Ruling Star is an episodic meditation on the incommunicable aspects of life in a strange place called California. As the sun bleaches the grasses before summer begins, we set forth to visit a miscellany of locales while we search for a clue of time’s passage. A pileup of illusions defeats my quest and leaves me in love with the unknowableness. Bagatelle I is a film with a thread of portraiture running through it. We meet an artist clinging to a fence during a break from his workplace. The walls of his world are formidable and highly energetic. Still, there are spaces where solitary work can transform a chaotic world. New Shores is a continuation of In the Stone House. Nathaniel Dorsky and I leave the East Coast to try life in San Francisco. Not one dream or expectation comes to fruition. A new city needed a new way to live. The film scene and the opera were lifesavers for us. As in Douglas Sirk’s Zu neuen Ufern, we fled the “prison” of life in the stone house back east only to crave a return there, which we did in the late 1980s. This visit briefly has us see the autumn sequence of many years past, which concludes both the seasonal journey of In the Stone House and New Shores.

— Jerome Hiler