Hamill Industries is Marc Tudó and Núria Graham — or rather, it was. The Barcelona studio was founded in 2013 by Tudó as a one-person operation; Graham joined in 2015 and the work shifted noticeably. Most of what people associate with the Hamill name — the long takes, the relationship between foreground action and background geometry, the sense of time passing at two different speeds simultaneously — began with their collaboration.
I've been watching their catalog for about four years, since we added their work to the archive in 2022. I've watched most of the forty-odd videos they've made more than once. Some of them many times. I kept trying to find a vocabulary for what I was looking at and kept not finding one — which is, I think, a sign that the work is genuinely doing something.
The question of display
The problem with writing about Hamill Industries is partly the problem of writing about music video in general. The form exists to be experienced on a screen, and text descriptions of visual work are almost always reductive. But there's a more specific problem with their work: it tends to be about the relationship between the moving image and the space in which it's displayed.
Their 2018 video for Objekt — "Agnes Apparatus" — is the most straightforward example. Shot entirely in a decommissioned telecommunications facility outside Barcelona, it follows a single performer moving through a series of rooms while the geometry of the architecture rotates very slowly around them. Watched on a phone in portrait mode, you get about forty percent of the video. Watched fullscreen on a good monitor, you start to understand what they're doing with perspective. Watched as they've apparently shown it at festivals, projected at a scale where the architecture in the frame approaches the scale of actual architecture — something else happens entirely.
This is not a complaint about compression or aspect ratio. It's an observation that the work is explicitly about the conditions of its display, which makes it unusual in a form that usually treats display as irrelevant.
Influence and illegibility
I find it genuinely hard to identify their influences. There's something in the long-take work that's adjacent to Chantal Akerman, but I don't want to invoke that name carelessly — it risks saying "slow and Belgian-adjacent" when what I mean is something more specific about how duration becomes subject matter. There's also something in the more recent work that reminds me of certain Hungarian animators from the 1970s, specifically in how they handle the relationship between a single moving element and a static frame. But I might be imagining this.
What I'm more confident about is that their work doesn't look like most music video, even the music video that's trying to be unusual. The standard vocabulary of "cinematic" music video — shallow depth of field, slow motion, dramatic color grading — is absent. The work looks like it was made by people who came to the form from somewhere else. In fact, Tudó studied architecture, and Graham studied graphic design. Neither came through film or video production. This is probably relevant.
The catalog as argument
One of the arguments we make at SpectraVid is that the director's catalog is the unit of analysis, not the individual clip. Individual clips can be flukes — the result of a particular artist's brief, a particular budget, a particular happy accident. But a pattern across twenty or forty videos tells you something about an author's preoccupations.
The Hamill catalog, taken as a whole, makes an argument about stillness. Not slow motion — stillness. In almost every video, there's a moment where the movement stops, or nearly stops, and the image holds. Not long enough to be uncomfortable, but long enough that you notice. They're asking you to look at the frame rather than follow the motion. This is a very specific thing to ask of a viewer in a form whose entire vocabulary is premised on movement.
I don't know if this is intentional. We're planning to interview them for the director Q&A series later this year. I'll ask.
"The work doesn't look like most music video, even the music video that's trying to be unusual."
Where to start
If you want to watch their work and aren't sure where to begin: "Agnes Apparatus" for Objekt (2018) is probably the clearest example of what I've been describing — available to members in the archive. Their 2020 video for Nils Frahm, "All Melody," is more accessible and slightly warmer in tone. Their 2023 video for Eartheater, "Volcano," is where I think they're currently heading — more kinetic than their earlier work but still organized around that quality of suspended attention.
A full filmography is in the director section of the archive.