Portland Show and Tell

Upcoming at the North West Film Center will be two nights of screenings of my films, and, if we get 10 participants, a workshop.  Here’s the schedule:

NWFC, Whitsell Auditorium, 1219 SW Park Avenue, Portland, Oregon
May 31

7:00 PM                Last Chants for a Slow Dance

9:00 PM               Parable

Workshop June 1-2  (To register call 503-221-1156)

June 3         

6:30  PM             La Lunga Ombra  (Italian with English subtitles)

8:15   PM            Imagens de uma cidade perdida  (minimal Portuguese with English subtitles)

Last Chants for a Slow Dance (1977)

Last Chants was made in 1977, for $3000, in and around Missoula, Montana.  It swiftly went to many film festivals at the time (Edinburgh, Toronto) and gained a strong reputation as a real “American Independent” film.  It’s listed now in the book 1000 Films You Must See Before You Die, and I get DVD orders from around the world thanks to that.  J Rosenbaum also lists it in his 100 Best Films Ever.  Here’s a review:

From the Chicago Reader  by Jonathan Rosenbaum

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My own favorite among Jon Jost’s experimental narratives, this chilling portrait of an embittered, misogynistic lumpen proletarian (Tom Blair) driving through western Montana consists mainly of a series of virtuoso long takes. Jost’s highly original technique and Blair’s searing performance combine to create one of the most powerful and provocative psychological profiles of a motiveless killer to be found on film.

(For much more from Rosenbaum see this or for a UK view see this.)

Parable, (2007)

Parable was made in Nebraska, just as the Bush era was coming to a formal close.  It was done without a script, and as I told the actors, I didn’t want to know what I was doing, I wanted to dive into my psyche and see what came up.   It’s a sour film, but beautiful and weird and disturbing – the kind of film I want to make.  Here’s a review from Portland critic, Dennis Grunes:

PARABLE (Jon Jost, 2009)

Jon Jost’s films have always tended toward parable. Now this is the case again with Parable, the jewel of his Fuck Bush (He Fucked Us) Trilogy. (This overarching title is mine.) Homecoming (2003) homed in on the aftermath of a returning dead soldier; Over Here (2007), of a returning living soldier. Now Jost turns to the Bush-Cheney & Co. assault on individual rights and freedom, its devastation of these, and the linkage between this war at home, on the American citizenry, with the illusory nature of American hopes and promises predating Bush 43.   Jost’s parable is a perfect one: crystal-clear, yet elusive, mysterious, irreducible, unfathomable. It was videographed in Lincoln, Nebraska, in, as Jost puts it, “the Time of Bush.”

Like his Last Chants for a Slow Dance (1977), one of whose violent aspects it brilliantly revives, the film proceeds by set-pieces, some of which are fashioned from Nature outdoors. A long one has two men supposedly in the front seat of a car, the supposed road rapidly visible in retreat through the back window. In reality the scene is artificial; facing us, the men’s images are scrunched and thinly outlined in black. Jim, who has just abandoned his wife, is driving the other man’s car. (The owner/passenger’s license has been suspended for drunk driving.) As country-western music plays on the radio, Jim extols the virtue of American freedom, identifying with it the road of possibilities before them. But this road is excluded from the frame; and even if were it visible, it would not be real, but illusory. The men themselves are reduced by the comic strip captions that reveal what they are thinking, each about the other and in response to what the other is saying. While Jim loved going to church as a boy, the owner/passenger did not. With sore irony this disparity binds them as they both end up singing the hymn “I’m in the Lord’s Army.” Jim, sentimentally, still is; his companion “ain’t marchin’ anymore.” Recall Tennyson’s poem “The Two Voices”? Could not these two chaps represent competing aspects of a single personality?

After Jim anally rapes and then shoots his companion in the brain point-blank, two other characters appear in the country. Their relationship, that of master/owner and slave, reminds one of Roman Polanski’s great The Fat and the Lean (1961). The androgynous slave–mime Rachael Le Valley gives a haunting performance–has his/her ankle bound by rope. (Sometimes an upper torso shot makes the slave-in-motion seem perfectly free; but he/she isn’t.) Updating the myth of Sisyphus, the owner is continually (though not continuously) unraveling a vast, serpentine pile of rope. When he is shown first engaged in this activity, we cannot see the rope; what we see is his upper body rhythmically “at it,” his screen-right shoulder undulating in and out of sunlight. In a later, parallel scene, the owner, indoors, appears to be having sex with someone whose moans we hear but who isn’t included in the frame. No; the owner is once again unraveling rope, while the moans emanate from the slave, who is masturbating in his/her space of confinement outdoors. The poor slave pays a terrible price for getting the owner all hot and bothered. We hear the sound of a cleaver as it is being sharpened in the bathroom as the slave stands upright in the tub.

A recurrent visual refrain is the owner’s eye through a peep-hole, looking in on the slave. The surveillance is creepy and frightening–but also, somehow, sad. I was reminded of Redon’s Cyclops. (At one point the owner at work at his pile of rope is shot through a tight-meshed screen, making him also appear to be a prisoner.) Another recurrent visual refrain is a tree or trees luminously alive in a breeze. This symbol of freedom in certain contexts ironically reflects on the lack of freedom that humans experience.

Jim eventually reappears and comes to a bad end. (The slave’s.)

Jost’s film concludes with a postscript indicting Bush and Cheney and other members of their administration. The collision between the preceding poetic parable and this straight shot of prose generates tremendous feeling.

  An American masterpiece.

