Jerome Hill spent the decade of the 1950s developing his artistic skills. This is the time period in which Hill had his first major film success; began painting intensively, especially at Cassis; and reinforced a variety of artistic and personal partnerships through his Cassis Festivals.

Hill's creation of the Grandma Moses documentary in 1949 signaled a bold start to his postwar filmmaking career. It also marked the beginning of Hill's professional collaborations with Erica Anderson, who played a critical role in the making of Hill's next major film, "Albert Schweitzer." The film won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature of 1957. His correspondence with Anderson and with others involved in editing and promotion of the film represents a rich collection of material on documentary filmmaking, Hill's personal working style, and not least of all, Schweitzer himself.

In 1957 and 1958, Hill also found time to begin a series of Performing Arts Festivals in Cassis, France. These festivals offered exposure to a wide variety of European theatre professionals and Musicians that Hill helped support financially. Many of these theatre groups and performers were at the fringes of the arts world; Hill's papers of this period represent a unique perspective on the New York and European avant-garde.

In the early 1950s, Hill began thinking about doing a documentary film on Carl Jung. Hill had been intrigued by his theories of the subconscious, and Hill's cousin Maud Oakes encouraged his interest. Hill interviewed Jung at his home in Switzerland, accompanied by Oakes, an anthropologist and comparative religion expert. Hill set aside the Jung project when the Schweitzer film began monopolizing his time. He would later discard the idea of a full-length documentary, but his impressions of Jungian ideas found voice in "The Sand Castle," which opened in 1961.