JEROME HILL:

Jerome Hill began experimenting with filmmaking when still a young adult. While his father was involved with some of the first film companies in the United States, as part of his effort to publicize the Glacier National Park tourism trade, Jerome waited until he was out of college to begin his film work.

After making some experimental movies in the 1930s, including "La Cartomancienne," Hill set about documenting the recent developments in skiing, highlighting the techniques that European instructors were bringing to American resorts. The resulting film, "Snow Flight," entered national release as a short, preceding feature films. Otto Lang and Hannes Schneider assisted Hill on the film, which was distributed (under varying titles) by Warner Brothers.

With that success, Hill took on filmmaking as his main profession. He made his second documentary feature in 1940, "The Seeing Eye," about the efforts of groups training dogs for the blind. While in the Army, he scripted and filmed two training films, "Chow Hound" and "Poison Ivy."

After leaving the Army in 1944, Hill started again on documentary work. His first postwar project was "Grandma Moses," a documentary on the famed painter, which utilized unusual camera effects and the narration of Archibald MacLeish. The 1950 film attracted a great deal of attention, and Hill was able to follow this up with his documentary masterpiece, "Albert Schweitzer." This film, which gained much of its quality from a close partnership between Hill, its director, and Erica Anderson, head cinematographer and camerawoman, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1957.

Looking for a project after the success of "Albert Schweitzer," Hill was drawn to Carl Jung. Hill had been fascinated by Jung's theories of the subconscious mind, to which he was introduced by his cousin, Maud Oakes. Hill and Oakes had already done some preliminary work on a Jung documentary prior to 1957, but Hill soon decided to convey Jung's ideas through other means.

The resulting film, "The Sand Castle," represented Jungian themes through the allegory of a boy who builds a sand castle at the beach. The sand castle, which draws the attention of a varied collection of eccentric beachgoers, also serves as the setting for an elaborate stop-motion animation dream sequence near the end of the film. The film represented a new direction for Jerome, as he would largely leave the documentary arena for a more experimental, personal style to his films.

Hill's next film was "Open the Door and See All the People," based on an unpublished novel by Jerome entitled "Peacock Feathers." The film was an ensemble piece, focusing on the relationship between two aging sisters. As in "The Sand Castle," Hill touched on the creative process, eccentricity, the role of the parent, and the social order. The film shows the influence of European cinema, particularly in the tone of its farce and its character development.

Throughout the sixties and seventies, Hill produced several short films, many using experimental processes or methods. Several of these films were collected and edited together with unreleased footage in Hill's final movie, "Film Portrait." As its title suggests, the film is a personal memoir told through the films that Hill created over nearly fifty years.

While none of Hill's post-1957 films enjoyed the broad appeal and critical recognition that "Albert Schweitzer" did, they are a greater legacy. They are successful as much for the experimentation and freedom they exhibit, as for the insight they provide on Hill himself.

Hill had an artistically rich upbringing that was unusual for his time. His father took time to encourage his son in his artistic pursuits, and Jerome's grandfather's house, with its huge collection of paintings by European masters, was literally next-door.

Hill showed an early talent for painting. In a set of watercolors contained in the collection, completed at eight years of age, Hill's talents are obvious. He continued developing these skills throughout his childhood. Later in life, Hill asked his brother Louis Jr. to destroy many of his early drawings that were still stored at the house. The set of watercolors is one of the few childhood projects to survive. Another can be found at the Saint Paul Academy, where a set of murals Hill painted in a science classroom can still be seen. Hill created the murals, which portray events from the history of scientific discovery, while a student at the Academy. In 1964, he returned to touch up the paintings and to add a scene depicting Albert Einstein.

Immediately after graduating from Yale with a major in music, Hill sought to get back to painting. Making the most of his post-collegiate freedom, he traveled to Europe and studied at the British Academy of Painting in Rome and the Academie Scandinave in Paris. In addition to traditional painting subjects, Hill also enjoyed architectural drawing and traveled to many classical sites while in Europe.