La Lunga Ombra (The Long Shadow)(2006)

La Lunga Ombra was shot in Italy in a week or so, with a few modest “name” actresses and a retired model.  Totally improvised, it was my take on how 9/11 had impacted a certain class of intellectuals in Italy, and more broadly in Europe.  It cost me about $50 to make, thanks to the actresses footing the bill for my food.  Here’s a review by web cinema critic Acquarello.

On the surface, Jon Jost’s austere, somber, and uncompromisingly caustic improvisational rumination on the pall cast by the aftermath of 9/11 on the European consciousness, La Lunga Ombra seems an uncharacteristic departure from the intractable consciousness of middle America that pervade his early films – a post tragedy portrait that converges more towards claustrophobic, Bergmanesque angst rather than the transformative, post-apocalyptic, loss of innocence grief that its conceptual framework would seem to suggest. Loosely structured around the lives and mundane gestures of a trio of close knit friends – a literary figure (Eliana Miglio) (whose agency appears to be in the process of publishing a photo-essay journal on the faces of colonial-era terrorism) and a television producer (Simonetta Gianfelici) who retreat to a remote, off-season seaside cabin in order to tend to a mutual friend, Anna’s (Agnese Nano) emotional crisis and ensuing depression after being unexpectedly abandoned by her cruel (and perhaps abusive) husband – the film is also a provocative, broader exposition on the intangible, often corrosive collateral damage of psychological warfare and demoralization.

Intercutting the quotidian rituals of women in the stasis of their isolation (as they alternately attempt to console Anna by lending a sympathetic ear as she struggles to articulate her sense of loss, distracting her thoughts with idle conversation and whimsical parlor games, and encouraging her to reclaim her identity by returning to youthful pursuits) with textural and increasingly abstract archival footage from acts of terrorism, Jost reinforces an atmosphere of disjunction between characters and context that, in retrospect, perhaps reveals the underlying separation between action and consequence that pervades the film. A videotaped interview with a businessman recounting his experience while working in postwar Afghanistan alludes to this bifurcation when he describes his observation of the absence of everyday interaction between men and women in contemporary, post-Taliban Afghan society, a culturally enabled separation that leads to a certain level displaced intimacy not usually found in patriarchal cultures.  Conversely, the friends’ hermetic retreat also becomes a form of artificial segregation – this time, from the community of men – where their interaction is relegated to the margins (represented only as distant photographs hanging from walls or leafed through in books (uncoincidentally, as symbols of warfare or violence), or existing in the periphery as fire wood vendors, technicians, or photographers). However, inasmuch as instinctual regression serves as a defense mechanism against inflicted wounds, it also exposes the myopia of victimization. In a sense, this defensive retreat towards isolation – and in particular, a self-imposed isolation in order to reinforce a sense of solidarity and foster moral support – not only illustrates the core of human nature’s response to trauma, but also introduces the idea of the women’s private turmoil as a microcosm of post 9/11 consciousness where grief, loss, fear, and confusion have invariably given way, not only to isolationism, self-righteousness, and intransigence, but more importantly, to a self-perpetuating moral contamination and spiritual inertia that continues to fester long after the crisis has subsided. Moreover, by incorporating granular and pixellated images from the World Trade Center attack that appear increasingly impressionistic and decontextualized (paradoxically creating an inverse proportionality between the distance to the image and its resolution), the juxtaposition becomes a potent metaphor for the abstraction inherent in the psychology of terrorism, where effectiveness is measured, not in conveying graphic realism or maximized casualty, but in the manipulation of public sentiment through the global domination of media images. It is this quest for sensationalism and media occupation that is ultimately encapsulated by the controversial inclusion of a gruesome and desensitizing ritual execution footage taken in postwar Iraq that concludes the film – a grim and sobering reminder of society’s own implication in the creation of the spectacle, in the systematic corruption of its own soul.

Imagens de uma cidade perdida (2011)

Imagens is a meditative documentary, a kind of rumination on place and its time and spirit – the old parts of Lisbon, Portugal: Alfama, Graca, Castello.   It was screened at the Rotterdam festival, and was in competition at the Yamagata documentary festival in Japan in October 2011.  Here again is Dennis Grunes:

IMAGES OF A LOST CITY (Jon Jost, 2011)

“I think we are blind. Blind people who can see, but do not see.” ― José Saramago

Prolific Jon Jost’s videographed Imagens de uma cidade perdida, from Portugal and South Korea, now that I’ve seen it, replaces Lars von Trier’s Melancholia as my choice for the best “film” of 2011. Jost has written about “the Portuguese inclination towards fatalism and sadness,” their saudade. His portrait of modern Lisbon perhaps suggests this (although this would not have occurred to me had I not read Jost’s remark), but reflects as well its mirror-image, the sadness that derives from the gradual loss of everything to Time. Jost has dedicated Imagens to his young daughter, Clara. (For an explanation of the tragic situation involved, see my essay on his 2006 Passages.) Poetic and never poetical, it is a documentary that ferrets out glimpses of human and material disrepair. Only children at play and hands at work hammering pieces of stone into the sand to create an alley pathway—something for future feet—escape the pervasive tenor of loss, exhaustion, dilapidation. We witness people who are being, or feeling, left behind in a globalized city dropping from its historical and cultural stature into the Third World.

