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.
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 -...
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 1973-5. This film addresses both the political and cultural situation of the US at the height of the Viet Nam war, Watergate and...
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...
The famous French film director Jean-Luc Godard is interviewed by British film theorist Peter Wollen and the editor of Framework Don Ranveaud. He talks of the developments in his work, the change in style epitomized by his most recent film, Sauve Qui Peut, his work with Francis Ford Coppola and the...
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...
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.
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...
Ex-con is released from jail, goes through release procedure, buys a gun, tries to pick up girl in bar, tries to sleep, meets up with ex-prison buddy, goes to take revenge on drug deal gone sour. A minimalist drama of dire simplicity, using avant-garde methods.
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.
Jon Jost describes his 2021 collage-as-narrative feature “Tourists” as “an exploration of many things—the writer Raymond Carver, the town Port Angeles, the nature of writing stories and poetry, the interplay between writing and acting, the nature of fiction and truth.” Jost works with his...
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,...
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...
