Introduction
Jon Jost, director of 'Sure Fire' (2002) and 'All the
Vermeers in New York' (2002), began making films in the
early 1960s. His films, which he made independently and
on low budgets, demonstrate a creative imagination and
seriousness of purpose which have earned him an important
place in the history of American independent cinema.
Jost made his first film in 1963 when he was nineteen,
and describes himself as
having been: 'A mixed-up kid, alienated from my family
and my culture'.* In 1964 he was arrested for draft-evasion,
and subsequently spent 27 months in prison. He says that
before going into prison he considered himself an artist,
but that prison was 'a slap in the face' which gave him
the moral right to open his mouth. He emerged no less an
artist, but with a strong sense of purpose which gave his
work potency and validity as a comment on society.
His purpose was overtly political in some of his early
films, his targets being American corporate capitalism,
and the American involvement in Vietnam. But the
dissemination of propaganda was never his concern, and
overt political statement receded into the background as
his work progressed. It could be said that politics is
part of his radical questioning of our individual and
social lives, or that his examination of our lives is
part of his politics; either way his definition of what
is political is so broad as to be all-inclusive, and
therefore, while acknowledging a strong political sub-text
to all his work, it seems best to forget the label and
concentrate on what the films actually say.
Jost's output during the period under consideration fell
roughly into two stages: from 1963 to 1975, when he made
a large number of shorts and the feature 'Speaking
Directly', and from 1976 to 1983, during which time he
focussed almost entirely on feature films. This essay is
not intended as a comprehensive account of all of Jost's
films. It is, rather, a selective and personal reading of
a large and complex body of work which is open to many
levels of interpretation. I intend to pick out some of
the predominant themes and methods explored in the early
shorts, then go on to examine the first features, hoping
to show how the early groundwork provided the foundation
from which Jost launched into his fascinating and
disturbing portraits of contemporary life.
While it is difficult to generalise about work as varied
as Jost's, it might be said that in the period under
consideration three over-riding concerns emerge: To
communicate with us through film, to communicate with us
about film, and to offer insights into our society and
the lives of some of its individuals.
A short scene from '1, 2, 3, Four' (1968-70) serves as a
good introduction to Jost's concern with the
possibilities of communication through film:
The camera pans
from left to right, revealing four people. The first
holds a book open in his palms while looking at us.
The second offers us a bowl of food. The third lights
a flare. The fourth films us with a cine camera.
Perhaps the first
thing to notice is that the scene is not self-explanatory,
we have to 'read' it, and this is characteristic of all
of Jost's work. We cannot, as we do with conventional
films, sit back passively and allow the images to pour
their meaning into us; we have to participate, and it is
through this active participation that real communication
takes place between Jost and each individual member of
the audience.
One possible reading of the sequence might be: (1) I have
some ideas to communicate to you, (2) I have to put the
ideas in concrete form (the girl holds the bowl in the
same position as the man holds the book) to give you food
for thought, (3) I need a means of attracting your
attention before I can communicate, (4) Therefore I have
made a film.
So the scene can be read as a statement of intent by Jost;
he wants us to know exactly what he is doing, and why.
This Brechtian quality is a constant in his work, and
serves the purpose of deflecting our attention away from
the film and onto the reality of our lives.
It is significant that, with the fourth figure in the
sequence, Jost is filming a cine camera filming, as a
close examination of what film is, and how it conveys
meanings to an audience, is a dominant feature of his
early work, and a theme which is explored on its most
fundamental level in his short film 'Traps' (1967).
Traps
In 'Traps' there is a sequence in which all we see on the
screen are some bands of shade running from top to bottom.
On the sound-track we hear an extract from a work of
fiction in which the narrator describes his feelings on
realising that the door of his room is slowly opening. As
we listen, one of the vertical bands on the screen seems
to broaden, and immediately we are trapped into thinking
that we are watching the edge of a slowly opening door.
We feel suspense; Why is the door opening? Who is behind
it? What will happen when the door opens?
The shot is held for some time, and we cannot help but
come to the realisation that all we are seeing on the
screen is an abstract image; a white rectangle with bands
of shade. Jost has made us aware of the gap between an
image and its meaning, and of the ease with which a film-maker
can cause us to experience the meanings he wants to
impose on us. The opening door, and all the attendant
suspense, exist only in our minds.
Jost has said that he considers it a primary function of
the artist to 're-invent the language'. In a sequence
such as this we see him exploring and exposing the basic
vocabulary of film language, an exploration which is both
a pre-cursor to re-invention, and an act of re-invention
in itself.
Flower
The relationship between language and meaning is explored
further in the short film 'Flower' (1970), in which a
direct parallel is drawn between film language and verbal
language. The film opens with a quote, in the form of a
printed text, from Mallarm saying that when he reads
the word 'flower' he experiences a sense of beauty. But
there is no flower actually there, only the word, and the
associated idea of a flower. Therefore, he concludes, the
word 'flower' denotes a beautiful idea.
