Describing Adolfas Mekas’ Hallelujah the Hills is a real chore. It is avant-garde in a way that no longer seems all that ‘avant,’ yet in 1963 its impact was felt strongly in independent filmmaking everywhere. Basically a festival & college-town art picture, it has a comic energy that’s primitive and sophisticated at the same time. It’s easier to say what it isn’t rather than what it is. It’s a comedy, but almost entirely without form. Its oddball cast engages in skit-like comic scenes, but what we see is more like the kind of monkeying-about that happens in home movies. Yet every scene feels inspired by a pure love of moviemaking.
European immigrants Jonas and Adolfas Mekas were a major influence on New York film in the 1950s. They organized screenings of notorious underground movies and founded the magazine Film Culture; they worked in film societies and made movies of their own. Jonas was much more prolific but Adolfas’ first picture Hallelujah the Hills was the one that came to be best known. Some of the experimental films from New York around this time could almost be called Movie Doodling. I’m thinking of Marie Menken, some of whose films are little more than blurry home movies of flowers. Despite capturing the freedom of a playful home movie Hallelujah is professionally made, with excellent synch sound.
The movie purports to be a comic look at the romantic travails of two men smitten with the same woman. Best friends Jack (Peter Beard) and Leo (Martin Greenbaum) are both in love with Vera, forming a triangle as in Truffaut’s Jules & Jim. After seven years wooing her individually, they show up at the same time to propose, and are given bad news: Vera has gone and married a third suitor, the goofy lecher Gideon (cameraman Ed Emshwiller). Our two boys then go off on a camping trip to heal their wounds together, which permits odd flashbacks to idyllic memories from their time spent with the mutual object of their affections.
That description makes Hallelujah the Hills sound too organized. Its slapstick comedy refuses to follow established rules. Although there’s plenty of on-set synchronous sound, the story frequently uses silent movie irises and inter-titles. Like some films of the French New Wave, it occasionally refuses to hide its own artificiality, as when near-proposal scenes supposedly spread across seven years are all obviously edited from the same shot. Handsomely filmed in 35mm, the show avoids formal compositions, but frequently plays with that convention. At one point it imposes little frames over a couple of scenes, marking possible compositions within the frame, as would a photo editor. A few more visual jokes are imposed on the image with optical tricks, as when vertical Asian subtitles appear at the edge of one shot!
But most of what we see is staged as an absurdist comedy. Jack and Leo clown about, stumbling through the Vermont woods. They shoot guns, they throw lumber into the river. They manage to make this nonsense look unplanned. The main comic material covers their memories of incompetent courtships, and introduces the broadest avant-garde strokes. Vera is played by two actresses. Jack’s Vera is Sheila Finn, who later showed up in some French TV work. Leo’s Vera is played by Peggy Steffans, the same actress who worked with, eventually married and produced a decade’s worth of adult/experimental films with another maverick New York director, Joe Sarno. The one time that both swains visit Vera, she’s seen only from behind so we can’t tell which actress is being utilized. To illustrate their rivalry at the dinner table, the two men go at each other with culinary weapons. In a gag suitable for a Three Stooges comedy, Leo pinches Jack’s nose with a nutcracker (leaving marks!). Introductory shots of the two Veras use soft vignetting, framing her as D.W. Griffith might frame Lillian Gish back in 1912.
Although Vera is strongly attached to both men, each puts off a proposal of marriage, leaving both with seven years of awkward memories of the patient Vera. The indecisive Leo visited in the summer, and Jack came by in the winter. Jack’s memories of play in the snow would scare anybody not a member of a Polar Bear Club — they run and play barefoot, even on the ice-covered local stream. Jack runs about naked in the snow, and even swims in the presumably freezing water. The film’s one specific cinema reference comes when an inter-title announces a break to pay homage to Griffith’s Way Down East, with the famous scenes on the ice floes.
All of this reminiscing takes place while the boys are camping in the same woods where most of the rest of the movie plays out. In one scene they unpack a birthday cake, with candles that are already lit. The next day it becomes a target for their guns as it floats down the river. The joke isn’t played for silent-movie laughs, like passages in Richard Lester’s Beatles films; it’s more like off-the-wall drollery. There are also few if any jarring editorial effects. What’s being celebrated is the freedom from commercial and narrative constraints. Vera is quiet and thoughtful, the boys tend to be doltish jokers, and the wise-acre father doesn’t mind teasing them mercilessly. A couple of scenes of home life in Vera’s house frame momentary bustles in the kitchen, or focus on Mom complaining that nobody helps her with the chores. Then Mom will suddenly stare at the camera, as if saying “I know you’re there and I don’t care.” It’s all too obscure and mysterious to be joke-driven, and it’s far too stylized to be character driven. It appears to be ‘cinema-driven,’ way before self-conscious and self-referential filmmaking became a thing.
A still photo shows cameraman Ed Emshwiller shooting out in the country with a large, fully-blimped 35mm camera on a standard studio tripod. This accounts for the sync sound but must have made for a laborious production — lugging even a little camera through those woods would be a chore, but Emshwiller’s reportedly weighed 135 pounds.
The film is 100% committed to the idea of play. The characters might as well be cartoons, although Jack and his Vera look beautiful enough to be fashion models. Vera is playful but none of the humor assails her dignity: she was patient with her beaus, she had some laughs with them, and then she moved on. Naturally, the boys imagine that the winner Gideon behaving as an uncouth creep, to the woman they love.
A perfunctory finish sees our two confused heroes encountering a pair of escaped convicts, who wear striped pajamas suitable for a silent movie. But a few minutes before that is the film’s most poetic, baffling scene. Posing as intrepid hunters, the two losers in love come upon a bizarre sight: a barren tree with perhaps twenty fashionable women sitting and standing up in the branches, high above the ground. Is the scene saying, ‘don’t give up boys, because there are always other women to woo?’ It’s a sight that Luis Buñuel would love. Meanwhile, we’re wondering how those actresses possibly got up there, wearing their nice clothing. Was there a cherry picker handy?
