Adolfas Mekas

The DVD is PAL (no Zone) – that means it will play on any DVD player in the world, except in the technologically retarded USA - but it will play on any computer.

Even avowed enemies of the New American Cinema were impressed by the film’s lack of pretensions and its unexpected lyricism and zen serenity in the midst of nervous parody.

Andrew Sarris, Village Voice, 1963

Tourné suivant le bon vieux principe d’une idée par plan, ses collines embaument de fraîche ingénuité et de gentillesse rusée. L’effort physique y côtoie hardiment le gag intellectuel. On s’émeut et on rit d’un rien: un buisson mai cadre, une banane dans la poche, une majorette dans la neige…

Jean-Luc Godard, Cahiers du Cinema, 1963

This unpretentious low-budget film made with few reels of film and a lot of imagination, is the wildest and wittiest comedy of the holiday season. Plotless and pointless, seemingly without a care for structure, it is infuriatingly unconventional and wholly disarming. Adolfas Mekas displays an uninhibited affection for cinema, as evidenced in a staggering series of references to other movies - from D.W. Griffith to Jean-Luc Godard, with Japanese subtitles to supplement a Ugentsu-like fireside scene.

Eugene Archer, New York Times, 1963

Hallelujah the Hills is the weirdest, wooziest, wackiest screen comedy of 1963 – a slapstick poem, an intellectual hellzapoppin, a gloriously fresh experiment and experience in the cinema of the absurd.

Time, 1963

Undoubtedly the greatest success (of Cannes) was the American film, Hallelujah the Hills. Imagine a combination of Huckleberry Finn, Pull My Daisy, the Marx Brothers, and the complete works of Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and W.D. Griffith, you have got it. What have you got? A film which is both hilariously funny and ravishingly lyrical.

Richard Roud, The Guardian, 1963