Jost follows this with many shots of flowers, and again
the sequence goes on for a long time, giving us ample
time to consider what is taking place. We begin by
looking for the flower which matches our idea of a flower,
and none of them do. Our idea of a flower does not exist
in the real world, only specific individual flowers, such
as the ones we are seeing on the screen, exist there. But
if we cannot see our idea of a flower on the screen, nor,
we realise, can we see any real flowers, all we can see
are projected patterns of light shade and colour.
The film ends with a quote praising the beauty of 'hues
conceived in the mind', and deploring the folly of men
who think such beauty can be represented by mere 'grunts
and squeaks', (i.e. language).
Jost is demonstrating that film itself cannot present us
with reality, or with meanings, film is a mere language,
patterns of light and shade, grunts and squeaks. It is we
who attribute meaning to the images, and any reality we
might think we are seeing in the film is merely an
illusion. Jost continually reminds us of this fact, even
in the features, in order that we should see through the
illusion to what is being communicated from him to us
about our real lives in the real world.
Having established that film is only a language, it
follows that everything we see on the screen is
determined by the film-maker's intentions towards us, and
towards his subject matter. Jost has defined film (In 'Susannah's
Film', 1969) as 'light, shade, and bias', and his film '13
Fragments and 3 Narratives from Life' (1968) is a complex
and fascinating essay on this subject.
13 Fragments and 3 Narratives from Life
The subject of '13 Fragments and 3 Narratives from Life'
is a girl called Katya; not an actress playing a part,
but an ordinary girl who has collaborated with Jost in
making a film about herself. The film employs the form
and techniques of a documentary, but what emerges is a
three-way dialogue between Jost, Katya, and ourselves in
which it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish
fact from bias.
The film opens with a series of establishing shots, which,
as in any other film, is designed to introduce the
subject in its context. We see an aerial shot of a city,
a close-up of a girl fastening her blouse, a telephone
cord, (while on the sound-track we hear a girl declining
an invitation to go out), a close up of a girl applying
make-up to her face, a comic strip, and a record on a
turntable.
This pictorial introduction establishes the subject as a
girl who lives in a city, but along with this fact we
have been given a biased view of her character. The
telephone shot implies that she is unsociable, and the
other shots, which are from Jost's private stock of
images, whose meanings become clear after seeing one or
two of his films, are a 'montage of distractions'
establishing her as a complacent consumer of popular
culture; the comic strip and the record, and a wearer of
disguises; the make-up.
Thus, through his selection of images, Jost has
established a context of his own bias, a context which
will influence the way we see the girl. The process
continues with his verbal introduction:
"Her name is
Catherine, but, perhaps to make herself different,
she calls herself Katya."
This comment is the
verbal equivalent of the shots of make-up and the blouse;
it highlights a quality of pretence in the subject, and,
while it tells us a fact, it also conveys an attitude of
criticism, perhaps even ridicule on behalf of Jost. The
commentary continues:
"Katya's
younger sister used to share the flat, but recently
she surprised her friends and was married on a
Thursday."
Again, this comment,
which is the verbal equivalent of the comic strip,
conveys factual information about Katya, but with its
parody of the language of popular romance, it also mocks
her. So, although nothing overtly biased has been shown
or said, and although it has gone by so quickly we might
not have noticed it, a distinct bias towards the subject
has been imparted. The point is that all films do this,
no matter what their subject, or how objective they
pretend to be.
Jost then withdraws and allows Katya to take over the
narration:
"He was going
to call this film '13 Fragments and Three Interviews
From Life', but then he found out I wasn't very good
at interviews."
Then in the first
narrative, entitled 'The Life of Facts', the camera holds
on Katya's coffee cup, and then on her, silent and
motionless on a sofa, while on the sound-track she tells
us some facts about her life; she gets up in the morning
and makes coffee, goes to college, does a part-time job,
and so on. This is almost direct communication between
Katya and us, and although the separation of image and
sound-track might seem like interference, it actually
increases our sense of objectivity. We can concentrate on
what she has to say all the better for not having to
watch her speak, and if she had to speak to the camera
she would, presumably, either act or become nervous,
which, again, would distract us from the facts. The bias
of the film-maker seems to be at a minimum here.
Then Jost takes over again: on the screen we see close-ups
of Katya's face, while on the sound-track he reads facts
about political events; the war in Vietnam, the Paris
riots, and the assassination of Martin Luther King.
The film-maker's bias now comes across strongly, although
the information with which he presents us is strictly
factual. The portraits of Katya are stark full-face and
profile shots, reminiscent of the 'mug-shots' of prison
records, conveying the impression that she is being
accused of something, or, at least, being held up for
examination. We still have in the back of our minds the
facts about her life from the first narrative and the
juxtaposition of these facts with the facts of political
events adds up to a presentation of Katya as insular and
complacent, wrapped up in her own world while people in
the world around her are fighting and dying for high
ideals. Thus, through the selection and juxtaposition of
facts, the film-maker has manipulated us into sharing his
bias. How often is this done to us in news reports and
documentaries?
Jost then gives Katya another say in the matter:
"It's not
fair. He's setting me up unfairly. I've never been to
those places and don't know those people. It's not
fair."
In the second
narrative, entitled 'Facts are Tempered by Passion',
Katya tells us more about her life, this time adding her
feelings to the facts. She is generally fed up, doesn't
like the city, wishes she could travel, and, she says,
she isn't really very happy. In this section we seem to
be getting closer to Katya. She is being honest with us,
and we sympathise with her.
