Hiler’s now best known work was immediately hailed as a revelatory masterwork when it premiered in 2011, as a camera original reversal print, at the influential and now sorely missed “Views from the Avant-Garde” section of the New York Film Festival. Offered by Hiler as a poignant yet celebratory farewell to the recently discontinued color reversal 16mm film stock, Words of Mercury makes remarkable use of lyrical superimposition to give dazzling life to the rich range of colors, textures and rhythms that animate the film. Although Words of Mercury’s interweaving of quadruple layers of image and color often seems to be precisely timed and structured, Hiler, quite remarkably, edited his film in camera, trusting in his intuition, never knowing the exact outcome, but certain that it would remain true to his singular vision. Mirroring the saturated colors of Hiler’s stained glass work, imagery in Words of Mercury is transformed by the reverberant overlapping of colors and shapes, with the flow of layered and superimposed images periodically interrupted by the relative calm of more direct, “single-layer” scene. Hiler described his film as, “the film takes a journey from darkness and a bare world through the seasonal spreading of seeds to a place almost choked and repugnant with color—a place that invites death. The final couplet from Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost speaking of the place of death, supplies me with my title."

Marginalia is a contemplation in shades of grey and periodic color on the state and place of society in a quickly changing environment. It could be seen as a view from the margins. Or, as its title suggests, it might be expostulatory comments on the page-edge of our shared circumstances. Its air is filled with things slipping away to make way for an as yet unknown birth. The characters that we approach most proximately are a family with two young sons. The forebodings in this film have a kind of antidote in the way ideas and skills can be passed along to young generations outside the margins of the main arena of digital entertainment. As educators discuss dropping cursive writing from the syllabus of future grade schools, my interest in all things handmade becomes acute. Scribblings course their way across the screen as scratches: the margins invade center stage. Images of electrical power occasionally appear as well as a distant Facebook headquarters. Will future writing depend on such things? Could a power outage bring an end to the written word? Not really, but so much and so much more in our lives is dependent on mega-energy.

As with my films, so far, Marginalia is silent. The above description should not be considered the correct reading of the film. Images simply flow by and are not at all laden with purpose other than to connect with the viewer's sight and mind. Be unburdened with thoughts of understanding what the filmmaker is trying to say. Most people who find themselves watching poetic films are pretty familiar with what marginal means. – Jerome Hiler