Jon Jost
Impressions from the American Independence Day celebrations in Butte, Montana: evening mood, American flag on the veranda, barbecue, firecrackers, fireworks. A quote from Donald Trump: “Marxists, anarchists, troublemakers and looters destroy our statues, erase our history, indoctrinate our children and trample our freedom. Your goal is no better America, your goal is the end of America.” A short, to-the-point comment.
Over 30 filmmakers and friends of Strand Releasing have come together to honor the company’s indelible contribution to independent cinema over the past thirty years. The participating filmmakers have each created a short film for the project, all shot on iPhones. Produced by Strand Releasing and Connor Jessup.
Jon Jost: MURI ROMANI II is a "slow film" showing the walls of the center of Rome in a manner which is both beautiful and mysterious, and hopefully prompts a meditative state which unconsciously raises thoughts of the deep history of Rome and of humanity.
Coming out of an accident with amnesia, Sophie Bauer tries to reshape herself in the eyes of those who knew her best.
A movie by Jon Jost, who is the maestro of the American experimental movie world. The film tells us the strange incidents that happen in the ruined old village. Comparing to Jon Jost’s previous movies, this film has a clearer narrative and is more experimental with the structure as well. The essay film, which takes place in Missouri where they live an outdated lifestyle and where old culture still exists, confuses the boundary between fiction and non-fiction. The movie is based from a true story but instead of telling the exact story, the director casts real actors and gives a little twist to it. The actors explain about the inhumane incidents that happened in the village and while reviving it, they create their own narratives.
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.
Taking inspiration from the collaborative 1967 militant anthology film Far from Vietnam, five of the boldest and most prominent American militant filmmakers unite to create this searing (and seething) omnibus work, employing a variety of approaches to reveal the hidden costs of the United States' (and Canada's) most expensive and longest-running war. (TIFF)
"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.
Mountain landscapes enveloped in foggy fields that slowly merge into one another. Sometimes the fog clears and details become visible. Sometimes the landscape blurs into an abstract drawing. From photographic images by Danila Rumold.
Teaching at Italy’s national film school, I assigned the students the project to make a film over 3 day weekend. Walking around where I was crashing at a student apartment in the San Lorenzo neighborhood I accidentally made this sketch of the ambience there – the nearby big cemetery, the lively street life. Serendipity.
In October 2008, Jon Jost is standing with his camera in the waiting area of a train station in the USA, filming the other travelers: a mother with a child, the cleaning service, businesspeople on the phone, the conductor who falls in love and says goodbye to his wife. Finally he gets on the train himself and points the camera out of the window at the passing towns, the landscape and the clouds in the evening sky. A benevolent look at America - in the middle of the global economic crisis.
After being thrown out of his house, a cowboy hits the road in a senseless wave of robbery, murder and rape. On a bucolic farm a seemingly retarded woman is kept on a rope by a mute farmer. Soon, the cowboy shows up. "Parable" is a radical reflection on the George W. Bush years, where the populace has become zombie-like.
Placed in a small seaside area north of Rome, of late popular with the intelligentsia and artists, La Lunga Ombra provides a portrait of 3 professional women under the hidden duress of post 9-11 Italy, and more broadly, Europe.
An enchanting moving painting. Digital colour shifts like a palette knife in greasy paint. For those who want to undergo the drug intoxication without chemicals. The work is made up of a compilation of material that the film maker has developed and processed in recent years. These are the fruits of many experiments within the limited visual possibilities of digital video. They are rooted in the experiments and observations of the experimental cinema.
Vergessensfuge is a meditation on the psychology of obedience and submission, in this instance springing from a handful of photographs taken in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp immediately after its liberation in 1945. The images are of young women, aged 20 - 30, who were guards at the camp - to say, compliant, obedient Germans doing as they were told to do.
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.
In the fall of 2003, Jon Jost walks with his camera through the garden of Waseda University in Tokyo. He films the bamboo forest, tree tops, grasses, bushes and leaves. The exposure changes and the most beautiful painting is created.
A wedding in Rome. Jost watches a bride and groom on the street, their swinging white dress, his festive suit, walking together on cobblestones. Filmed in slow motion, a beautiful flow of black and white movements emerges.
I walked around Trondheim, shooting this and that, and at one point I saw these girls walking across a little footbridge. After I got the shot of them, I spent a little time trying to imagine what they might have seen on their little walk. This is the result. I don't know if it was the light, or the architecture, but I was reminded of Edvard Munch's paintings and graphics, and decided this was a modest electronic homage to him. (Jon Jost)
Arbor Fugue is made from “outs” material from the installation piece, Trinity. I felt that the material made for an interesting re-working of the nature of the musical form of the fugue, in which motifs are returned to again and again in new forms. This was an experiment in doing the same visually.