In the mid 1930s, Hill began spending more time making films and less on painting. He did not return to painting in earnest until the 1950s, when he began to call Cassis his home for a majority of the year. Cassis offered him an opportunity to practice his landscape painting, and he utilized the bright palette of the French coast to great effect in his portraits and studies. The collection has reproductions of most of the paintings that Hill completed from 1960 to 1972.

Hill learned quite early on how to perform and pose for the camera, for his father, Louis Hill, was entranced by the technologies of photography and motion pictures. Jerome began to take photographs in adolescence, and continued to do so for the rest of his life.

Hill's early photographs confirm his interests in drama and in architecture; many of them show him and his friends playacting, while others focus on building facades and architectural details. Later on, in his late twenties, Hill developed an appreciation for impressionistic and abstract art. His photographs began to reflect an experimentation with composition and simplicity that mirrored trends in the art world of the time.

In 1936, Hill published a book of photographs entitled "Trip to Greece." Designed by the famous Merle Armitage, the volume collected photographs Hill took in Greece earlier in the decade. His documentation of the Greek landscape was so extensive that the U.S. Army sought his expertise when planning operations in the area during World War II.

Hill took great pleasure in photography, and documented his life in photographs. The collection contains thousands of prints, with the bulk of them dated 1925-1972. Hill selected his most successful prints and collected them in albums, and these albums provide excellent evidence of his skills as a photographer. Hill's personal photographs comprise an intrinsic and central narrative of the collection.

Jerome Hill majored in music at Yale, and he continued composing songs, film music, and music for small ensembles and orchestras for the rest of his life.

Hill's childhood was filled with music, as his parents actively exposed their children to symphonic concerts and music lessons. In adolescence, Hill began combining his love for poetry and his awareness of popular Broadway music into creating songs.

At Yale, Hill focused on classical composition and learned the finer points of music theory. The collection contains handwritten concertos and short pieces for large groups.

In adulthood, Hill counted several colleagues and friends in the field of music, including composers Hugh Martin and Alec Wilder. Martin helped Hill on music for his documentary "Grandma Moses," and Wilder composed music for Hill's features "The Sand Castle" and "Open the Door and See all the People." Hill also enjoyed a close musical relationship with poet Ophelia de Rouge, with whom he composed several songs, most of them introspective, moody pieces. Some of these works with De Rouge were broadcast in 1968 on Swiss National Radio.

In 1971, a concert comprising many of Hill's orchestral works was held at the Basilica di Santa Cecilia in Rome.

Several of Hill's own compositions are featured in his cinematic memoir, "Film Portrait." Hill created the soundtracks to a majority of his short films.

Since 1972, Hill's works have been celebrated at several retrospective concerts. In 1975, Hill's works were featured at a concert celebrating the 100th anniversary of Albert Schweitzer's birth. They were performed by Edouard Nies-Berger, who collaborated with Schweitzer and Hill on the 1965 film "Schweitzer and Bach."

Jerome Hill's name provides a window into his manner of philanthropy and charity. Although he was born James Jerome Hill II, he chose to be known as Jerome Hill rather than James J. in part to distance himself from the considerable weight of that famous name.

James Jerome Hill I, Jerome's grandfather, was a famous railroad magnate, nicknamed the "Empire Builder," who established the Great Northern Railway as one of the premier East-West rail routes in the United States.

Jerome Hill, financially independent due to trust funds established by his grandfather and by his father, Louis W. Hill, never sought to lord this wealth over his acquaintances. He was careful to keep his connections obscured among casual acquaintances, and this practice even led to Life Magazine, in a World War II sidebar, identifying Hill only as a "house painter."

While in his early life, his charity largely took the form of supporting struggling friends and relatives, he slowly branched out. In the 1950s and 1960s, Hill began actively funding a wide variety of artists and creative professionals. In 1966, he began the Avon Foundation, a granting organization that continues to this day in the form of the Jerome Foundation. It focuses on supporting the work of emerging creative artists in Minnesota and New York City. A sister organization in France, the Camargo Foundation, sponsors residencies at Hill's Cassis property for scholars and students of French and francophone culture, as well as visual artists, composers and creative writers.

The importance of Hill's support of the arts lies in his open mind toward experimental and avant-garde expression. Now, as it did during his life, Hill's philanthropy supports new and emerging artists that have few options for ongoing funding.