The Super-8 films include some of Huot’s most impressive filmmaking and some of the most impressive Super-8 filmmaking I’ve seen anywhere. Ironically, the handling ease and lower expense of the smaller gauge have resulted in finished films much less personally revealing than the earlier 16mm diaries and much more consciously directed toward audiences: for example, what sexuality we do see in the recent films is in the nature of performance; often Huot and his wife, painter Carol Kinne, design environments, costumes, and sound tracks for comic, pixilated sexual escapades. The Super-8 films continue to reveal Huot’s life, but there is no longer the sense of personal investigation evident in Rolls : 1971. In its place is Huot’s pleasure in recording the beautiful and enjoyable elements of his life and sharing them with viewers.

Film by Robert Huot.

“…(a) serialist comparison-contrast of the variations in nine naked male and female torsos.

Film by Robert Huot.

A section from ROLLS: 1971, which I feel stands well on its own. The continuous field of falling snow appears to break into three planes or zones of different density and speed. I think of Snow in some sense as nature's answer to SPRAY. - Robert Huot

LEADER and SCRATCH are extensions of Huot's early interest in minimalism. They are successful in reducing the number of filmic variables so completely that essential qualities and potentials of the materials of film can be felt. While SCRATCH is nothing more than eleven minutes of dark leader with a continuous handmade scratch, the resulting imagery varies a good deal, depending on how deeply Huot dug into the emulsion: when the scratch is shallow, for example, it seems to bead and move up through the image; when the scratch is deep, it seems to remain within the frame, vibrating horizontally.

"Beautiful Movie" is a filmic cameo during which a passage of blue film leader and clear film painted red introduces a lovely image of a woman, naked from the waist up, sitting on a brass bed, combing her hair. When we first see the woman, she is well out of focus, but during the following minute or so she slowly becomes clear. As soon as the image is completely clear, however, Huot dissolves to an image of himself sitting in a similar position, combing his own hair. This image quickly goes out of focus, and the viewer sees the original passage of leader and painted film, this time in reverse, forming the other half of a filmic frame. "Beautiful Movie" is a quietly feminist work; Huot revised the traditional tendency to worship female beauty by suggesting that, yes women are lovely, but there is no physical reason why men cannot be lovely in the same way.—Scott MacDonald, “The Films of Robert Huot: 1967 to 1972”, Quarterly Review of Film Studies, Summer 1980.

“For Black and White Film, Huot created his own photographic imagery for the first time. After a few moments of darkness, a young woman (Sheila Raj) lowers a covering of some kind, slowly revealing her naked body. She reaches outside the circle of light, which illuminates only her silvery form, scoops up dark paint, and, beginning with her feet, gradually paints her entire body. When she has become invisible except for the faint sheen of the paint, she drops her arms, looks straight ahead, and the film fades to total darkness. The serenity of the film, which is structurally reflected by Huot’s presentation of the action from a single position in a single take, its sensuality, and the aura of ritual it creates (Raj always moves in a formal way and, except when she needs to look for the paint, looks modestly down) make Black and White Film a quietly haunting work.”—Scott MacDonald, “The Films of Robert Huot: 1967 to 1972”, Quarterly Review of Film Studies, Summer 1980.

Two reels projected simultaneously, with slight variations in speed.

The motif of having people slowly approach the camera first appears in Nude Descending the Stairs, an interesting minimalist work made up of three single-take, single-angle black and white silent rolls during each of which one person - in one instance, Huot dressed in a white painter's jumpsuit; in the others, a naked woman (Marie Antoinette) - slowly descends a four storey staircase toward the camera. Because of the camera's upward angle, the descents are translated into level forward motions during which the two people grow larger with each step they take. The film's concern with the manipulation of space and with the details of human motion through it, accounts for both the title and the inscription 'for Duchamp and Muybridge.