More facts from Jost follow:
"She says she
wants to be an artist. I asked her what art is, and
she said she didn't know. I asked her what love is,
she listed some qualities, I asked her if she thought
love was important, she said she did. I asked her if
she was in love, she said no. I asked her why not,
and she said she didn't think she could love."
With this commentary
Jost undercuts her honesty and our sympathy, and holds
her up as an object for our pity. Then it is Katya's turn
again:
"What he's
saying isn't true. I didn't say those things. Or
maybe I did, but I didn't mean them the way he makes
it sound."
The facts are being
bounced around so much, acquiring so many different
connotations that we hardly know where we are any more.
Then in the third narrative Katya says:
"It's all
false. Movies are false. He wrote out the words."
Is that true? Or did
Jost only write out those words? Now we don't know where
we are at all; any idea that we may have been grasping
some facts has been undermined, and we are thrown back
upon ourselves to sort out the mixture of fact, invention,
and bias.
The film ends with Katya strolling through a park, while
on the sound-track, with background music playing, she
gives us her philosophy of life. Now she seems confident
and contented, she seems to know exactly what she wants
and what she is doing. We are inclined to feel contented
too, the film seems to have a happy ending. But by now we
should be suspicious, we are being manipulated by the
sentimental music and the idyllic parkland setting; and
perhaps Jost wrote out the words she is speaking now too.
Finally the camera stops following Katya and she walks
off, not into the sunset, but into the darkness of some
woods. We are left feeling cheated, we don't know what to
think or what to feel. The film has manipulated us from
start to finish. The point is that all films manipulate
us all the time, but most film-makers conceal the
techniques which Jost has made so conspicuous.
Having said all that it seems a contradiction to say that
'13 Fragments and 3 Narratives from Life' functions as a
social documentary, a portrait of Katya, and yet it does,
and to ignore this aspect would be to deny a large part
of the film's interest.
Jost has said that he wants his films to be about the
kind of people films usually ignore, and carried this
principle from his early shorts 'Leah', '13 Fragments and
3 Narratives from Life', and 'Susannah's Film' into the
features 'Last Chants for a Slow Dance' and 'Slow Moves'.
Part of his intention in doing this is undoubtedly to
break down the barriers to communication which films
usually impose, and, according to Susannah in 'Susannah's
Film', to convey his belief that ordinary everyday events
are beautiful and sacred. She says that Jost wanted to
film her sleeping in her room, rather than playing the
violin, because playing the violin wasn't mundane enough.
But another aim seems to have been to get the girls to
talk as much as possible about themselves, in order to
reveal how they see themselves. Katya, for example, 'wants
to be an artist'. This theme becomes very important in
the features, in which characters are shown to make
decisions in accordance with the image of themselves they
carry in their minds, images which they have not
consciously chosen, but which have been planted there by
society.
1, 2, 3, Four
'1, 2, 3, Four' (1969-70) is another early short from
which elements, both thematic and formal, can be traced
into the features. It is an essay on political and social
problems, constructed as a montage of images, dialogue,
printed texts, readings, and action. The arrangement of
these elements creates a dialectical process in which
points of view are played off against one another both
within each scene, and in the juxtaposition of scenes.
One short scene neatly illustrates Jost's aim (discussed
earlier in connection with the scene which pans across
four people) of translating his ideas into film:
A man is sitting
at a work bench assembling a bomb, while reading
aloud a passage which equates poetry and revolution.
At the end of the reading he drops a lighted match
into a tin can, and a little explosion sends up a
puff of smoke. In front of the can is a clapper-board.
Jost is equating his
film with a terrorist's bomb, both being intended to
shock us into taking note of a message, and at the same
time asserting his belief that a film is a better medium
for the communication of his radical ideas than a bomb.
Jost's bomb is purely visual, a harmless but potent tool
designed to entertain us while he delivers his message.
The main subject of the film, however, is the difficulty
of communication between people with polarised attitudes.
Subtitled 'An Essay on Domestic Problems', (domestic in
two senses), the film looks at private conflict and
national conflict, and at the inseparability of the two.
Perhaps the most important kind of polarisation, with
regard to later development in the features, is that
between male and female attitudes. The couple in the film
do not talk to, or listen to each other, they are
constantly arguing, and therefore not communicating.
He puts a record
on the stereo, she takes it off. He puts it on again,
she takes it off again.
He: "Why are we living together?"
She: "Because you don't like to be alone. And
because you're good in bed."
Voice: "How do you translate happiness?"
She: "Money."
Voice: "How do you translate love?"
She: "F - ."
He: "The dishes are dirty."
She: (angry) "I don't feel like doing the dishes."
A plate is smashed.
Persistent
confrontation without communication leads to the
impoverishment of human values, such as love and
happiness, and to destruction. And any hope of
communication is thwarted by their irreconcilable
attitudes to life.
She: "Are you
happy?"
He: "I can't be happy while General Motors
exists."
She: "What would make you happy?"
He: "To be rid of General Motors. Or to be
fighting against General Motors."