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Jost casts his camera behind and under places and structures, favoring peoples’ backs. (A mischievous boy, though, pops his face into the camera; we enjoy following his vivid shirt to the far back of the frame and again up front.) The framing divides and otherwise restricts exterior space. The opening static, long-held shot is behind a residential structure—a house, I think—and another, an apartment building, with an alley in between the two. Children play. On a bench, closer to us, her back towards us, a solitary older woman sits; at one point, the boy mockingly kisses her and is reprimanded, presumably by his mother. The woman sits and sits; is she observing, or simply staring into space? Is she as much remembering as living?—inside her head in the past, or in the moment? Eventually she is joined by a neighbor her age. They softly converse. What of life has slipped away from them? Both are nearly as stationary as the camera—so much so, in fact, that when the first woman, alone, reaches once to the ground, this motion of hers perplexes and unsettles.
Jost’s video passes between substantiality and abstraction; sometimes, abstract images are conjoined with clear, immediate sounds, or substantial images are conjoined with abstract sounds, the echo-y or distant sounds of seeming voices of the past. Images also pass between color and monochrome. An overhead long-shot, seemingly black-and-white, studies children at play in the street. They resemble the blind, groping, evolutionary beetles in Robert Browning’s poem “Two in the Campagna.” Individually some of them may have futures; but, visually, vertically, the group of them, however young, are imagined lost to Time. In time, most everything we see and hear in this “film” becomes a metaphor.

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The governing one, because it evolves into a metaphor for the creative process that is generating Imagens, as well as a wider metaphor for the narrow, peripherally blind purposefulness of our laboring lives, shows masculine hands at work constructing the aforementioned pathway. The activity is “in the moment,” direct and immediate, except that the abstraction achieved by focusing only on hands almost feverishly busy amidst speechlessness and the alienating sound of hammer on stone, consigns it to something more elusive than a material dimension. Later, a dissolve restores the activity, now approaching completion, to our view. Both passages seem to be in black and white—until a glimpse of a worker’s blue jeans enters the frame: as quietly explosive a visual gesture as when the woman on the bench reached momentarily to the ground. Is it an illusion that the present seems capable of redeeming, however briefly, whatever has been lost to Time?

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For a long time, Imagens remains out of doors, in a way separating us, as well as the people themselves, from the stability of their lives. Eventually, the camera is indoors—for instance, at a window observing a municipal bus, as well as other traffic, outside. Darkness; covered with blinds, the window—or another window—is doubly mysterious. Jost applies distortion to create the illusion that the venetian blinds and window are undulating—breathing. It is a blind and labored—a mortal—breath. Sound, also, seems distant, ghostly. The occupants of the house or apartment, although it is their own struggle, are themselves blind to the struggle at the window.

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     Imagens de uma cidade perdida, outdoors again, closes on an older gentleman occupying a bench. The image startles for two reasons. This bench, on the street, isn’t shot from behind; we are given a lateral view. The solitary occupant, moreover, seems to be in the throes of anguish or terrible pain. Rather than sitting upright and facing forward, he is all over the bench, as though he were using it to hold himself together. We are seeing how he feels—for whatever cause. Jost doesn’t budge the camera, and we cannot help but see. Is it Portugal’s experience of fascism, which an earlier inserted passage addressed, what is weighing on this man? Is his health, like his city, in disrepair? We do not know, we will never know; but we cannot help but see.

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Lisbon is a city that has never meant anything to me. Now it will haunt me for the rest of my life.

KC and “fly-over country”

KC

I went to Kansas City for their small film festival, with a five day stay providing a respite from constant travels, and the chance to look around a bit.   As with other cities in the American mid-west there is the combination of a nearly brutal simplicity, of boxy buildings from the late 1800′s to the present, laid out in the customary grid, but counter-balanced with residential areas of handsome houses, and the occasional nod to a kind of showy opulence – in KC this would include the now restored, though not to its original use, train station.   And as in most of the cities I’ve been to of late, the centers are now marred with a disjointed mix of glassy contemporary skyscrapers, seemingly competing for some prize for worst amalgam of modernist/post-modernist design cliches.  The only virtue of these eye-sores is that they were built with modern day financially rooted intent, and will likely be torn down in 50 years or less, while their older companions, built to last, may survive them.  We can hope.

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The new Kaufman Center for the Performing ArtsWinstead’sAuthur Bryant’s BBQ

The architecture of these cities and towns seems duly reflective of the inhabitants:  a somewhat blunt and direct and practical people, who, with a small minority dissenting, vote Republican as if it were a religious duty.   What’s the matter with next door Kansas is the same thing that’s the matter with Missouri.

KC Airport

From Kansas City I flew on to Minneapolis and a few stops in small-town Minnesota – Northfield and St Cloud – before returning to the city.

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Randy Malecha at Willie’s Shoe Repair where “You Will Be Satisfied” (I was)Northfield Bank robbed by Jesse James (unsuccessfully)

Chip Demann, leader of the James-Younger gang (reenactment)Unsuccessful bank robbersSt Cloud, Minnesota

Minneapolis-St. Paul coming up next. 

Florida Follies

As the saga of George Zimmerman moves on, there has been a flush of “new information” which apparently has sent the right-wing into bloggeria mania.  Intent on proving that Trayvon Martin was just another “n-word” and that Zimmerman is some kind of heroic vigilante figure, they’ve gone bonkers over the purported “evidence” released by the Sanford FL police department.  Of course in this evidence, there’s some odd stuff, which the press, seemingly working in tandem with those out to twist the story.  The above tape was released early, and as noted by some, Zimmerman neither looks nor behaves as if he had just been in a life and death tussle, during which he admittedly shot Martin in the chest.  He claimed that he did so as Martin was sprawled atop him, pummeling him and making him fear for his life.   Note, though, that there’s no blood all over Zimmerman, which there certainly would be had Martin been above him (or actually anywhere in physical contact).  Nor in the tape is there any evidence of the alleged black-eyes and scratches which the police claimed were there.  Rather there is a rather casual and unharmed-looking Zimmerman, and similarly casual police behavior.   Zimmerman was released that night, and the “forensic” photographs which the police released were taken the next day.

