Notes for Jerome

Comprised of footage Mekas shot over three visits to the home of his friend Jerome, NOTES FOR JEROME make up Mekas’s tribute to the American filmmaker and artist Jerome Hill, who passed away in 1974. Music performed by Hill, Taylor Mead, Charles Rydell and other artists makes up the soundtrack.

“During the summer of 1966, I spent two months in Cassis as a guest of Jerome Hill. I visited him briefly again in 1967, with P. Adams Sitney. The footage of this film comes from those two visits. Later, after Jerome died, I visited his Cassis home in 1974. Footage of that visit constitutes the epilogue of the film. Other people appear in the film, all friends of Jerome: Taylor Mead, Bernadette Lafont, Charles Rydell; Barbara Stone and David Stone and their children; Noel Burch, Judith Malina and Julian Beck and the Living Theater collective; Mrs. Chaliapin, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Michel Fontayne; Alec Wilder, P. Adams Sitney and Julie Sitney; and Jerome’s perhaps closest and oldest friend, whose name I forgot, but whom he always called Rosebud. Those were happy but lonely summers for me, I thought a lot about home. That’s why this film, this elegy for Jerome is dedicated to the wind of Lithuania. Sometimes, though, I had a feeling that Jerome was as much of an exile as was I.” ―Jonas Mekas

Reading: Eglė Lukšaitė und Goda Palekaitė, from writings by Jonas Mekas