JEROME HILL:

James Jerome Hill was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, on March 2, 1905. He was born into the family of Louis W. Hill, one of the prominent families of Saint Paul and heirs to the railroad fortune of James J. Hill, the famed "Empire Builder." Hill had three siblings: two brothers, Cortlandt and Louis Jr.; and one sister, Maud. Maud is referred to in the collection by her married name, Maud Hill Schroll.

Hill's papers represent a fine view into the Louis W. Hill family in particular and into the world of Saint Paul in the early 20th century. The Hill family, who lived at 260 Summit Avenue, next to James J. Hill's mansion, hosted and entertained the cream of Twin Cities society. Hill's mother, Maud, was an extraordinarily friendly woman who maintained friendships with a wide variety of people throughout her life. Her correspondence with her son Jerome is one of the highlights of his personal papers.

Hill's father and grandfather maintained large collections of artwork from contemporary and classic European painters, such as Corot, Rousseau and Delacroix, and Hill was fascinated and inspired by these paintings to begin painting and drawing from an early age.

Hill attended Saint Paul Academy, and while there, distinguished himself as an artist. He created a series of murals for one room at the school that showed famous scenes in the history of science, including Archimedes and Isaac Newton's discoveries in physics.

Hill attended Yale University. At Yale, he made a number of friends that would last his entire lifetime. While a student, he took full advantage of his proximity to New York City to see a variety of arts events. His brother, Louis Jr., attended Exeter and then Yale, attending while Jerome was also a student, so Louis and Jerome made some of these trips together.

Upon graduation in 1927 with a degree in Music, Hill traveled to Europe and began studies in painting. On trips with family and friends in Europe, Hill experimented with still photography and with early motion picture cameras.

His early adulthood was marked by a period of ill health. It is not explained or outlined in any great degree in the collection, but Hill apparently suffered from a thyroid problem, the effect of which upon his life was compounded by medical advice that had him avoid strenuous activities. As he aged into his mid-twenties, he decided that building his strength was necessary, and he begins to appear much more vital and healthy in photographs of this period.

In 1929, while painting landscapes in the south of France, Hill discovered a piece of property in Cassis, a scenic port town on the Mediterranean Sea. Hill purchased the property and began sharing his time between Cassis and Paris in 1930. Although Hill also maintained a residence in Norden, California, at the ski resort called "Sugar Bowl" and also lived in New York City for long stretches, Cassis would remain his physical and spiritual home for the majority of his life.

Hill's filmmaking career began with the filming of "Snow Flight," a documentary and instructional film on the new techniques of downhill skiing that European instructors were bringing to American ski resorts. The film, made on location at Mt. Rainier in Washington state, was released in 1936. In 1939 and 1940, Hill worked on a documentary on companion animals entitled "The Seeing Eye."

Hill painted and made short films throughout the 1930s, and continued to do so until he joined the military in World War II. In the war he served in a variety of roles. Initially, in 1942, Hill was assigned to a Tank Destroyer Battalion. After working his way through a variety of military red tape, with the help of his aunt Gertrude, Hill was able to secure a commission as an officer. While the nature of his service is somewhat unclear, as Hill did not discuss it a great deal, he was trained in identifying bombing targets, and as a prisoner-of-war interrogator, serving largely in the Mediterranean Sea area. The collection contains a service record that indicates his dates on service in specific divisions. Hill wrote a vivid account of visiting his Cassis property shortly after the removal of German troops from the French coast.

One of Hill's more personally rewarding duties was as part of a motion picture team that created training films for the Army. Hill's scripts for two training films, "Chow Hound" and "Poison Ivy," can be found in the collection. Hill's photographic experience also played a part in his assignments, as officers sought to take tactical advantage from the photographs and knowledge Hill had developed during his travels in Greece.

After his service, Hill returned to his property in Cassis, which had suffered only minor damage under German occupation. Hill spent the rest of the 1940s painting and traveling, before restarting his filmmaking career late in the decade.

Hill spent the decade of the 1950s developing his artistic skills. This is the time period in which Hill had his first major film success; began painting intensively, especially at Cassis; and reinforced a variety of artistic and personal partnerships through his Cassis Festivals.

Hill's creation of the Grandma Moses documentary in 1949 signaled a bold start to his postwar filmmaking career. It also marked the beginning of Hill's professional collaborations with Erica Anderson, who played a critical role in the making of Hill's next major film, "Albert Schweitzer." The film won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature of 1957. His correspondence with Anderson and with others involved in editing and promotion of the film represents a rich collection of material on documentary filmmaking, Hill's personal working style, and not least of all, Schweitzer himself.

Hill also collaborated with Schweitzer on a series of pipe organ performances of Bach compositions, recorded at a church in Schweitzer's hometown of Gunsbach in the Alsatian Munster valley of France. These were captured in Hill's film "Schweitzer and Bach."

In 1957 and 1958, Hill also found time to begin a series of Performing Arts Festivals in Cassis, France. These festivals offered exposure to a wide variety of European theatre professionals and musicians that Hill helped support financially. Many of these theatre groups and performers were at the fringes of the arts world; Hill's papers of this period represent a unique perspective on the New York and European avant-garde.

In the early 1950s, Hill began thinking about doing a documentary film on Carl Jung. Hill had been intrigued by his theories of the subconscious, and Hill's cousin Maud Oakes encouraged his interest. Hill interviewed Jung at his home in Switzerland, accompanied by Oakes, an anthropologist and comparative religion expert. Hill set aside the Jung project when the Schweitzer film began monopolizing his time. He would later discard the idea of a full-length documentary, but his impressions of Jungian ideas found voice in the allegory "The Sand Castle."

After the successful opening in 1961 of his film "The Sand Castle," in which Hill acted as producer, writer and director, he wanted to pursue another project in the same vein. In reading about Jung, ESP, and other theories on the subconscious, Hill had been fascinated by the idea of strong psychological links between identical twins. With this idea in the background, Hill turned to writing, creating a novel-length work called "Peacock Feathers." The manuscript was sent to publishers, with little success. Hill decided to rework the novel into a movie script, creating a project that was to appear in its final form as "Open the Door and See all the People." Along the way, the project was also called "The Identical Twins" and "Peacock Feathers." The movie opened in 1964 to mixed reviews; Hill would not attempt another major feature film.

The last dozen years of Jerome Hill's life were arguably his most productive and exciting. In addition to his artistic exploits, he started a philanthropic foundation for the arts and humanities (the Avon Foundation, later renamed the Jerome Foundation), helped in founding a center designed to preserve and promote avant-garde film (Anthology Film Archives), staged a massive arts festival (Cassis Festival 1967), and renovated a nearby hotel property for use by his Camargo Foundation in their housing of visiting scholars.

The 1960s also marked Hill's most prolific period of painting, with at least 300 canvases finished in that decade. His painting in this period showed a renewed energy and vibrant use of color. He was extremely prolific during this time, completing up to 20 paintings a year while keeping up his schedule of film work, travel and correspondence.

Toward the end of the decade, he began to think more concretely about his legacy and what he would leave behind. This had the effect, among others, of the decision to start work on his cinematic memoir, "Film Portrait." The film opened in 1972, and was seen as a fitting statement of Hill's life. Profoundly personal, yet playful and experimental, the film represented both a step forward and a look back.

Hill died of cancer in November, 1972. He is buried at Resurrection Cemetery in Mendota Heights, Minnesota, as are his parents.

Biographical information was taken from the collection.