An informal and prosaic, yet informed and balanced presentation of critical arguments and conversations on the state of experimental and avant-garde film during the early half of the 1980s, Film: The Front Line – 1983 provides an engaging and accessible introduction to several noteworthy, underrepresented personal filmmakers. Rosenbaum makes a conscious decision to omit key, […]
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 […]
As much an elegy to film as it is a dissolution of romantic myth, Jon Jost’s Paris-set digital feature, Oui Non hews closely to the spirit of Jean-Luc Godard’s late period, mixed media essay films – a reflection on the city and the cinema through conventional images of the present as preconceived, idealized evocations of […]
An unhurried, almost soporific succession of long and medium establishing shots of a bucolic logging town in the Pacific Northwest provides an entrancing and deceptively tranquil prelude to the impending – and perhaps, unavoidable – tragedy of The Bed You Sleep In. As the film opens, an unassuming, middle-aged, independent contractor named Ray Weiss (Tom […]
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 […]