He: "What would make you happy?"
She: "A garden, a river, the sky."
We see her walking
naked through a wood, but this pastoral fantasy is
shattered by the roar of a jet aeroplane overhead.
This fundamental incompatibility of male and female is a
recurring theme in Jost's work. The woman is content to
exist, and looks for fulfilment in the quality of her day-to-day
life, but the man can only define his existence in terms
of what he does, he needs to live for something. This
view is expounded in the short 'A Man is More than the
Sum of His Parts A Woman is . . . ' (1971), in which
women are likened to a queen bee, and men to the workers
and drones. 'l, 2, 3, Four' takes the insect metaphor
even further, likening woman to the female spider which
seduces the male then consumes him while he copulates.
These daunting, and perhaps misogynistic views might be
seen as underlying the male/female relationships in 'Last
Chants for a Slow Dance' and 'Slow Moves'.
'1, 2, 3, Four' ends with an attempt at reconciliation.
We are given this argument connecting domestic life to
political issues: 'If you traced the wires by which
electricity reaches your home back to their source, you
would find a pile of dead bodies'. Then, coupled with an
image of a candle being blown out, a girl says: "I
love you, therefore I will never use electricity again."
This final conceit synthesises the opposites, male and
female, rational and irrational, political awareness and
personal love. But it is absurd and impossible. It seems
there is no real solution.
The film ends on a close-up of a happy-looking couple,
leaning against their house with arms around each other.
But how long can such happiness last? How long will it be
before irreconcilable conflict sets in?
Speaking Directly
'Speaking Directly' (1973-75), Jost's first feature,
draws together many of the elements mentioned above into
one film, and can be seen as his opening statement to a
wider public. It does not have the integrity of structure
which his later work achieved, and looks like a
collection of shorts, but the whole gains an extra
quality which the shorts, because of their limited format,
did not have.
The guiding theme behind the film is a self-portrait of
Jost, his attempt to place himself, as a man and a film-maker,
in his social and political context. In one section Jost
literally gives us a self-portrait, a head and shoulders,
while he introduces himself, speaking directly to the
audience. Then the camera pulls back to reveal that the
shot we are watching is being filmed by Jost himself, in
a mirror. Jost is 'reflecting upon himself'. We are also
given a guided tour of his home, and introduced to his
friends, each of whom is given a few minutes to speak
about their relationship to him.
All of this is fascinating to watch, but what comes
across most strongly is that this is an attack on
established cinema conventions. All our expectations of a
feature film are being ignored: there are no actors, plot,
music, or setting. Instead the film-maker is introducing
himself to us, and showing us some ordinary people saying
ordinary things. The mood is distinctly revolutionary;
all the usual barriers between film-maker and audience
are being broken down in favour of direct communication
on the subject of our real, everyday lives.
The film continues to break the rules, except the
cardinal rule that the audience must be entertained, in
every scene. There is a powerful montage sequence on
Vietnam, in which three short sections of film are shown
repeatedly, while on the sound-track we hear a Vietnamese
woman's firsthand account of a bomb raid, and statistics
about the United States' military involvement. In the
third section of the film there are sequences designed to
demonstrate the nature of film language, and the way it
works on the audience.
At one point film Jost shows us all the equipment that
was used in filming, and tells us how much it cost to
make. He is de-mystifying and re-inventing cinema, taking
it out of the hands of the capitalist exploiters and
bringing it closer to the audience in every possible way.
One of the simplest, yet most effective scenes from the
third section is an illustration of a prominent feature
of all of Jost's work: the long take. Jost says that he
started using long takes because they both appealed to
his tendency towards formal restraint and helped keep the
cost of the film down, and that he continues to use them
because he likes to give the viewer time to look for
himself. He sees this partly as a political gesture, in
that it gives the viewer, and the actors, more freedom of
choice.
The use of long takes is also a deliberate attack on the
standard practice in conventional film editing, which is
to make frequent cuts in order to advance the story as
quickly as possible. The attitude towards the viewer
implicit in this practice, to hook him firmly into the
story, alleviating him of the need to think, either about
the film or beyond the film, is exactly what Jost is
fighting against.
Some viewers object to long takes, and if the device is
misused they have good reason, for they simply alienate
us from the film and induce boredom. But when Jost uses
them there is always good reason, and viewers who become
bored or restless are, in a way, experiencing exactly the
point he is making; they are resisting the challenge to
think about the contents of the scene, and impatient for
the film to carry on distracting them with a story.
A scene in 'Speaking Directly' takes this principle to
its logical extreme: A stop-watch is placed before the
camera, Jost announces: "End of take five minutes",
and that is it, nothing more happens for five minutes.
The viewer is thus thrown completely back upon himself.
He might use the time to think about why Jost has done
this, he might think about why he is sitting in a cinema,
and what he expects from the screen in front of him, or
he might simply become restless and impatient for the
film to start again. The viewer has been forced into a
confrontation with himself, something which rarely
happens, either in the cinema or outside it.