A 2000 short film directed by Jon Jost. The film screened at International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2002.
Muri Romani is a somewhat radical type of documentary. In appearance, it is utter simplicity. For example, the image of a patch of wall in Rome, today. As one watches, the wall seems to change, invisibly, without technical means. The sound is a collage of street sounds: motorinos, bells, people talking, trams, and sirens -- the daily sounds of central Rome.
ROMA is a hastily drawn together documentary/essay on Rome, drawn from a large amount of material collected over two or three years, and put together in haste for an Italian television commission. The material had all been done for myself, but this particular collection of material was drawn together under a deadline and time limitation set by others. As such I feel it is only partly my own expression, done under the gun for other interests, and to make some needed money. As such this work is compromised - while clearly my own in vision, it is not what I would really do with the material, to which I hope sometime to return. But in the meantime it provides a glimpse of Rome - its deep history, its opulent arts, and its sprawling contemporary urban reality.
An essay film/documentary perusing matters of art, society, history, and a grab-bag of the author's interests, which also serves as a primer to the aesthetics of digital video.
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.
West Side Story meets Rumble in the Bronx meets A Clockwork Orange. Bizarre tale of London, a lonely teen yearning for affection and a leather jacket who lives in a dysfunctional family home where the mother keeps popping and sexually playing with her other child, X-Ray, a member of a gang of Mods who are constantly at war with a gang of Asian Bikers. Amidst this turmoil, London and her soul mate M16 search for meaning in a phantasmagoria without it.
Ricky, a dim-witted ex-con, meets Beth, a dim-witted waitress, in an Idaho diner. They take off in his car to Washington and begin an affair. Beth, a lonely romance-novel addict, is hopelessly enamored; Ricky is just in it for the (constant) sex. Beth's longing to visit California and Ricky's longing for quick cash leads them into a desperate situation. Director Jost uses a variety of avant-garde visual and narrative techniques, such as montage, collages, split screens and lengthy, tongue-in-cheek monologues to tell the tragicomic story of two complete losers in love.
Times are hard for Northwestern lumber-mill operators like Ray and his wife Jean. Ray and Jean's lives are thrown into chaos when their daughter writes home from college
Anna, a French actress, is approached by financial broker Gordon in the Vermeer room of a New York gallery. However, romance does not ensue...
Set in the quasi-Biblical splendor of the Mormon Dixie of central Utah, Sure Fire follows the trajectory of an American archetype, the small town entrepreneur seized by visions of fortune. Wes, eager to sell out the local grandeur to the wealthy hordes of Southern California, wheels and deals in real-estate, but more fundamentally he hones in directly to the get-rich-quick schemes for which America is famed. Sweeping up family and friends into his monomania, Wes' zealotry leads inevitably to tragedy.
This film is a portrait of the passage of one year in the lives of some San Francisco friends, circa 1988 (before the dot.coming of the city), a slow marijuana hazed story which drifts like the fabled fog, encompassing the quirks and habits of a generation that made the city theirs, if only for a while. Very obliquely Rembrandt Laughing sketches the time and place, encompassing the AIDS epidemic, the casual sexual revolution, the debris of '68 lingering in the air. A quiet, very San Francisco comedy of life among a small group of friends. Rembrandt Laughing was improvised over the period of about a month by Jost and his friends, mostly acting non-professionals.
Plain Talk is a complex essay-film, a follow-up a decade and some years later to Speaking Directly, and so another State of the Nation discourse, made for Britain's Channel Four in the year 1986-87. The work involved extensive travel around the United States, and poses an examination of just what America is/was, or what do we mean when we speak of it. Done in a series of radically different sections which collide with each other in a manner intended to provoke thinking, Plain Talk, which was made by an American and intended for American viewers, was indeed broadcast in Britain, but somewhat predictably, not in the USA.
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.
An ultimately doomed relationship in between a suicidal woman and an unemployed steel worker San Francisco.
It is night and, in the foyer of a small hotel, a receptionist performs her tasks, unhurried and impassive, her face ghost-white, an emotional mask. Like the camera, she gazes steadily, both silent spectator and vicarious participant in the fantasies played out by the hotel's transient guests. As the night progresses, she answers a phone, hands over a key; guests pass back and forth gradually taking on a dream-like presence. She continues to work and, when morning comes, she leaves, her nightshift over. 'NIGHTSHIFT shows what film can do if the conventional pace of narrative is slowed down and montage diminished. It is not a new idea, of course, but the way it is done here is both absorbing to look at and satisfying from the moral point of view.' (Jill Forbes, Monthly Film Bulletin)
An essay-film on language and theater, on human communication - intellectual in content, but purely poetic in terms of form: image, sound, language, cinema. Stagefright, with the exception of one shot, was all filmed in a small puppet theater space, actors against black.
