Portrait of an Artist

Jerome Hill: Filmmaker and Philanthropist

by Shaun Brady

retrospective

Born in 1905, Jerome Hill was only a few years younger than cinema itself. The two, as Hill points out in his autobiographical Film Portrait, "grew up together." Like any lifelong friend, Hill continued to regard the medium with a playfulness long after it had gained a self-regard and dignity that forbade new acquaintances the same liberties.

As the grandson of railroad magnate James J. Hill, the filmmaker had the funds to dabble in a wide array of arts — painting, photography and music. In film, he found a mode of expression that allowed him to incorporate all these other art forms. But his most important focus may have been philanthropy. The Jerome Foundation, makes grants to emerging artists for the creation, development and production of new works. (Spike Lee and Todd Haynes have been among its beneficiaries.)

I-House's retrospective begins with Hill's Oscar-winning 1957 eponymous documentary on humanitarian Albert Schweitzer, which at first glance seems an anomaly compared to the filmmaker's later work. The film is a standard, dry narrated portrait of the doctor at home in Germany and at work in Africa. But the aspects of Schweitzer's life on which Hill chooses to focus offer a key to Hill's interests: love of music (Hill made a separate short on Schweitzer's lifelong study of Bach organ scores), a Thoreau-like regard for nature, empathy for humanity and constructed communities.

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Hill refers to his 1964 feature, Open the Door and See All the People, as a "black comedy," but it is at most light grey. The story of 70-year-old twins, the film is utterly whimsical, a fantastic examination of differing worldviews — one sister is the head of a makeshift family out of Capra's You Can't Take It with You, the other a domineering would-be stage mother.

Both it and The Sand Castle, Hill claimed, were inspired by the director's conversations with Carl Jung, the subject of another short doc (not on the program). Sand Castle is a lark, full of sight gags and play, about a day at the beach that culminates in a beautiful animated dream sequence.

Film Portrait was Hill's final work, completed two years before his death in 1972. It tells Hill's personal history, but in a way that makes it inextricable from the history of cinema — as a childhood discovery, as a recorder of home and family, as gateway to experimentation, as means of personal expression. It incorporates all of the techniques that Hill used throughout his career, but in a way that makes clear how he finds every single frame precious and magical.

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

Jerome Hill: Filmmaker and Philanthropist | Wed.-Fri., Mar. 18-20, $7, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-387-5125, ihousephilly.org.