When, via the stepping-stone of 'Angel City' Jost
completed the transition from shorts to features, his
themes and methods coalesced to produce works of subtlety
and integrity which, while superficially more accessible
than the shorts, carry the same power to fascinate,
disturb, and deliver a political message. 'Last Chants
for a Slow Dance', 'Chameleon', and 'Slow Moves' are as
subversive and inventive as anything else Jost has done,
but look more like normal films in that they employ the
conventional ingredients of character and narrative
continuity, and in that their message is embedded in the
story, rather than presented directly.
Angel City
'Angel City' (1976) appears as a transitional work in
that while it is held loosely together by a thread of
narrative, it makes many of its overtly political points
through digressions, and sequences which deliberately
disrupt the narrative. The film is a simultaneous attack
on capitalism and Hollywood films, two evils which, in
Jost's view, go hand in hand; the latter helping to
spread the corrupt and dehumanising values of the former
throughout society.
The narrative, featuring the familiar Hollywood figure of
a private detective, is used to hold our attention, while
at the same time, by playing on our expectations,
undermining the conventions of the genre. Frank Goya, the
detective, has been hired by a businessman to investigate
the murder of his wife, and all the usual stages in the
build-up of the drama are undercut and discredited by the
fact that Goya explains this directly to the camera, with
the already dead body draped over the edge of the pool
beside him.
Goya begins his investigations with a visit to the
businessman's mistress, and she, perhaps in keeping with
Jost's 'female spider' image leads him through the
labyrinthine corridors of her house towards the bedroom.
She is the feminine embodiment of capitalism, a corrupt,
seductive, consumer of men.
But while Goya pursues his investigations at ground level,
we, in an interpolated montage sequence, are whisked up
to view Los Angeles, including the conspicuous HOLLYWOOD
sign, from the air. As the camera drifts slowly across
the seemingly endless web of streets and houses, now
reduced to an almost abstract pattern of light and shade,
the sound-track gives us two contrasting commentaries on
the scene; a poem, and a list of statistics.
The function of this sequence is to distance us, in every
way, from the action. We look down not just upon the
scene of the crime, but on its context, geographical and
political. Who, Jost is implicitly asking, is responsible
for the murder from this point of view? It cannot be the
personified LA evoked by the poem, nor can it be one of
the millions of tiny units which go to make up the
statistics; births, marriages, divorces etc. It has to be
something bigger, something which has power over both the
city and its human population.
It doesn't take Goya long to discover that capitalism,
represented by the businessman himself, is responsible.
The generic convention of the detection has been
transformed into the adoption of a political perspective,
and the convention of the confession, or unmasking of the
villain consists, in Jost's version, of the businessman
strolling along the beach extolling the virtues of
corporate capitalism. This scene looks and sounds
conspicuously like a TV advert, with the businessman
using the suave, persuasive, sinister language of a
professional public relations job.
The convention of the film chase is also parodied and
ridiculed by Jost; the scene cuts back and forth between
Goya and the businessman-villain, denuded of cars,
running along in front of a painted back-drop shouting:
"I'll get you, you son-of-a-bitch." "Oh no
you won't." The scene is patently artificial and
absurd, and ends with a long-shot which destroys the
illusion by showing us the camera, camera crew, and
actors working in the street in front of a mural.
'Angel City' is an amusing film, largely due to the cool
sardonic manner of Bob Glaudini, who plays Goya. But the
underlying message is deadly serious, and an important
reference point for the development of themes in later
features. The message is that American corporate
capitalism is a system which corrupts and destroys human
life, and that it has powerful accomplices, such as
Hollywood, which both perpetrate its dehumanising values,
and distract its victims, (with stories), while the
villain goes in for the kill.
Having identified the villain, Jost turns his attention,
in 'Last Chants for a Slow Dance' and 'Slow Moves', to
the victims, or, as he calls them in 'Stagefright', the
casualties.
Last Chants for a Slow Dance
Tom of 'Last Chants for a Slow Dance' (1977) is one of
those statistics; married, father of two, on the verge of
divorce, and unemployed. He is also a desperate human
being, unable to cope with marriage, fatherhood, or
steady employment, and, in the eyes of society, a misfit.
Here, for the first time, Jost has created a convincing
character in a convincing situation. The direct
communication between film-maker and audience has gone,
or at least, taken a step back, and the film presents us
with a narrative in more or less the same way that other
films present us with a narrative. A deliberate hole,
however, is left in the illusion; at the beginning of the
film, before the 'character' speaks, we hear the actor
say: "Shall I start now? You said thirty seconds."
In this, and other ways, Jost reminds us that we are
sitting in a cinema watching a film, and therefore that
any meanings we perceive have been deliberately put there
as a means of communication between himself and us.
'Last Chants for a Slow Dance' works partly as a
psychological study, in that Tom's decline from restless
young man to murderer can be seen as a function of his
own maladjusted personality; we are even given an
indication of the origin of his problems: "Everything
goes so fast. I don't remember anything. I don't remember
my childhood, except that my father was always beating me,
and I was always running away." Running away is all
he learned to do as a child, and all he knows how to do
as an adult. But at the same time, Jost makes it clear
that, whatever the reasons for Tom's maladjustment, it is
cues from society which prompt him to take the action he
does take.
