JON JOST RETROSPECTIVE
Born in Chicago in 1943, Jost was raised in a military family that lived in Georgia, Kansas, Japan, Italy, Germany, and Virginia. He started making films after he was expelled from college in 1963, and two years later was imprisoned by the federal government for burning his draft card and refusing to serve in Vietnam, a term that lasted two years and three months. (Ironically, this may have been the longest period since his teens that he lived at a fixed address; when I first met him in 1977 he was living mainly out of his car.) Afterward, he worked with draft resisters and the Chicago Mobilization, and helped found the Chicago branch of a radical film production and distribution group later known as Newsreel. He then moved to the northwest–living mainly in rural sections of Oregon and Montana–where his remarkable early features Speaking Directly (1973) and Last Chants for a Slow Dance (1977) were made. During the same period he lived intermittently in Los Angeles and made two other features there, Angel City (1976) and Chameleon (1978).
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This Sunday’s program of some of Jost’s rarely screened early shorts includes two silent films he made shortly before he went to prison, Portrait and City. Unless one imparts significance to a voter-registration poster in the Chicago-made City, neither film can be called political. Judging from what I’ve seen–all of Jost’s features and about half his shorts–this isn’t true of any film Jost has made since his prison stint. For all their stylistic and thematic differences, they’re clearly informed by a political sensibility.
Jost’s isolation from his family is made clear by the following brief speech in Speaking Directly, which we hear while looking at a family snapshot: “My parents: I’m just getting to know them after not seeing them for about eight or ten years. My father is a retired Army colonel whom I think of as a war criminal, and my mother, as a cipher, shielded herself from the world with the apology that she is a woman and therefore not responsible.” His isolation from the viewer during this period in his career is equally pronounced, both because of and in spite of the rigorous honesty and thoroughness of his self-analysis; yet Speaking Directly, which is subtitled Some American Notes, conveys much more to me of the taste, thought, and passion of 60s counterculture than anything I’ve seen about that era in the mainstream media (a bracing alternative to the endless lies of TV). And Jost is intellectually honest enough to insist on his interconnectedness with both his audience and the rest of the world in spite of his isolation. Consider the following two monologues:
If the extraordinary experience of the second shot offers a close parallel to some of the key “structural” films made by U.S. and Canadian independents during the 60s and 70s, Jost’s isolation from the film community during those years virtually guaranteed that he would arrive at such concepts and techniques chiefly on his own. This lonely stance represents both the strength and weakness of his early work–an irreducible kind of self-reliance that usually means a need to reinvent (or else invent ahead of others) certain staples of avant-garde filmmaking. (This is a trait shared by David Lynch in his precommercial days, though the political and historical innocence of Lynch couldn’t be further from the self-definitions of Jost. It’s just that both of them owed part of their originality and freshness to their studied ignorance of what other independent filmmakers were doing.)
