Program 11: Hallelujah the Hills

Inspired as much by Hollywood comedies and romances of the silent era as by the French New Wave, Adolfas Mekas’s debut feature remains, 59 years after its American premiere in the first New York Film Festival, an irreverent delight, a semi-slapstick vision of true love, and a valentine to cinema itself. Two madly impulsive young men are in love with the same woman, who happens to be played by two different actresses. The snow-covered fields and trees of Vermont gleam brilliantly in the background in this film that prompted Jean-Luc Godard to write, in Cahiers du Cinema, that Mekas is “a master in the field of pure invention, that is to say, in working dangerously—‘without a net.’” A selection of the 1963 New York Film Festival.