This was the photograph taken the evening of the event.  Notice the lack of black eyes, any visible damage to head or face.   Also notice the civilian shirt, not the same as in the video.

And the next day, here is Mr Zimmerman, in prison jumpsuit, shaven, cleaned up and….  and sporting the wounds allegedly inflicted by Mr Martin the previous night. And this is how the New York Times reported it:

Mr. Zimmerman was a neighborhood watch volunteer at the gated community called Retreat at Twin Lakes, in Sanford, Fla., where the shooting took place. He suffered a broken nose, black eyes, cuts to the back of his head and back pains, all of which he said were the result of a struggle with Mr. Martin, who was unarmed.   NYT  May 18 2012.

None of the things I have read (not at all exhaustive) have pointed out that the above jump-suit photos were taken the day after Mr Zimmerman was allowed to return home.  For other’s views on this see this.

One of the officers to respond to the Retreat arrived there to find “George Zimmerman, in protective custody, which I know to be the head of the neighborhood watch,” the officer stated in a report.

“Zimmerman appeared to have a broken and a bloody nose and swelling of his face,” the report said.

According to a report by another officer, Timothy Smith, the police offered Mr. Zimmerman the chance to be taken to hospital at least three times — at the scene, during the ride to the police station and after arriving at the station — and he declined each time.

Nor do the reports make much of the fact that George Zimmerman’s father is a retired State Judge and lawyer, with close connections to the Florida legal establishment.   The above provides transparent evidence that the police and high up elements of the Florida State Justice system are engaged in an on-going cover-up of the murder of Trayvon Martin, presumably in the interests of Zimmerman’s father.

Ina Drew

Of course follies are not limited to Florida, though the Sunshine State has demonstrated a high capacity for jiggling the law in the interests of certain favored souls – recall the hanging chads and the Supreme Court’s decision to award the Presidency to the Governor of Florida’s brother after many dubious electoral antics.    The above charming woman is Ina Drew, formerly the 4th highest paid ($14 million) member of the JP Morgan clan’s executive.  She is now the somewhat disgraced scape-goat of the moment (along with The London Whale, one Bruno Iksil, a trader for JPM), canned for her part in the 3 billion and counting losses which Jamie Dimon chalks up to “stupid” actions.   Of course that those might also be illegal is another matter for our sterling courts to deal with.  And we can pretty much guess how they’ll be dealt with – in the same warped manner that Trayvon’s death is being handled.

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Drawing thanks to Stephen Lack

Empire Prairie

Here in Stanberry, Missouri, (pop. 1,230 or so), tucked up in the northwest corner of the state, shooting a film for Blake Eckard, who’s lived here all his life.   The film will be called Ghosts of Empire Prairie.   Aside from shooting the film (SONY XDcam), Blake cast me as a red-neck Daddy asshole.  So far a bar-fight involving a (real) rodeo hand resulted in a nice bruised butt from landing on the floor a few times smack on top of my wallet.  Hard to sit comfortably the last few days.   It’s been now 10+ days, and we seem to be coming to a close – one actress left, an actor leaves tomorrow.  I’m out of here middle of the month.   The smear of time is an odd mixture of small-town slo-mo and the rush of shooting, and I lost track of the calendar some time ago.  Blake has a script of some kind, though the exigencies of reality usually see it tossed under the bus at the first clash between “idea” and execution.  Blake writes in a literary manner, with descriptions which he has no means to actually make happen on screen.

Blake “Buck” Eckard

Stanberry ATM

Those tossed on screen with me include Ryan Harper Gray, who met Blake through me when Ryan did his first role for me, in Homecoming.  He’s done one other film with Blake since, as well as two for me and is up for another for me in August.  He also is finishing his own first film, This Is A Love Story.   Along with Ryan are two friends of his, from Dallas, his erstwhile home-town, though he’s made pilgrimage now to LA.  They are Frank Mosley, himself a filmmaker, and Arianne Martin.   We’re each cast as rural caricatures:  myself the asshole Dad of Lonnie (Gray) and Ted (Mosley), and Dawn, Lonnie’s high-school local slut, bar-girl.   Of this mix Blake seems, in my view, to be making a slice of small town Gothic something.

Ryan Harper GrayArianne MartinFrank MosleyJon as “Burl”

With just a few scenes to go, and 20 minutes in a pretty tight edit, it looks as if Ghosts of Empire Prairie might turn out rather good.  I hope so, for Blake and the rest of us.   While I don’t like to count chickens before they hatch, we did give the Venice festival a little heads up about this film, and if it all works out Blake will submit it for their consideration.  Roll them dice.

Sign in St. Joseph Mo coffee shop

The lady came out of her house as I was taking this picture, and asked “What are you doing?”  And I replied, “I’m taking a picture of the hand coming out of the car’s hood.”   She seemed a little surprised at this straight-forward reply, and then said, “It’s my boyfriend’s ex,” and went back into her house.

RIP Amos Vogel

Amos Vogel, 1921-2012

Amos Vogel died this past week, signalling perhaps the end of an era in which film existed as something other than a pure financial product.  Amos, whom I met a few times and recall visiting in his Village apartment in the middle of NYU, was an early and ardent champion of film as an art, a provocation, something to stir the soul and mind, and not merely a transitory means to slip X bucks from your wallet.   Long ago, he set up Cinema 16, a distribution and exhibition system for the propagation of art/underground/avant garde.  Later he started the New York Film Festival, which he directed until 1968.   A political radical, he had no qualms in describing himself as an anarchist, and in openly supporting very “left” views.

