Shortly before Jerome Hill's death in 1972, Film Portrait was shown at the San Francisco International Film Festival, where Albert Johnson wrote: "It is an artist-filmmaker's documentation of his aesthetic and creative growth, from 1905 to the present, preserved, captured and held in photographs and cinema during this span of time. By some magic connivance between Time and Destiny, Mr. Hill's father, a wealthy industrialist, became fascinated by the earliest film cameras, and took pictures of his family, of journeys and happenings during his son's childhood. These films became the basis for young Jerome's obsessive, creative curiosity about narrative cinema and, with tremendous energy and precocity, he began to experiment with making motion pictures. Film Portrait is an unsentimental look into the past in order to show the filmmaker's physical, emotional, and most important, his aesthetic struggle to maintain his creative impulse and imagination against America's indifference to anything avant-garde."