The early 1960s were the golden age of underground films. Some, like Jack Smith’s “Flaming Creatures,” caused scandal. Others were too explicit to write about (see Barbara Rubin’s “Christmas on Earth”). At least one was a commercial success: “Hallelujah the Hills” by Adolfas Mekas.
“A wild parody of art films by a new American director scored a surprising success Saturday at the New York Film Festival,” Eugene Archer reported in the DailyExpertNews in 1963, the festival’s inaugural year.
Returning to Lincoln Center for three shows, part of a series dedicated to the early ’60s avant-garde, “Hallelujah the Hills,” is perhaps the series’ most conventional selection – a feature film with actors, some even professional, and a semblance of plot, shot in sharp black and white by Ed Emshwiller, an underground filmmaker with great technical expertise.
The film is romantic slapstick, far from the bohemian Lower East Side in Sylvan Vermont. Two boys, Jack (the intrepid photographer Peter Beard) and Leo (painter and mechanic Marty Greenbaum) are in love with the same young woman, Vera (“a beautiful and enigmatic winter spirit” according to Archer’s review). She is played by two different actresses (Sheila Finn and Peggy Steffans), both with a clear resemblance to Jean-Luc Godard’s muse Anna Karina. The rivals court Vera in different seasons over the course of seven years – a crisis ensues when both show up for Thanksgiving.
As the title suggests, “Hallelujah” is nothing but exuberant. Adolfas Mekas, the younger brother of Jonas Mekas and, like him, an immigrant from rural Lithuania, was in his late twenties when he made the film. Pratfalls and drunken antics galore. Beard delivers a particularly athletic feat – bounded bare ass through deep snow at one point. (With his horn-rimmed glasses, Greenbaum looks more like the Woody Allen type.)
Jump cuts are also common. Very much an American tribute to the French new wave movie, “Hallelujah” suggests a frothy “Jules and Jim” made in the low-key style of “Shoot the Piano Player”. Maybe there was a two-way street. Since “Hallelujah” was a hit at the 1963 Cannes Film Festival, judged by Godard, it is not inconceivable that it was an inspiration for his 1964 “Band of Outsiders”.
“Hallelujah” isn’t overly juicy, though it does demand a tolerance for madrigal jazz (heavy on a tinkling harpsichord) and unbridled cinephilia. “I haven’t seen a movie in ten days,” Leo complains. The rivals play as Kurosawa samurai. There are nods not only to Godard, but also to the early cinema of Charlie Chaplin, Mack Sennett and WC Fields. Late in the film, Mekas interpolates a celebrated slice of floe excitement from DW Griffith’s 1920 “Way Down East.” The series still works and so does, in a more limited way, “Hallelujah the Hills”.
In fact, as fashionable as Mekas’ film ever was, it has an atavistic quality to it. Beneath the surface lurks a Lithuanian folktale about rival princes and a princess (or goddess) linked to the changing seasons. Hallelujah indeed.
Hallelujah the hills
July 29, August 2 and 3 at Film at Lincoln Center, Manhattan, filmlinc.org.