A scathing portrait of the Hollywood/LA arts milieu of the late 70’s, Chameleon follows the amorphous day of its lead character, an Armani-jacketed peddler of high-class dope, fraudulent art, and preening postures suited-to-fit the changing victims, though as with all such fakery, the real victim in the long run is the person who lives such a life.
A detective fiction mixed with an essay-documentary about Los Angeles, Hollywood and the film industry, Angel City is a satiric comedy with serious intentions.
This film follows an antisocial working-class husband and father struggling to find work in the Midwest.
Speaking Directly is an essay-film making for a kind of State of the Nation address, from the perspective of someone other than the President of the United States, circa 1972-4. This film addresses both the political and cultural situation of the US at the height of the Viet Nam war, Watergate and its aftermath, and likewise addresses the personal life, in this context, of the filmmaker, at that time thirty years of age, recently out of two plus years in federal prison for refusal to accept military service.
"PRIMARIES is a simple film which merely establishes a definition of 'politics'. Its narrative moves in paragraph blocks, with each sentence accompanied by different pictures of a young woman's hands, feet, torso, face… A TURNING POINT IN LUNATIC CHINA provides a critique of the methods of communication employed by my fellow Leftists. The ritualistic posturing and sloganeering I had used myself and seen in action in Chicago and San Francisco State, the seizing of exotic foreign figures (Mao, Che) and ideological rhetoric (SDS debates on Stalinism)–all struck me as mistaken and useless... [TURNING POINT] initiates a conscious probing of the means and techniques of mass communication, particularly film. 1, 2, 3, FOUR... delivers a critique from within of the... ideologies... of the 'counter-culture'... [It] provides no answers, but rather it allows the internal dynamics of the 'left' generate its own questions."
A homage to nature and a plea for a careful approach to it. In one of his early films, Jon Jost shows impressions of a stream in the forest and a couple streaming through the forest: direct looks into the camera, cross-fades, multiple exposures, playing with sunlight, shadows and shapes. At the end, the appeal of a Wintu indigenous man who condemns the reckless treatment of the whites with nature is faded in.
“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)
Jost writes: “13 Fragments is a portrait of a young woman, 1968, evasive of political responsibilities, done in an austere, clean but very low-budget manner."
Working for the first time with sound, I made TRAPS, a film scripted in jail on hearing of an acquaintance’s suicide, and LEAH. Both are “portraits” of alienated young women. TRAPS is harsh in both form and content, with long takes speaking to the camera juxtaposed against long silent sequences as, in an argument by accretion, the grounds for alienation are piled up. Ostensibly a “documentary self-portrait” made by the woman of the film, TRAPS’ seemingly uncohesive segments crystallize only at the last moment when the neutral narrator (and alleged “editor” ) informs the viewer that the woman committed suicide. -https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC05folder/JostNotes.html
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.
Jon Jost: "RANT is a discursive portrait of Steven Lack, actor (Cronenberg's Scanners, Alan Moyle's Rubber Gun, Jost's All the Vermeers in New York) and full-time painter/artist in the New York scene since the late 1970's. The film provides a glimpse of this world through Lack's friends, dealers, and family, while showcasing his paintings and sculptures, and giving an insight into the creative processes of this driven artist."
CHHATTISGARH SKETCHES is a videographic notebook of a journey in India in the spring of 2003. It was made during brief periods free while I was conducting a practical digital video workshop in the small city of Raipur, in Chhattisgarh, in an out-reach program intended to provide lower-caste and tribals access to, and experience with, digital video. Most of the material in this work was made during weekend trips to the villages of the students, who invited me to stay with them. As such the film is an impressionistic glimpse of a non-touristic area of India, one of its poorer and less developed regions. It was my intention to capture more the “spirit” or “sense” of the place - the languid pacing of time, the light, the richness of color - than in any sense to make a clinical “documentary” about it. Included in the film, at the end, is a sequence of shots made by my students during the workshop conducted in Raipur.
The war in Mali is seen through a kaleidoscope that gives the whole thing an unexpected beauty and fascination. An anti-war film. A sung requiem provides the soundtrack.
From Jon Jost's Site: "Canyon is in effect a re-make of a film I shot in 1970 in 16mm, which ran 5 minutes. It was a look down into the Canyon for a full day, made from a sequence of shots, taken from the same viewpoint, Yavapi, dissolved one to the next. This version is in HD and takes advantage of the improved definition, and the release for certain constraints which 16mm imposed – technical and financial. Here the limits of time, cost, and the improved aesthetic quality allowed for another approach, though again the work is from a single vantage point – it is subtler and more in keeping with the nature of the canyon and its pacing."