In his book, “FILM AS A SUBVERSIVE ART” he cited among many others, my own film,  “Canyon.”   In doing so he made clear that his idea of  “subversive” included the sublime.

His death comes at a time when the commercialization of everything in the name of  “the Market Economy” has bludgeoned the kind of cinema he supported into a near-death coma.   I imagine he looked at the “independent” cinema which in its various guises and labels of the last few decades, as a sad denouement for the kinds of work he dreamed of, a sign that indeed the insidious forces at work in “the Market Economy” reduced most young filmmakers to imagining that a modest shift in television sit-com formulas constitutes “creativity.”

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The Hunger Games

As if to demonstrate the mental corruption of  Hollywood’s landscape, the makers of the BO smash The Hunger Games, which as of this week has grossed 366 million dollars domestically, released for their promotional picture, the above item.   A modestly careful look at this image shows that while archery apparently plays a major role in the film, no one could be bothered to figure out how to actually shoot an arrow:  aside from holding the arrow rather far from the near-center point on the string which is technically “correct”  one must also wonder by what gravitational magic the arrow manages to hold itself on the wrong side of the actress’ hand.  Perhaps Photoshop?  Or she has an extra finger that grows from the backside of her hand?   Truth being the last pursuit of those who control Hollywood, I imagine we will never get an answer.

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From Nathaniel Dorsky’s “Compline

While lamenting the near-collapse of the kinds of cinema which Amos Vogel supported, I do note that a recent screening of works by my friend Nathaniel Dorsky at the Redcat Cinema in Los Angeles, elicited this item in the New York Times.   [For other thoughts on and from Nathaniel, see his "letters" in my other blog.]

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Tornado alley

I am presently in Stanberry Missouri, population 1,240 or so, here to help my friend Blake Eckard shoot a new film – I’m doing camera for him (with my equipment) and about 10 days ago he also asked me to act in it, so I will be playing Burl Enright, drunkard red-neck dad, who, if things stick to plan, will get killed by his no-good sons by the end of the film.    I hope I can do a reasonable job of it – in front of and behind the camera.

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The Market Economy, aka, Titanic

ORD (Chicago)

Chicago streets

I was born in Chicago, though in infancy was moved to Detroit, then Ft. Benning Georgia and then in a long list, on to foreign shores, and other cities and towns.    Given a choice of 3 colleges to go to at the age of 17, I chose IIT, solely because it was in Chicago, and some homing sense provoked me to wish to know a bit of the city I had been born in.  The choice clearly served as a marker, a kind of  “destiny.”  Had I chosen instead the University of Pennsylvania, or Providence’s RISD, I am sure I likely would have had an entirely different life.    So Chicago, where I lived for only 3 years, but highly formative ones, is a place ripe with reverberations in my own life.   Its prosaic simplicity and rough edged nature both appeals to me and repels me.  It is full of memories lingering in the names of streets, buildings, people and important events in my life, all enriched by a handful of surviving friends dating back to 1964.

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This visit was a quick one, a rushed stay with long ago friends, a talk at Columbia College, screenings and a workshop at Chicago Filmmaker’s, the original of which I’d helped found in 1967.   A fast visit through parts of the city reminded of personal events:  the Federal building where I was sentenced to prison in 1965, and outside of which I was almost arrested 3 years later.  Other places which invoked other memories,  such as the Convention of 1968.   All of it far too fast and weighted with too much personal history for me to begin to put in some perspective.  I hope next time around to be going slowly, with time to tape with friends, and to absorb to the city, and find a small toe-hold for grasping this part of my life,  of the nation, and my small place in it.

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Frank Lloyd Wright’s Oak Park Studio

LAX PDX BNA TYA TPA

Gerry Fialka in Venice

LA Land

On LAX arrival from Korea, the previous 4 and a half years in Seoul (mostly) vanished in an instant, and former “home” of Los Angeles immediately became, once again, if briefly,  “home.”    Couch accommodation from friends Ryan and Tiffany in quiet Silver Lake.  Recovered from jet-lag in LA following screenings with the LA Film Forum, the Echo Park Film Coop and Cinefamily, all of which went nicely.  Saw friends, made new ones, acclimated to the laid-back world of palm trees, Mexican food,  and the tone of SoCal.   Despite the superficial shifts of graphics on the signage, and the new buildings, and the constant flush of wealth and accompanying new “hip” neighborhoods, LA was essentially the same place, with the same a weird concentration on looks, fashion, the movie biz, being “hip” LA style:  things changed and didn’t really change at all.

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Alenka in Venice

Ryan GraySilver Lake

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Took Amtrak to Portland for $80, thanks to too much luggage to fly it – brought to deal with the next 18 months on the American road.   To take it likely would have added $300 to the airfare given America’s airlines’ draconian profit-minded gouging policies on extra bags – or even one.   I went coach, and once the sun settled before coming into Oakland, it was the question of trying to sleep.  Dawn saw us in Klamath, Oregon, on the high plateau east of the Cascades which was still graced with snow.  Just as the train was coming down off the Cascades into the Willamette Valley above Eugene a large Douglas fir fell down, derailing the baggage car.  Our 29 hour long journey turned into 38 hours and ended on a bus in a snowstorm in the valley, a very unusual occurrence there.

