The early 1960s was the golden age of underground cinema. Some, like Jack Smith’s “Flaming Creatures”, have caused scandals. Others were too explicit to write (see Barbara Rubin’s “Christmas on Earth”). At least one was a commercial success: “Hallelujah the Hills” by Adolfas Mekas.
“A savage parody on art films by a new American director scored a surprise hit Saturday at the New York Film Festival,” Eugene Archer reported in The New York Times in 1963, the festival’s first year.
Returning to Lincoln Center for three shows, part of a series devoted to the avant-garde of the early 60s, “Hallelujah the Hills” is perhaps the most conventional selection of the series – a feature with actors, some even professional, and a semblance of intrigue, shot in black and white with great sharpness by Ed Emshwiller, an underground filmmaker with great technical mastery.
The film is a romantic slapstick, set far from the bohemian Lower East Side in sylvan Vermont. Two guys, Jack (intrepid photographer Peter Beard) and Leo (painter and assembler Marty Greenbaum) are in love with the same young woman, Vera (“a charming and enigmatic winter pixie” according to Archer’s review). She is played by two different actresses (Sheila Finn and Peggy Steffans), both bearing a marked resemblance to Jean-Luc Godard’s muse, Anna Karina. The rivals court Vera in different seasons over the course of seven years – a crisis arises when the two show up for Thanksgiving.
As its title suggests, “Hallelujah” is nothing if not 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. Stunts and drunken antics abound. Beard gives a particularly athletic performance – at one point leaping bare ass through deep snow. (With his tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses, Greenbaum looks more like Woody Allen.)
Skipped cuts are also common. A veritable American homage to French New Wave film, “Hallelujah” suggests a frothy “Jules and Jim” performed in the carefree style of “Shoot the Piano Player.” Maybe there was a two-way street. As “Hallelujah” was a hit at the 1963 Cannes Film Festival, reviewed by Godard, it’s not inconceivable that it inspired his 1964 “Band of Outsiders.”
“Hallelujah” isn’t too sappy, though it demands a tolerance for jazz madrigal (heavy on a tinkling harpsichord) and rampant cinephilia. “I haven’t seen a movie in 10 days,” Leo complains. Rivals play Kurosawa samurai. There are nods not only to Godard but also to early cinema by Charlie Chaplin, Mack Sennett and WC Fields. Towards the end of the film, Mekas interpolates a famous portion of the ice floe excitement from DW Griffith’s 1920 “Way Down East”. The sequence still works and so, in a more limited way, “Hallelujah the Hills”.
In fact, as fashionable as Mekas’ film was, it has an atavistic quality. Beneath the surface lies a Lithuanian folk tale about rival princes and a princess (or goddess) related to the changing seasons. Hallelujah indeed.
Hallelujah hills
July 29, August 2 and 3, at the Film at Lincoln Center, Manhattan, filmlinc.org.