Jon Jost

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 ways both ugly and beautiful. And few directors' sensibilities were more gay, both overtly and covertly. Film historian Daniel Kremer is your tour guide through an obscure, perplexing body of work heretofore ignored and often unfairly shunned. Cruel, Usual, Necessary: The Passion of Silvio Narizzano is an essay documentary of discovery.

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Caveh gets stoned. Jon Jost doesn't.

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A film that Jon Jost dedicated to his daughter Clara, an artistically designed home movie and at the same time a look back at his life, mostly commented off-screen by Jon Jost. He used the technology of the digital camera which contrasts nicely with his newly discovered love for watercolor painting.

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Empire Prairie, where Lonnie Enright grew up. He's headed home now, to see his ailing father and little brother. Bad things are coming.

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Teenage London is trying to find meaning in the world, or a leather jacket of her own. Unaccepted by neither the Mods or the Asian biker gang, she tries to find her own path. Meanwhile, the two gangs maintain a mutual vendetta sure to erupt in a smorgasbord of violence.

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A Paul Joyce documentary on the American independent film scene.

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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.

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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.

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Reel 18 of Gérard Courant's on-going Cinematon series.

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As night falls, the receptionist of a small hotel dutifully performs her routine tasks while strange lodgers descend upon the dark corners of the inn.

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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.

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A young draft resister finds peace and love in the country, but his solution to the problems of the city may very well be a naive dream.

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A lyrical oblique film.

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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.

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A film that Jon Jost dedicated to his daughter Clara, an artistically designed home movie and at the same time a look back at his life, mostly commented off-screen by Jon Jost. He used the technology of the digital camera which contrasts nicely with his newly discovered love for watercolor painting.

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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.

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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."

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A tone poem about problems in a romantic relationship of a middle aged couple.

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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.

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Bowman Lake is a single image film of Bowman Lake, sunrise to sunset.

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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.

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An experimental sketch that came about while Jon Jost was teaching at Italy's National Film School. He strolled through the San Lorenzo district, observed the celebrations, the lively street life and didn't miss the nearby cemetery.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The Portuguese Revolution (1974-75) seen through the eyes of some of the most important photographers and filmmakers that witnessed the event. Their dreams and expectations and what came out of the revolution. With outstanding historical footage.

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A portrait of the London city - including tourist sites and trading markets.

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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”.

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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, claiming to have a horrifying revelation.

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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.

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Two HIV-positive young men — a semi-employed film critic and a hot hustler — tear off on a cross-country crime spree.

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A parable of the missteps of life enacted in the hothouse world of late 1980’s New York, in which the art market and the stock market each boomed, and in process spawned a smorgasbord of “yuppie” delusions which still persist. Anna, a French actress studying in New York, crosses paths with a successful stock-broker, Mark, standing before a Vermeer portrait at the Metropolitan, thence ensues a peculiar romance of missed meanings and connections, with tangential asides to the steaming arts world and stock market, loft-mate conflicts, and, perhaps, love. Wrapped up in their blindered worlds, Anna and Mark deflect away from their chances, leaving at the conclusion the wistful face of Vermeer’s portrait enigmatically asking questions. All the Vermeers in New York is a comedy of manners which, as gently as a Vermeer, looks beneath the skin of this time and place, and of these characters.

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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.

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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.

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A Bohemian and a five-year-old take walks on the outskirts of Osijek.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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As night falls, the receptionist of a small hotel dutifully performs her routine tasks while strange lodgers descend upon the dark corners of the inn.

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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.

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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.

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A man who is dissatisfied with his family life leaves home for weeks at a time, drifting from town to town.

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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.

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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 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.

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