A globally composed musically arranged montageround so Henry Hillss arcana appears to be a fulminant 30minute cutup epic that takes footage both found and shot by the filmmaker and crosses it in an almost arithmetic manner with a prearranged soundtrack The basis is a written film treatment of the musician John Zorn in which 254 scenes bundled into 15 sequences are captured in short sometimes cryptic descriptions Hills very much in the style of a Harry Smith or Bruce Conner has collected takes of radically differing origin for each of the 254 script directions and funneled them into a complexly ramified stream of associations The sequence of scenes is underscored or rather interlocked with pieces from the John Zorn composition The Bribe 1986 a musical tribute to crime fiction writer Mickey Spillane
