Also Directed by Jon Jost
Newport, Oregon. In a coastal town, Jeff and his wife Mattie work together facing the economic shifts. One son Chris, is unemployed; the other, Steve, is away on military service. Chris is lackadaisical and shiftless, Mattie perhaps drinks on the sly and tried to help her son, Jeff keeps his nose to the grind-wheel. Chris is dumped by his girlfriend, Jamie. Jeff scrambles to stay afloat. During a therapy session it is revealed that Chris is Jeff's step-son. Steve returns, but in a "transfer tube". Following his funeral, the family meet; an argument erupts, revealing the depths of the division between Jeff and Chris. In a counseling session Chris breaks down and is comforted by the counselor. Mattie and Jeff, lost in their grief, each lose their way.
Nas Correntes de Luz da Ria Formosa (In the Rays of Light of Ria Formosa) is a kind of documentary shot over a period of 3 months in summer of 1997 and then edited over the next 2 and a half years. The work is a spiritual portrait of a place and time. It is, as is Cabanas, willfully slow, meditative, passive. It has no evident narrative, though I hope I was able in my editing and other choices to impart a kind of slowly developing momentum which functions vaguely like a narrative, or like the melodic line in a piece of music. Finally LUZ is about light, and philosophically about life, and our place on this planet, and its place in the universe.
A tone poem about problems in a romantic relationship.
"Imagens de uma cidade perdida" is a portrait of an old area of Lisbon, primarily the Alfama, but also other central areas - Castelo São Jorge, Graça, Bairro Alto, and elsewhere. It was shot in 1997-98, over the span of more than a year. Like those places, its pace is languid and it wears the sense of "saudade" which defines Lisboa and Portugal.
One day, father makes a shocking decision in a family gathering. The family disagrees with it and against him in the very beginning. However, they make up their mind to support him at the end. A portrait of family disorganization casting the master of experimental film, James Benning.
Bowman Lake is a single image film of Bowman Lake, sunrise to sunset.
“A silent perusal of the Grand Canyon, morning to night, from a single, fixed camera position, by means of constant dissolves spaced a few seconds apart. Man — entirely absent — is no longer the center of the universe; the canyon exists outside of him. Despite the invisible photographer and his technologically-caused dissolves, this is a creditable approximation of the true foreign-ness of nature.” — Amos Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art (1974)
A telling story of an unemployed Vietnam vet in Butte, Montana, whose wife leaves him after seven years when she feels there is no longer communication between them and - more painfully and pointedly - because she is unable to have a child owing to his sterility from exposure to Agent Orange. Told in a gentle style, richly emotional, Bell Diamond was made with non-professionals drawn from the community of Butte.
1964, Autumn in Chicago. This was my 4th film, shot while waiting to go to prison for refusing to serve in the US military. Silent. B&W. I think it captures the sense of depression, of loneliness within the city. Looking back it seems almost archaic, Chicago as some kind of East Bloc country in Soviet times.