Tom is already desperate when the film opens; in a
society which places high value on employment, material
wealth, and family life, he is unemployed, broke, and
alienated from his wife and children. He resorts to the
only way of life he can cope with; driving around in his
truck from town to town, ostensibly looking for work, but
really seeking the comfort of anonymity, casual sex, and
escape from responsibilities.
When Tom does return home it is only to be harangued, and
threatened with divorce, by his wife, who is now pregnant
for the third time. She verbally attacks him for his long
absences from home, his failure to find a job, and his
lack of concern for her and the children. Her attack is
justified, of course, and she probably shouldn't have
married him in the first place, but this is no help to
Tom, who cannot help the way he is, and no consolation
for the society upon which he will take out his
frustration. It is Jost's view, and his case is
convincing, that Tom is society's problem.
Having been finally rejected by his wife, Tom hits the
road again. He stops at a cafe, and while eating comes
across an amusing letter in a newspaper and reads it out
to a man sitting next to him. The letter is a sexual joke,
and the man says: "You don't believe that's really a
letter do you? Those letters are made up by some guy
sitting in a back room. The government puts out that
trash to keep people's minds off their real problems."
This is the nub of Jost's argument; that the media floods
society with stories which distract people from their
real problems, and perpetuate dehumanised values, in this
case that a wife exists as a sexual object for her
husband, which encourage them to remain distracted even
when the story is forgotten. It is Jost's contention that
Tom, with his lack of intellect, and lack of purpose in
his life, is a helpless victim of such stories.
In a later scene Tom spends the night with a girl he
meets in a bar. The camera is positioned so that, on the
right of the screen, we see the couple's legs through an
open door, while on the left of the screen we see a TV
showing a game show. The scene is in black and white,
except, strangely, for the TV screen, which is in colour.
Because of this the distribution of values within the
frame is curiously and disturbingly balanced, and, being
one of Jost's long takes, we have ample time to consider
why this should be. When Jost draws attention to colour,
such as in his frequent shots of a girl applying make-up,
it is nearly always to emphasise its artificiality, its
capacity to distract and conceal. In this scene the TV
and the rest of the screen vie for our attention. What is
going on in the rest of the screen is really terribly
bleak; Tom is having a meaningless one-night-stand with a
girl he has just met and doesn't care about, and in the
morning he will be gone.
But what is happening on the TV screen is depressing too;
an audience-participation game show, in which people's
lives literally become merged with TV, and which,
broadcasting its phoney spirit of competitive bonhomie,
is nothing less than a brain-washing exercise, designed
to sedate its viewers while instilling values favourable
to capitalism.
The whole scene is a depiction of emptiness disguised,
and as such is a depiction of Tom's world, in which the
distribution of values is out of balance with the needs
of reality. Later in the scene, when the girl walks in
front of the TV, we see the coloured image of the screen
superimposed on her body. This betrayal of the illusion
is Jost's way of ensuring that we are not merely
fascinated and distracted by his trick photography.
The turning point for Tom comes after he has looked at a
folder of criminal records. Each page has a photo of the
criminal and a summary of his activities and
characteristics, including (the detail which fascinates
Tom the most) his tattoos. In Tom's eyes these little 'stories',
which situate their subjects in a recognisable
relationship to society, give meaning to their subjects'
lives. And so he has found a last chance to give meaning
to his own life; by becoming a criminal he can become a
story, in newspapers, on TV, and preserved for posterity
in police records.
Jost only interpolates one 'montage' shot into the
narrative, but it is one the viewer will never forget:
suddenly we are watching, in merciless close up, a live
rabbit having its head forced over a chopping-block. We
see the helpless look in its eye as it struggles, then it
is decapitated and we see the blood spurt. Then, one by
one, its paws are chopped from its still-twitching body.
That, Jost implies, is how much chance a man like Tom has
against the coercive power of society and its media.
Tom's final, irreversible act is even more disturbing
than the slaughter of the rabbit. He comes across a man
whose car has broken down in an isolated rural spot, and
stops to help him. They chat, and it turns out that the
man comes from the same town as Tom, and, like Tom, has a
wife and children. They have something in common, but the
man has kept all the things Tom has lost, and for the
first time we seem to be seeing Tom engaging in a
friendly conversation, talking for the pleasure of
communicating.
But just when we begin to think he might be human after
all, and that this new-found friendship might be the
start of an upturn in his life, Tom casually gets a gun
from his truck and robs the man. "I can't get work,"
he explains, "I've got no money, this (the gun) is
all I got left." Then he leads the man into the
woods, and shoots him. The need to align himself with
society's media-perpetrated values has taken precedence
over all human values.
The film ends with a long take of Tom's face as he drives
his truck, forcing us to contemplate the meaning of what
we have just seen. And there is much to contemplate, for,
in this film, Jost has produced a convincing account of
how society engenders its own crime, and creates its own
criminals.
Chameleon
Like Tom, Terry of 'Chameleon' (1978) is a character who
seems to have lost touch with normal human feeling, and
whose life is devoid of love, happiness, or purpose. But,
being more intelligent than Tom, and having a capacity
for self-examination, Terry is a more complex character.
