"Without Jerome":The Patronage of Jerome Hill and the Curating of 1960s American Experimental Work in Europe Ronald Gregg (bio) Experimental filmmaker, critic, curator, archivist, and advocate Jonas Mekas acknowledged the importance of filmmaker Jerome Hill's patronage to the New York avant-garde cinema, emphatically stating—quoting him—"I have to tell you frankly that without Jerome, Film Culture magazine would have closed by 1960. Without Jerome, neither the Film-Makers Cooperative nor the Film Makers Cinematheque would have survived. Without Jerome there would be no Anthology Film Archives."1 Both Mekas and playwright Jack Gelber, who wrote The Living Theater's first major success, The Connection (1959), used the word "angel" as a label for the philanthropist Jerome Hill and his financial support of the experimental underground;2 as Mekas acknowledged, many artists and entities would never have survived the 1950s and 60s without his financial support. A descendent of the multimillionaire railroad tycoon James J. Hill, Hill generously used his inherited wealth to fund his own filmmaking and extensively fund those experimental entities that Mekas lists and much, much more. Hill provided direct grants to individual filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage, Gregory Markopoulos, James Broughton, and Mary Ellen Bute3 and anonymously funded twelve experimental filmmakers a year from 1960–65 through the "Friends of New Cinema" fund administered by Mekas. According to Mekas, these "Friends of New Cinema" grants paid "twelve needy avantgarde filmmakers … forty dollars a month for a year. … Today, you may laugh about the forty dollars. But in the early sixties, it paid for a month's rent."4 He [End Page 148] significantly supported the work of film producer and entrepreneur David Stone, including Stone's production of Adolfas Mekas's Hallelujah the Hills (US, 1963), which featured Jerome Hill as Convict 1,5 and, as Gelber noted, Judith Melina and Julian Beck's experimental theatrical company The Living Theater, including their European tours. For instance, Hill gave The Living Theater $20,000 in support of their 1962 European tour.6 Also, Hill paid the legal bills for Mekas and Ken and Flo Jacobs in 1964, who were arrested for screening Jack Smith's experimental film Flaming Creatures and charged through the obscenity laws at the time.7 Important to the focus of this article, Hill also funded and participated in the introduction of American independent and experimental films to Europe in the 1960s, including the Festival of Two Worlds at Spoleto, Italy in 1961, and two traveling exhibitions of experimental films throughout Europe in 1964 and 1967 into 1968; organized film screenings of experimental work in Cassis, France; and supported the New American Cinema Group Exposition in Torino, Italy, in 1967. In his giving, Hill stayed mostly anonymous. Only Mekas and a few other individuals knew about the extent of his giving. Two major reasons for his anonymity stand out. One, as word got out about his generosity, the number of requests for financial assistance from struggling artists greatly increased. To shield himself from these requests, Hill set up the Avon Foundation in the 1960s, formalizing the request process and giving him distance from requests. A 1964 memo by A. A. Heckman, Executive Secretary of the Avon Foundation, notes this desire for anonymity, stating, "Mr. Hill has created a personal foundation to be known as Avon Foundation for the purpose of providing anonymity for Mr. Hill. (Under no circumstances is anyone to know who founded Avon Foundation except the officials of the First Trust Company, the partners of Doherty, Rumble and Butler, and the Directors and staff of Hill Family Foundation)."8 The Avon Foundation was later renamed the Jerome Foundation after Hill's death in 1972, which is still an important source of grants for early career artists. Two, Stan Brakhage relates that Hill was once prevented from exhibiting his paintings in a Paris gallery due to his wealth, since the gallery claimed that "everyone would think that your family had bought the show for you. … Our reputation would be ruined."9 Similarly, Hill was likely concerned that observers would think that he had bought his way into screening his films in Spoleto, Torino, and other places. Mekas seems to...
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May 14, 2024
Helena Shaskevich 
Open Access