Film Portrait

Jerome Hill (2 March 1905, St. Paul, Minnesota – 21 November 1972, New York City) was an American filmmaker and artist. He was born into the family of Louis W. and Maud Van Corlandt Hill, one of the prominent families of Saint Paul and heirs to the railroad fortune of James J. Hill, the famed “Empire Builder.”
He attended St. Paul Academy where, as a student, he first demonstrated skill as an artist. He studied music at Yale University receiving a degree in music. As a student, he took many trips to New York City to see a variety of arts events. After graduation in 1927, he traveled to Europe where he began to study painting, and experiment with still photography and film. While painting Landscapes in the south of France, Hill discovered and purchased a piece of property in Cassis, a scenic port town on the Mediterranean Sea.

Hill’s film endeavors began with Ski Flight (1938), a documentary and instructional film on downhill skiing. Filmed on location at Mt. Rainier in Washington state, and starring skier Otto Lang, the film premiered at Radio City Music Hall. A second documentary film The Seeing Eye (1939-40) profiled companion animals.
His artistic career was put on hold during WWII when he joined the military serving a variety of roles. He was assigned to a Tank Destroyer Battalion in 1942, and later served as a liaison officer with French forces. He also worked on the military motion picture team creating training films for the Army.

After the war, Hill continued to travel and paint for most of the 1940s. In 1949, he returned to documentary filmmaking with his portrait of American painter Grandma Moses, produced with cinematographer Erika Anderson. The film was nominated for an Academy Award and marked Hill’s creative partnership with Anderson that would produce the feature length documentary, Albert Schweitzer. The film won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature of 1957.

Hill made his first “story” film, The Sand Castle made in 1959-60. Inspired by Carl Jung and his theories of the subconscious, it was a comedy-fantasy in black and white with a dream sequence in color introducing a novel form of stop-motion animation. Jung’s ideas also motivated the full-length film Open The Door and See All the People (1964). Hill would create numerous notable films during his career that included Schweitzer and Bach, the hand-painted animation shorts: Anticorrida Merry Christmas, The Artist’s Friend, and The Canaries.

In 1971, Hill made his full-length autobiographical film, Film Portrait. An especially poignant cinematic work, Film Portrait was created after Hill had been diagnosed with an incurable cancer and was contemplating his legacy as an artist and philanthropist. The work was selected as an outstanding Film of the Year for presentation at the 1972 London Film Festival and won the Gold Dukat Prize at the 21st Annual Film Festival in Mannheim.

Jerome Hill’s life and career was largely defined by his support for the arts and humanities on an international level. In 1957 and 1958, he initiated a series of Performing Arts Festivals in Cassis. These festivals presented an array of European theatre professionals and Musicians that Hill helped support financially. In 1964, he founded a philanthropic foundation for the arts and humanities (Avon Foundation), which since 1973 has been known as the Jerome Foundation. He helped fund Film-Makers’ Cinematheque Film Culture magazine, and Cahiers du cinéma, and was involved in the Spoleto Festival in 1961 and the International Exposition of the New American Cinema.

After meeting with avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas about the possibility of writing an article for one of his film publications, Mekas presented Hill with the idea of a museum devoted to the preservation and exhibition of film as art. This vision eventually became Anthology Film Archives, and would be considered Hill’s most important contribution to the cultivation of the visual arts. Realized through Hill’s financial and creative support, Anthology Film Archives opened on November 30, 1970 at Joseph Papp’s Theater. Hill was heavily involved with the organization up until his death in 1972. His work continues to be recognized for its importance to the history of cinema.

His short film La Cartomancienne (1932) was restored for the DVD collection Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant Garde Film 1894-1941 released in October 2005.

His most famous work was Film Portrait (1972), an autobiographical piece about the artist’s own life, which won numerous awards and is one of only 450 films nominated for the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress.

Hill had a Chalet built at Sugar Bowl Ski Resort and while living there, paid for and operated “The Magic Carpet”, the first aerial tramway on the west coast. —Wikipedia