While Tom was just beginning to find his place in society,
Terry is already established in his, he is a dealer in
drugs and art (more or less the same thing in Jost's view),
and as such is an exploiter as well as a victim of
society's dehumanising currents.
Terry is chameleon-like in that he adapts his behaviour
to suit the person with whom he is dealing, in order to
exploit their weak points. We see him first dealing with
a printer, and part of the film's message, that art is a
meaningless gloss over a world of corrupt and
impoverished human beings, is made in a scene densely
packed with meaning.
We see the printer making screen prints, and Jost's
recurrent motif of colour is emphasised again as we watch
the inks spread across the silk-screen. He then hangs his
prints on the wall to dry, praising their colours,
apparently indifferent to their subject-matter: a gun.
Terry, however, for whom art is a weapon of exploitation,
picks up a real gun from the printer's bench and say's he'll
take it in lieu of some money the printer owes him. In
the ensuing argument it is clear that the printer values
the gun because, like a work of art, it is a fine piece
of craftsmanship, and worth a lot of money. He seems
oblivious to the fact, of which Terry is all-too aware,
that the gun is a tool for killing people.
Terry puts pressure on the printer to make some illegal
extra copies of a limited edition, and it is clear from
the dialogue that the printer has done such work before.
The printer resists, in an effort to salvage his
professional integrity, but Terry applies pressure
remorselessly.
Then Terry leaves, although he will return to resolve the
matter at the end of the film, and we see the printer,
alone in his workshop, take out a bottle and set about
drowning his problems with alcohol. The printer is a
craftsman, only marginally involved in art, but this
marginal involvement, is enough for Terry to get his
hooks into him.
At one point in the sequence Terry, apparently as a joke,
aims the gun at his own head and pulls the trigger. This
action, equivalent to the printer's heavy drinking, might
suggest that no matter who has the upper hand, the art-dealing
world, like the drug-dealing world, is a world of people
toying with their own self-destructive impulses.
In the rest of the film we follow Terry through a series
of meetings; with a girl on a hilltop, a gallery-owner at
her house, and an artist living in the desert. Each
person Terry meets is, through their profession and
environment, located within a recognisable facet of human
society. The printer in his workshop is a craftsman. The
girl, outdoors with the sunshine and the animals, is a
nature-lover. The gallery-owner, in her luxury home, is a
business woman and society figure. The artist, with his
sculptures, astronomical telescope, and makeshift home in
the desert, is a creative recluse, living among the
mysteries of the universe. Terry, however, has no fixed
place in society. We never see his home; the only space
which is his is the inside of his car, and he flits from
one to the other of these people, temporarily borrowing
their environment, doing his business, then moving on
again.
Terry's attachment to society is seen to be even more
tenuous when we consider that the people he deals with
are themselves coming adrift. The printer has sold his
integrity and taken to drink. The girl lives in a dream-world,
wandering around the hills catching lizards. The gallery-owner
is rapidly becoming a drug addict. And the artist, also
taking drugs, has apparently rejected society altogether.
Terry's only attachment to society is through its
sickness. He feeds on sickness, becomes contaminated by
it, and passes it on to others.
With his adaptable character Terry always seems to be in
control. With the printer he is a thug, with the girl he
displays an almost child-like innocence, with the gallery-owner
he becomes a connoisseur of art and good living, and with
the artist he is the sub-culture drug dealer. He has the
right approach, and the right gift (he gives each a
present) for each person he meets, but he has no
personality of his own, he is a collapsed individual in a
collapsing world, and his various pseudo-personalities
are, like the art and the drug experiences he sells,
nothing more than a superficial and temporary gloss over
a barren reality.
Terry's meeting with the girl on the hilltop is the only
purely social meeting of the film. It is an illustration
of how love is draining away from Terry's life, and at
the same time a de-bunking of 'romantic young love'
scenes in Hollywood films. The setting is ideal for film-romance;
the young couple climb to the top of a hill together, the
girl is pretty, a breeze blows her summer dress and her
straw hat catches the sunlight. But all they do is stand
around like a pair of excited but awkward children,
talking over old times when they used to be happy
together.
The scene conveys a sense that whatever romance there
might once have been is now irretrievably lost, and
although Terry, as always, seems in control, his inner
agitation is shown by the hand-held camera shots which
jump about frantically, grabbing at random details and
irrelevancies, unable to come to rest or to get a grip on
the whole. It seems that Terry finds the possibility of
love and human warmth a threat, and this potentially
romantic scene is transformed into one of anxiety. The
scene ends with the couple remembering a song they used
to sing. They link arms and, parodying a dance number
from a musical, sing a song with the chorus: "I
wanna be fake. I wanna be bad." Love has gone, and
they have turned to other things instead.
The inner suffering which the inarticulate Tom underwent
silently is made painfully apparent in 'Chameleon' in a
number of scenes in which we see Terry alone. When alone,
Terry's chameleon-like personality has nothing but
emptiness to mould itself to, and he is prone to the
horror of experiencing himself as an existence without an
identity.
The first time we see him alone, driving his car, he is
listening to a tape he has made to remind himself of all
the visits and 'phone calls he has to make during the day.