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Had a nice stay in Portland with friends, Mark and Jane, though thanks to the lengthened train ride I seemed to acquire a terrestrial form of jet-lag taking another few days to get back on the local clock.  Real fun sleeping in upright chairs.  Portland was itself:  laid back, rainy, full of young people sitting in cafe’s buried in their notebooks, good micro-brews and Powell’s.  If I were going to live in a city in the USA I think it would be Portland.  But that’s not in the cards.  Took a ride up the Columbia River Gorge and a bit of eastern Oregon with Mark, a little hint of the coming year and more or travels to come.

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Mark Eifert

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From Portland it was on to Nashville and Vanderbilt University, with a screening, a quick look around and a short night of honky-tonk cruising.  As it turns out the strip of clubs with all-night music cranking out golden C&W oldies has, in my view, descended into something akin to Disneyland, with the clubs and the music aping the good old days about as successfully as the original Disneyland evoked “Main Street.”  Plastic.   Of course Disneyland is enormously popular and surely so is this strip of erstaz “country,”  which saw many a cowboy hat and what amount to “country” costumes.   I was somewhat taken aback by the evident epidemic of obesity, sometimes in the form of two-stepping lady couples emulating the manatees I’d see some days later.   Except they weren’t waterborne and gravity was working triple time.

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The Parthenon in Nashville

Former home of the Grand Old OpryHatch’s Print ShopThe King

Lacking time, and somewhat allergic to the tacky nature of all things Elvis, I skipped the pilgrimage to Graceland, which, I suppose shall be mandatory should life let me return for shooting the upcoming long essay on America.  Nothing can be more American than Elvis.

From Nashville I took a Megabus, for $9, to Knoxville.  2:30 am departure, which had  I been able to book earlier would have cost a mere $1.   The fellow passengers inverted the national figures and I was, along with one other light-skinned soul, the 12% minority.   Arrived at 7:30 and after a breakfast was whisked to a morning classroom presentation at the University of Tennessee, followed a day later with a public screening and a dinner at Calhoun’s, a famous eatery on the river, and an evening at the Preservation Saloon with good beer and music.  Great time, and I happily recommend both joints.   As with many other smaller American cities and towns, the center’s of which had been let go to seed, Knoxville in the last decade has seen a renewal, with old factory and office spaces turned into the ever-hip “lofts” for sale and lease, and an attempt to revivify the area with boutiques and such.   There it appears to be partially working, though many an empty store space suggested there wasn’t really enough wealth around to ape, say, New York’s Soho.    But still far more welcoming and livable than 10 or 20 years ago.

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Kelley McRae at the Preservation

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After workshop and screening at UT, had a few fallow days with my sister Jolly and husband Bob down near Louisville, some 30 miles or so south of Knoxville.  Gorgeous countryside with river meandering through, in foothills of the Smokey Mountains.  They have a lovely house and garden, and some acres surrounding them to fend off impending housing tracts.   A nice relaxing time for me before I headed south to Tampa.

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Bob’s vineyardBob & Jolly

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Flew to Tampa where Charles Lyman put me up in studio space next to his house on river there.   Though nestled in a suburban housing area, the side facing the river plunges one into seeming jungle Florida – a manatee grazes near by with its back a slash of white diagonal lines thanks to the prop of a speeding boat, birds paddle off with their young, and an alligator trolls across a little lagoon.   A dense canopy of trees and moss hang overhead, offering quiet and shade.  I took a little paddle upstream in a kayak, relaxed, and had a nice time lazing in the local manner.   Next day at the University of Tampa I seemed to step into the kind of internecine warfare that academia seems to foster – perhaps more so these days as faculties shrivel, “adjuncts” dangle on their personal tight-ropes, and the fiscal noose engenders ever more draconian save-yourself behaviors out of the usually erstwhile “liberal” persons championing whichever ethnic/gender or theoretical models of the moment (for a full treatment of this see this.)   Per usual, the faculty avoided meeting me, and one got the sense that only the person who invited me, Tom Garrett, wished to have me there.  He informed that thanks to the bloodletting he was, after a few decades, moving on to Texas the next term.   I was glad to see my friend Eli show up, and we decamped the campus (with a lovely old hotel transformed into cultural locus) and had a pretty good Mexican meal nearby.   He’s been wandering America’s back roads the last year or so, in a converted emergency medical truck, making his rather insane YouTube pieces.   Next morning I was off for next leg of this journey – Chicago and friends.  Of which, more later.

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Eli Elliot

Moving too fast and falling behind.  The hazards of such journey’s as this, which largely mirrors a lifetime of being uprooted, sent to a new place to meet new souls, is that the past is instantly erased, and that old ’60′s mantra becomes a living axiom:  be here now.   I’ve never been one for nostalgia, and in this time of less than a month of travels the trail of faces and places already smudges into a strange scrapbook of the past conjunct with present:  here today, gone tomorrow.

Dennis Grunes

Dennis Grunes

I don’t recall quite when I first noticed Dennis Grunes and started reading his reviews and blog.  Seems a long time ago.  I do recall meeting him in Portland perhaps in 2005 or 6.  He came to some screening of mine (private), I forget of which film.   Later I went to visit him at his apartment on the northeast side of Portland.   Hardly enough time to call him a friend, but I liked him, and what he did, and think of him as a friend despite the very limited real-world contact.  What he does is about the opposite of what I do.   He watches 2 or 3 or is it 4 or 5 films each day, and writes concise, intelligent reviews of them.  Films of all kinds and times – old, very old, brand new and everything in between.  I hardly ever watch films – instead I make them.

