal stock, Acid Rock exists only in the original (that is, Hiler has never made a print of it), and consists of three 100' reels of film unedited, a 9-minute film of dazzling beauty and incandescent imagery. What Jerome Hiler accomplishes with this brief film is little short of alchemy. Everyday objects, places, thing, and people are transformed into integers of light, creating a sinuous tapestry of restless imagistic construction. Acid Rock (so named because a huge rock with the word "acid" emblazoned on it drifts briefly past the camera during the opening moments of the film) displays the best qualities of abstract expressionist experimental cinema in that it transmutes perceptual reality into a zone of ineluctable transcendence, causing the images to perceptibly burst forth from the surface of the screen." - WWD