Second Mountain

Live Cinema Performance
Hillerbrand+Magsamen with Kirk Lynn
World Premiere: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Film Program, 2025

What if a film wasn’t projected from a machine — but cranked by hand?
What if every frame of that film — thousands of letter-sized sheets of paper — was drawn, touched, and moved by human hands?

What if a film could remember?
What if its memories—fragile, hand-drawn, imperfect—moved before your eyes like a mind replaying its past, one paper frame at a time?

We spend our lives revising the story of who we are. Second Mountain invites us to witness that process—the way imagination tries to make sense of a life, the way we turn regret into motion, and memory into light. Second Mountain (formerly titled Mountains) is a live cinema performance created by Hillerbrand+Magsamen in collaboration with playwright Kirk Lynn. Premiering with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s film program in 2025, the work transforms an ancient storytelling device—the crankie—into a luminous, hand-made machine for memory. Thousands of letter-sized transparencies, stitched and laminated with fragments of domestic life, unwind across oversized wooden spools. As the artists crank the images by hand, a live camera captures the movement and projects it onto a screen, turning light, touch, and labor into narrative.

The performance is both intimate and expansive: husband and wife at a table, a writer at the edge of the stage, images and words unfolding in rhythm. Lynn’s narration—spoken and played through cassette tapes—threads through a chorus of everyday sounds: the buzz of insects, a ringing phone, a sigh, a breath. Together, they form a meditation on ascent and repetition, on how we climb and fall, build and rebuild, love and let go.

Second Mountain continues Hillerbrand+Magsamen’s long exploration of home, family, and endurance. Where earlier works turned domestic materials into sculptures, photographs, and performances, here the house becomes a metaphorical landscape. Mountains made of blue tape overlap with architectural blueprints, the sleeping child merges with a horizon line, and loops of imagery evoke the cycles of care, creation, and collapse that define a shared life.

Within this ritual of image and sound, humor and tenderness coexist. In one sequence—the “Farewell Ritual”—the artists offer small gifts to the audience: bandages for when you fall, string to tie each other together, a dollar bill that must someday return. The gesture is absurd, yet deeply human, embodying the reciprocity at the heart of their practice.

To climb a mountain is to glimpse perspective; to descend is to remember it. Second Mountain is that continual motion—the turning of the crank, the loop of memory and vision, the art of finding one’s way again and again.

Kirk Lynn (www.kirkkirkkirk.com)
Kirk Lynn is an award-winning playwright, novelist, and screenwriter. As one of five Artistic Directors of the Rude Mechs theatre collective, Lynn has written and adapted over twenty plays, including the critically acclaimed Lipstick Traces, The Method Gun, and most recently, Not Every Mountain, which will premiere in summer 2018 at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. Lynn’s current solo projects include The Lamp Is the Moon, a commission for the Seattle Children’s Theater to premiere in April 2018, and A Plan and not Quite Enough Time, commissioned by UT Theater and Dance and Texas Performing Arts to premiere in 2019 as part of Leonard Bernstein’s centenary celebration. His one-man-show The Cold Record will premiere at the Fusebox Festival in the spring of 2018. Lynn’s debut novel, Rules for Werewolves, was published in 2015 by Melville House Books. Lynn earned his MFA as a fellow at the Michener Center for Writers and is Associate Professor of playwriting at the University of Texas in Austin, where he lives with his wife, poet and novelist Carrie Fountain, and their two children.

PRESS:

Ascension, Flak Magazine, Oct 21, 2025, Written By Michael McFadden
https://www.flakmagazine.com/articles/ascension