Dennis has a pretty severe diabetes problem which has slowly nibbled away at him, and periodically leaves him adrift and in need of help, and lands him in the hospital seeming to be at life’s edge.  After I left Portland in 2006 I recall him having what seemed a particularly bad bout and I contacted a handful of friends asking them to drop by and see if they could offer a hand, as I would have had I still lived there.  One, Jane Wilcox, did, and has apparently been going by a few times a week for some time now, helping with shopping and such things, for which I am deeply grateful.  She’s been a real dear, helping, as well as keeping me apprised of Dennis’ condition.   A week and some ago I dropped by with her to see him, which was a treat for me.  I hope it was in some way for him.

Given his condition I am rather amazed at his stamina, when after one or another bout with the ravages of diabetes, when he’s at risk of losing a foot, or his eyes dim still more, or he’s in hospital flickering near “the end,” he seems to bounce back, immediately sit down to see another fistful of films and write his reviews.   It would be one thing if his reviews were just opinions, but he has an ability to briefly give a sense of a film, tying into a to me vast knowledge of film and its history, and convey things in a way that has prompted me to want to see any number of obscure works I had never heard of.   In some odd way, my vision of Dennis is weirdly that I see him as heroic – which is again, utterly contrary to my views of life: I don’t believe in heroes, or geniuses or the ideas and concepts that do.  We’re all just people, constricted by our own circumstances, and do what we do, for better or worse.   Dennis has taken a pretty harsh hand dealt to him, and managed to find something possible for him to do, and something he clearly loves, and make the most of it.  His blog, www.grunes.wordpress.com, is, for anyone interested or engaged with cinema, a priceless compendium of intelligence and insight, touching on a oceanic range of films.   It strikes me as a kind of personal catalog of the cinema and should stand as a kind of reference source for a long time to come.

As I left a week ago, I gave Dennis DVDs of two of my most recent films.   A few days later, he wrote this:

IMAGES OF A LOST CITY (Jon Jost, 2011)

“I think we are blind. Blind people who can see, but do not see.” ― José Saramago

Prolific Jon Jost’s videographed Imagens de uma cidade perdida, from Portugal and South Korea, now that I’ve seen it, replaces Lars von Trier’s Melancholia as my choice for the best “film” of 2011. Jost has written about “the Portuguese inclination towards fatalism and sadness,” their saudade. His portrait of modern Lisbon perhaps suggests this (although this would not have occurred to me had I not read Jost’s remark), but reflects as well its mirror-image, the sadness that derives from the gradual loss of everything to Time. Jost has dedicated Imagens to his young daughter, Clara. (For an explanation of the tragic situation involved, see my essay on his 2006 Passages.) Poetic and never poetical, it is a documentary that ferrets out glimpses of human and material disrepair. Only children at play and hands at work hammering pieces of stone into the sand to create an alley pathway—something for future feet—escape the pervasive tenor of loss, exhaustion, dilapidation. We witness people who are being, or feeling, left behind in a globalized city dropping from its historical and cultural stature into the Third World.

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Jost casts his camera behind and under places and structures, favoring peoples’ backs. (A mischievous boy, though, pops his face into the camera; we enjoy following his vivid shirt to the far back of the frame and again up front.) The framing divides and otherwise restricts exterior space. The opening static, long-held shot is behind a residential structure—a house, I think—and another, an apartment building, with an alley in between the two. Children play. On a bench, closer to us, her back towards us, a solitary older woman sits; at one point, the boy mockingly kisses her and is reprimanded, presumably by his mother. The woman sits and sits; is she observing, or simply staring into space? Is she as much remembering as living?—inside her head in the past, or in the moment? Eventually she is joined by a neighbor her age. They softly converse. What of life has slipped away from them? Both are nearly as stationary as the camera—so much so, in fact, that when the first woman, alone, reaches once to the ground, this motion of hers perplexes and unsettles.
Jost’s video passes between substantiality and abstraction; sometimes, abstract images are conjoined with clear, immediate sounds, or substantial images are conjoined with abstract sounds, the echo-y or distant sounds of seeming voices of the past. Images also pass between color and monochrome. An overhead long-shot, seemingly black-and-white, studies children at play in the street. They resemble the blind, groping, evolutionary beetles in Robert Browning’s poem “Two in the Campagna.” Individually some of them may have futures; but, visually, vertically, the group of them, however young, are imagined lost to Time. In time, most everything we see and hear in this “film” becomes a metaphor.

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The governing one, because it evolves into a metaphor for the creative process that is generating Imagens, as well as a wider metaphor for the narrow, peripherally blind purposefulness of our laboring lives, shows masculine hands at work constructing the aforementioned pathway. The activity is “in the moment,” direct and immediate, except that the abstraction achieved by focusing only on hands almost feverishly busy amidst speechlessness and the alienating sound of hammer on stone, consigns it to something more elusive than a material dimension. Later, a dissolve restores the activity, now approaching completion, to our view. Both passages seem to be in black and white—until a glimpse of a worker’s blue jeans enters the frame: as quietly explosive a visual gesture as when the woman on the bench reached momentarily to the ground. Is it an illusion that the present seems capable of redeeming, however briefly, whatever has been lost to Time?

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For a long time, Imagens remains out of doors, in a way separating us, as well as the people themselves, from the stability of their lives. Eventually, the camera is indoors—for instance, at a window observing a municipal bus, as well as other traffic, outside. Darkness; covered with blinds, the window—or another window—is doubly mysterious. Jost applies distortion to create the illusion that the venetian blinds and window are undulating—breathing. It is a blind and labored—a mortal—breath. Sound, also, seems distant, ghostly. The occupants of the house or apartment, although it is their own struggle, are themselves blind to the struggle at the window.

