At an unidentified, vestigially western community in rural Utah, two old friends, a real estate prospector named Wes (Tom Blair) and a struggling, third-generation rancher named Larry (Robert Ernst), sit at the counter of a diner and bide their unhurried morning over bottomless cups of hot coffee, reminiscing over their last, uneventful hunting trip and […]
Few filmmakers capture the complex landscape of rural America in all its strong-willed self-determination, insularity, and dispiriting sameness as pointedly and eloquently as Jon Jost. It is this conjured frontier image of all-or-nothing prospects and fickle fate that engenders wealth just as easily as it nurtures poverty that Jost alludes to in the implicit irony […]
In Reel 2 of Lost, Lost, Lost, the first volume of Jonas Mekas’s diary film, Diaries, Notes, and Sketches, Mekas’s commentary of his early life in Williamsburg, Brooklyn as an immigrant and refugee drifting from factory to factory, accepting a series of temporary jobs as an assembly worker is presented against a typewritten letter that […]
Composed of three aesthetically distinct, self-encapsulated, geographically-based chapters – assembled footage from Jonas Mekas’ adoptive hometown of Brooklyn circa 1950 shortly after his arrival to America with his brother Adolfas, a series of short, herky-jerky vignettes recorded during the brothers’ return to their place of birth in the rural, agrarian village of Semeniskiai, Lithuania in […]
My introduction to Robert Todd’s cinema was through the experimental short, Our Former Glory, a film that juxtaposes clinical, often destabilized shots of urban architecture with footage from a makeshift missing persons posting center turned public memorial on a promenade overlooking a still smoldering World Trade Center site to create a powerful and provocative rumination […]
In a way, Robert Todd’s Rising Tide represents a continuation on the themes of obsolescence and disposability that runs through Our Former Glory and In Loving Memory, a reverent, quietly observed collage on the changing face of manual labor that, like Johan van der Keuken’s Springtime: Three Portraits, captures a way of life that is […]