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