The Florenstine Collection

by: Mikelle Street

Hosting the largest crowd at an Indie Grits Festival in the festival's 5 year existence, The Florenstine Collection was a film about love. While Romeo and Juliet it was not, the story still does end with a bit of tragedy.

The Florenstine Collection was shown with two other films all by Helen Hill at the Indie Grits Festival. The films were preceded by short speeches that revealed, among other things, that the City of Columbia had donated $1.2 million towards the Move the Nick capital campaign and that part of the new Nickelodeon Theatre would hold the Helen Hill Media Education Center. The Center will be created in order to boost media literacy, empower students to express their creativity, and to provide a platform for that expression with state of the art technology. The audience was allowed to see the premiere of the promotional video for the Center.

The three films that followed the speeches were all shown on 16 millimeter film because as Paul Gailiunas, Hill's husband, explained, "that's how Helen would have wanted them to be shown." Gailiunas finished Hill's films after her death.

All three films were mixed media using puppets, still images, as well as old archived film, mostly narrated by Hill herself. The first film soije if a 91 year old grandfather going delirious and subsequently dying from kidney failure in what can be interpreted in a juvenile way with diction, syntax, Hill's high voice, and even the medium all supporting this.

The second film featured one of the puppets going through a love tunnel and being educated about the various dangers of "falling" into love with random people.

The third film was the actual Florenstine Collection film. The film described how Hill found over a hundred dresses on Mardis Gras Day made from scraps of material all hand sewn, some with peter pan type collars but all with a loose silhouette. Hill took these dresses back to her home in New Orleans, and washed them all by hand and began to reconstruct them.

As she did this tedious work she also began to look into who the dress maker was and found that she was a southern African-American woman who was a deaconess at her church and was known for her high energy level. Floresntine wore the dresses she made to church as well as shoes that fashioned from cardboard.

When Katrina hit, Hill's home was destroyed as well as her film and the dresses of the Florenstine collection. Against the better judgement of her husband, Hill wanted to leave Columbia, which is where they had fled to the day before Katrina, and return to New Orleans to assist in rebuilding the city.

It was her love that drove her to push for the move and once back, Hill began to systematically restore the dresses and film she'd been working on for The Florenstine Collection. One night an intruder broke into Hill's home and killed her before shooting her husband and leaving.

Gailiunus says in the film, which seems part short documentary on Hill herself as well as the story behind the collection, that this is where the story ends. He finished the film for Hill using her storyboard and cutouts as well as journals to stay true to her vision. It was that vision that received a resounding standing ovation in the Town Theatre at the end of the showing.

The film with rescreen at the Nick on Sunday at 2pm.