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By 1968, Huot had begun to use photographic imagery, fusing his continuing concern with minimalism and an interest in the erotic. Red Stockings is a demonstration of the power of a single frame of photographic imagery. Except for one frame, the entire three-minute film is a continuous, uniform red which creates a variety of afterimages and other optical illusions. When the lone frame flashes by halfway through the film, the imagery is difficult to identify, but it has a somewhat erotic quality which, when I first saw the film, sent me to the rewind. I scanned the red until I located the frame and discovered an image of a naked female crotch. The title clarifies the erotic joke, which, however, exists only if the viewer is willing to examine the film closely enough to be sure of what is there. In Cross-Cut-A Blue Movie, Huot presents a minimal passage of intercutting between found footage of a hoochy-coochy dancer and a blue leader, organized as a pair of inversely related geometric progressions:

The resulting film is amusing (because of the pun in the title, the speed of the editing, and the funny fast-motion shimmy of the dancer); highly rhythmic (both because of the intercutting itself, and because of the rhythms of the dancer’s movements, the flutter of dust particles on the bleu leader, and the waver of scratch marks on the footage of the dancer); and formally interesting because of Huot’s creation of the montage which so energetically goes nowhere. 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 king, 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 or 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.

During the 1970s Huot has continued to make short films. The majority of his filmmaking energy, however, has been channeled into a series of diaries – five have been completed as of this writing – which give evidence of his growing commitment to film and of his considerable creative abilities in the new medium. One Year (1970) was clearly a turning point. While the short early works were interesting films by a painter, One Year (1970) reveals Huot’s sustained attempt to make filmmaking a constant element, if not the central element, of his creative life. One Year (1970) is a series of forty-nine rolls of 16mm film, nearly all of them unedited except in the camera, and all of them silent. The flares at the beginnings and ends of the rolls are not eliminated and, as a result, become a form of visual punctuation. The rolls are arranged so that, as title implies, we move gradually through an entire year, from winter to winter. The most interesting aspect of the overall organization, however, involves the fact that the first quarter of One Year (1970) is very different from the final three-quarters: this change reflects a fundamental alteration in Huot’s approach to film.