The Magic Umbrella

A little boy and his sister forced to spend a day at the beach build a sand castle, to the delight and interest of others. Rich black and white photography collides with a novel fantasy sequence combining color photography, stop motion and cutout animation. Equal parts Jacques Tati, A. Lamorisse and (Hill's perrenial favorite) C. G. Jung.

Based on Jerome Hill's unpublished novel, Peacock Feathers, this ensemble piece focuses on the relationship between two aging sisters.

1950 short film portrait of the octogenarian folk artist. Nominated for an Oscar in the category "Best Short Subject, One-reel".

This biographical docudrama traces the life of Dr. Albert Schweitzer, from his birth in Alsace, up to the age of 30 when he made 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 octogenarian 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. 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 for her hair. Will they meet?

Jack and Leo vie for the affections of Vera – who appears a little differently to each man – over the course of a series of energetic sketches, flashbacks and homages.

The life of Jerome Hill corresponded with the first formative decades of cinema and a greater part of the 20th century. Through fragments of Hill’s surrealistic, handpainted and documentary films (as well as the James J. Hill family's home movies), this autobiographical work serves as an aesthetically complete documentary of Jerome Hill as an artist and offers a personal perspective of the seventh art.

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

Footage of a bullfight, shot by Hill in 1934, hand-painted by the artist three decades later.

“After seeing Taylor Mead’s diaries I can’t look around myself anymore. There is so much to see! So now I sit with my back to nature, like Gertrude Stein.” – Julian Beck, The Living Theatre, Paris.

An "autobiographical sketch" centered around small group of vacationers to Hill's estate in Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur. A gorgeous and relaxing film-soirée that acted as Jerome Hill's return to cinema after a time away. Workmen construct a walkway to the open air theatre, while friends lounge and hobby, toil and swim.

The first student film made at Yale, and one of the earliest student feature films ever made, this adaptation of Henry Fielding's novel was made in the spring of 1927 by a filmmaking collective called the Purity Players, led by S. W. Childs, Jr.

Famous skier Otto Lang is featured in a short documentary filmed at Mt. Whitney and Mt. Baker, and premiered on 4 February 1938 at Radio City Music Hall with NYC screenings of Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).

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.

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.

This film uses an experimental painting technique on documentary footage of the bustling New York streets during Christmastime: Mary, Joseph and the unborn Christ travel through the streets.