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Imagens de uma cidade perdida, outdoors again, closes on an older gentleman occupying a bench. The image startles for two reasons. This bench, on the street, isn’t shot from behind; we are given a lateral view. The solitary occupant, moreover, seems to be in the throes of anguish or terrible pain. Rather than sitting upright and facing forward, he is all over the bench, as though he were using it to hold himself together. We are seeing how he feels—for whatever cause. Jost doesn’t budge the camera, and we cannot help but see. Is it Portugal’s experience of fascism, which an earlier inserted passage addressed, what is weighing on this man? Is his health, like his city, in disrepair? We do not know, we will never know; but we cannot help but see.

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Lisbon is a city that has never meant anything to me. Now it will haunt me for the rest of my life.

I note that while Imagens de uma cidade perdida played at the Rotterdam Festival, 2011, and was in competition at the Yamagata Documentary Festival in Japan in October 2011, it was rejected by a fistful of other festivals, among them the Margaret Meade, Florence Documentary, Bilbao, DocLisboa, Lisboa Indie, DOCSDF (Mexico City), Mumbai and Busan and Jeonju (Korea) fests.  Win some, lose a lot.

Thanks Dennis, and be well.

LaLaLand(ing)

Four days back, still a bit out of the local time, jet-lagged.  On arrival the four years absence seemed instantly erased, which seems my usual pattern: a life of travel and constant moves has made some kind of mechanism that really puts me in the old 60′s mantra, “be here now.”   Yesterday is obliterated, and LA, however changed since my last quick visit five years ago, seems more or less the place I lived in in 77-78, and 82-83.  Instant “home.”

Echo Park Film Center

Likewise, when I entered the Echo Park Film Center the second evening in town, to do my first screening (Chameleon, 1978), I felt instantly at home.  How could I not – it reminded of the funk and space of setting up the Chicago Film Coop long ago, in 1967, or the casual Santa Monica place, Focal Point Films,  I stayed in while editing Angel City in 1976.  Though this time the audience – a virtual full house in a space with maybe 36 seats – was a mix of young people and grayed souls of my vintage.   The screening went nicely (except for an over-bright projector), and the response and discussion was lively and long.  A very nice experience all around.

Bob Glaudini and John Steppling in ChameleonGlaudini and Winifred Golden

The next day to underscore the echo of time’s gone, I met with Mike Gray, who’d let me use his editing bench in Chicago back in 1967-8, and whom I’d known in 1977-78 in Los Angeles as he worked on The China Syndrome.  We had a nice talk over beer and wine, with intimations of our personal finality just off-screen.    In the evening, I had second screening, at Cinefamily in the Fairfax, not far from where I’d lived in 1978, in the old silent cinema theater.  Showed Angel City, to another mixed-age and highly appreciative audience.   Inwardly, both these two old films, despite naturally showing their vintage in the cars, clothes, lack of cell phones and other electronic gizmos, seemed to creatively dance circles around the last decade and more of supposed “indie” filmmaking which for me is almost (a few exceptions) all a tired old waltz around utterly conventional cinema, with its only “uniqueness” being that it is about the younger generation of the day, and done by them: mumble-core and other things.  But their cinema, whatever they imagine, is a tired old dead horse showing almost nothing that can’t be seen slicker on TV or Hollywood movies.  Cinematically DOD.   It was at these two screenings a pleasure to see a clearly positive response from younger viewers who seemed genuinely excited at their rather different approaches to filmmaking.  I hope for those it might rub off a bit.

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Glaudini, Golden, Roger Ruffin in Angel City

I hadn’t seen either of these films for some time, and was – as commented by some of the audience – struck by how pertinent to our current times they still are.   Chameleon, done in 1978, seems to have foreseen the coming decades of hustle and greed, while noting the acrid sourness by which such a life eats out one’s soul.  Angel City was a critique of capitalism’s tendencies in wise-ass detective-movie lingo, and remains as pointed and appropriate today as it was then.  Nothing changes?

Adam Hyman of the LA Film Forum

The last screening in LA was of Swimming in Nebraska (US Premiere !!), at the Egyptian theater in downtown Hollywood.   The audience was very thin, as I think such work is somewhat antithetical to the local community’s interests – AG films in the heart of the US filmbiz is a bit of an affront I suppose, and I think the people who live nearby are in the thrall of Hollywood’s offerings and mentality.  I hadn’t seen the film for some time, and found it quite strong – I have the tendency to have to learn to like my own work, and it certainly is the case with this one.    The density of Swimming takes some time to absorb, but now it seemed proper.  The audience seemed to like it very much, which was nice.

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Thanks to Adam Hyman for having set up these screenings in LA, and thanks to my friend Ryan Harper Gray and his girlfriend Tiffany for putting me up and getting me around town a bit.

Censoring Times

Smug David Brooks

Having resumed with occasionally posting to the NY Times, yesterday I received the censor stamp yet again.  Thin skinned editor for the absurd David Brooks, who manages to be about as smarmy as on can be.  Below is my response to his item of the day, The Rediscovery of Character.   David is always amazed and in wonder when he discovers new things that have been around forever.

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As usual, Mr Brooks let’s his blinders blind him. He casually dismisses the “Marxist” claim that people behave owing to “material” things. Nope, it’s some more nebulous thing called “character.” Grow up in a poor neighborhood, with lousy schools, no hope of a job, and you get bad character and broken windows. Grow up in a rock solid Republican one and you get classy schools (perhaps private), a ticket to Harvard, and then you can go on to Wall Street and bust balls and crash the entire economy with your greed: good character.

It doesn’t take a social scientist to figure out poverty begets poverty, nor does it take a Marxist to notice that in our wonderful plutocracy wealth begets wealth, regardless of the “merits” or the “character.”