Cruel, Usual, Necessary: The Passion of Silvio Narizzano
02024HD
Perhaps at first glance, the filmography of Silvio Narizzano appears unremarkable. Thanks to his sleeper hit Georgy Girl (1966), he's known largely as a "one-hit wonder" director. Upon closer inspection, however, likely no other filmmaker used cinema as effectively to exorcise personal demons in...
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...
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'...
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...
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.
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...
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.
This film is a record of the first Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival. It reflects the various ways the festival was given shape by nascent global changes embodied by Perestroika, the Tiananmen Square massacre, and many other contemporaneous events.
A bluesy lyrical romance of two ugly-ducklings who meet on the Golden Gate Bridge and after a brief and awkward courtship, live together with the usual problems of money and work, take flight to an illusory freedom on the road, and dances inexorably to a drab doom.
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...
“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...
An American independent director comes to Italy to shoot a film. But inconveniences and obstacles stand in the way at every step. These are the years in which “Tangentopoli” rages and the golden rule of officials and collaborators is “one (bribe) to you, one to me, one to Raffaele”.
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...
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...
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...
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.
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,...
