Bathing

Bathing, 1977
Video (color, sound); 4:25 min.



A woman is lying in a bathtub with her eyes closed. In the background the splashing from a running tap can be heard. The camera pans across the woman’s body to dwell on her face, which just protrudes above the surface of the water. The woman runs her hands through her hair. The movement is frozen and for a few seconds remains arrested on the monitor as a tonally alienated, black-bordered image. Then the camera continues with its observation. The woman begins to wash her hair with shampoo. Again the movement is halted. She continues with her hair washing, puts her head underwater a few times, and finally leans forward to remove the rest of the shampoo from her hair. This sequence is repeatedly interrupted through freezing the moving image at particularly ‘picturesque’ moments. While the protagonist’s natural and relaxed-seeming movements are transformed into extremely light, pastel color sequences, the darker colored, arrested images reflect well-known motifs from art history, familiar to us especially from Impressionist painting.
In Bathing, as in his Mirror Road, Windows and Objects with Destinations, Hill uses the camera and image processing devices to explore the malleability of electronic colors and image density.