The early 1960s was the golden age of underground cinema. Some, like Jack Smith’s “Flaming Creatures,” have caused scandals. Others were too obvious to write about (see Barbara Rubin’s “Christmas on Earth”).At least one was commercially successful: Adolphus Mekas’ “Hallelujah the Hills”
Eugene Archer reported in The New York Times in 1963, the festival’s first year, that “A new American director’s brutal spoof of an art film finds surprise success at Saturday’s New York Film Festival.” rice field.
return to 3 shows at Lincoln Center, part of a series dedicated to the avant-garde of the early ’60s, “Hallelujah the Hills” may be the series’ most traditional selection. A black-and-white film from Ed Emshwiller, an underground filmmaker with great technical expertise.
The film is a romantic slapstick drama set in Sylvan Vermont, far from the bohemian Lower East Side. Her two men, Jack (intrepid photographer Peter Beard) and Leo (painter and assemblist Marty Greenbaum), are the same young woman, Vera (a beautiful and enigmatic winter, according to Archer’s review). I’m obsessed with the sprites”). She is played by her two different actresses (Sheila Finn and Peggy Steffens), both of whom look a lot like Jean-Luc Her Godard muse Anna Her Carina. Rivals court Vera in different seasons during her seven years. A crisis ensues when both show up for Thanksgiving.
As its title suggests, “Hallelujah” is anything but vibrant. Jonas Mekas’ younger brother, and like him, an immigrant from rural Lithuania, Adolphus Mekas was in his late twenties when he made the film. He is full of pitfalls and drunken antics. A beard is especially athletic. At one point he bounces bare in deep snow. (Greenbaum with his horn-rimmed glasses looks more of the Woody Allen type.)
Jump cuts are also common. “Hallelujah,” an American homage to the French new wave film “Hallelujah,” suggests a bubbly “Jules and Jim,” made in the nonchalant style of “Shoot the Piano Player.” There may have been a two-way road. It’s not hard to imagine that “Hallelujah” was a hit at his 1963 Cannes Film Festival and, as Godard reviewed, the inspiration for 1964’s “Band of the Outsiders.”
“Hallelujah” isn’t overly happy, but it calls for forgiveness for madrigal jazz (heavy on tingling harpsichords) and rampant cinephiles. “I haven’t seen a movie in ten days,” complains Leo. His rival is Takeshi Kurosawa. It references early films by Charlie Chaplin, Mack Sennett and WC Fields, as well as Godard. Later in the film, Mekas interpolates the excitement of his famous 1920s ice floe of DW Griffith. “Way Down East” The sequence still works, so does “Hallelujah the Hills” in a more limited way.
In fact, as fashionable as Mekas movies were once, it has an ancestral quality. Lithuanian folklore lurks. Hallelujah.
Hallelujah the Hills
On July 29th, August 2nd and 3rd at the Lincoln Center Films in Manhattan, filmlinc.org.