Open the Door and See all the People

Jerome Hill"s “Film Portrait,” a 90-minute recapitulation of his early years and subsequent career as a movie maker, is an utterly charming swan song by the screen experimentalist who died in 1972 at the age of 67. The film, using old home movie footage, covers his childhood in a happy, wealthy Minnesota home and then shifts to his later avant-garde filming.

A little boy and his sister spend a Tati-esque day at the beach building a sand-castle, to the delight and interest of others. Inspired by the ideas of C. G. Jung, it is a feature length, low-budget, comedy-fantasy in black and white, with a dream sequence in color that introduced a novel form of stop animation.

Live-action footage of canaries, overlaid with hand-painted effects.

In 1951, Jung was filmed at his Bollingen retreat by two Americans, Jerome Hill, an artist and film-maker from Minnesota, and Maud Oakes, an author and researcher, whose book Where the Two Came to Their Father was the first major publication of the Bollingen Foundation. That book described a ritual and ceremonial sequence given to Maud by and old Navajo Medicine Man, along with its accompanying sand paintings. Maud had long been interested in Jung and his new psychology of the collective unconscious. She had met him in 1937 in New York, when she, along with her friends, Paul and Mary Mellon, attended a lecture he gave there.

In 1950 Jerome Hill went to Zurich with the intention of making a film about Dr. Carl G. Jung. The project was abandoned when Hill decided that Jung was not a good subject. After Hill's death, Jonas Mekas edited the film which focuses on Dr. Jung as a person.

An autobiographical sketch.

This biographical drama/part-time documentary, narrative written by Dr. Albert Schweitzer and spoken by Frederic March, traces the life of Dr. Schweitzer (with actors playing the characters), from his birth in France up to about the age of 30 when he makes the decision to go to French Equatorial Africa and build his jungle hospital. The latter half of the film encompasses a full day in the hospital-village following the 80s-plus Samaritan in his daily rounds.

In a European seaside village, a maiden takes clean sheets down from the clothesline. Carrying her basket of linens home, she stops to consult a fortune teller, whose been napping the the sun. The cartomancienne sees love in the cards. The young woman pauses to reflect. We then see water, swirling, and into view swims a man, as if just appearing on earth. He arrives on shore - is he just in her mind's eye, or is he real? She weaves a garland of for her hair. Will they meet?

1950 short film nominated for an Oscar in the category "Best Short Subject, One-reel"

The filmmaker appears as an artist attempting to set up his easel, with frustrating results.