The tape is extremely long, showing how his life is
defined by the dozens of deals he is doing with other
people, and also, considering the amount of time he has
spent making the tape, and the time he is now spending
listening to it, that he is extending his business into
as much of his life as possible, putting off the awful
moment when there is nothing left to do, and he has to
face himself.
When Terry does face himself it is not a pleasant
experience for him, or for the audience. We are with him
in his car again, and, without any tape to listen to, he
is thinking about his life. He knows that he has become
emotionally cold, and that nothing means anything to him,
and is distressed to find himself so. But, in the absence
of any meaningful contact with anything or anyone outside
himself, he can see no hope of his own salvation. "Am
I human at all?" he wonders. "Maybe I'm just a
gorilla. One day someone will come up to me and say 'F -
off you gorilla'." He then begins a chant: 'F - off
you gorilla, f - off you gorilla,' which goes on and on
as if he can't stop. He seems to be trying to hold on to
a sense of self through the sound of his own voice, but
unable to get out of the trap of equating his own
identity with the way others see him. The image is of a
man in whom sadness and loneliness have metamorphosed
into self-hatred.
Later we see him isolated against a black background.
Perhaps it is the middle of the night, or perhaps the
darkness is internal, but he is now face to face with his
own soul, and delivers a harrowing monologue on the twin
horrors of isolation and the fear of death. The scene is
theatrical in style, isolating it from the rest of the
film, (and anticipates a technique later used in 'Stagefright'.)
We see Terry in close-up, isolated by lighting which
gives a grey-green corpse-like, (and chameleon-like)
pallor to his skin. He talks frantically, not to the
camera but, isolated from the audience, to himself. When,
as he talks of death, he suddenly reaches up and smears
blue paint over his face, Jost demonstrates how effective
colour can be when its inherently expressive properties
are used to the full.
At the end of the film Terry returns to the printer,
finds that, in a last ditch effort to save his integrity,
he has neither made the prints nor come up with the money,
so Terry kills him. For this scene Jost picks up the
motifs introduced in the opening scene, and Terry kills
the printer symbolically, both with his own printing inks
and with the gun he had used as the subject for his
prints.
While this is going on a little scene takes place which
gives us perspective on the inhumanity and corruption of
the art world Terry inhabits. Terry's partner, a figure
we only see at the very beginning and very end of the
film, is waiting for Terry in the printer's office, and
starts chatting to another man who is also waiting there.
"Are you an
artist?" says Terry's partner.
"Oh no," says the man diffidently, "not
me."
"What do you do?"
"I'm a builder," says the man, apparently
ashamed of the fact. "I build houses. It's not
much, but I guess everyone sinks to their own level."
"That's not a bad thing, being a builder."
"I suppose not. People seem to like it."
The point is that the
builder seems to be a sensitive, decent, normal human
being, the only one we have seen in the whole film. And
in the midst of Terry's corrupt and deadly art world it
seems a breath of fresh air to meet someone who earns his
living through honest labour, doing something
constructive. He builds houses for people to live in; it
seems so simple, and yet, in this context, quite heart-warming.
The irony that his man obviously thinks of artists as
superior beings, and that he has sunk to being a builder
is almost tragic. It makes us feel that a society in
which artists are held in higher esteem than builders
must have its values upside-down.
The builder gets in Terry's way when he dashes out after
killing the printer, and Terry threatens him with the gun.
The scene is reminiscent of the end of 'Last Chants for a
Slow Dance', with the empty, desperate character
threatening the life of the ordinary decent citizen. But
this time, thankfully for the builder, and the audience,
Terry does not shoot.
"What happened back there with the printer?"
asks Terry's partner as they leave the building. "Don't
worry," says Terry, speaking the last line of the
film, "it had nothing to do with art."
The photography in 'Chameleon' is conspicuously, even
excessively arty, and this makes it an anti-art art-movie,
just as 'Angel City' was an anti-detective story
detective story. In both cases the self-contradiction is
deliberate and in keeping with the message. Jost wants to
make sure that we do not simply admire his films as
artefacts, he wants us to see through them to what they
tell us about our society.
'Chameleon', apart from being a powerful character-study,
tells us two things about our society. Firstly that the
drug dealer is not an alien being imposing himself on an
innocent society, but an integral part of the society we
have created for ourselves. And secondly that the value
we attach to art like the value drug addicts attach to
their drugs, is dangerously misplaced.
The films 'Angel City', 'Last Chants for a Slow Dance',
and 'Chameleon' have shown us a society permeated by
media; films, newspapers, TV, and the visual arts, which,
in the name of capitalism, cause damage to individuals
and to society as a whole.
Stagefright
'Stagefright' (1981) continues with this theme, but
formally is very different from the other works under
discussion. The reason for the difference is two-fold:
firstly it was originally made (in shorter form) for
German TV, and Jost has adapted his methods to suit the
medium, and secondly the subject under examination, the
theatre, is examined in close-up, rather than, as in the
pervious two films, through its effect on society at
large.
The film looks different because it is all shot in a
studio with actors performing against a black background.
The emphasis, therefore, in on expression through the
human figure, which both suits the TV medium and
reproduces the methods of the theatre. In fact, since we
are made constantly aware that we are watching actors
performing, and since the camera does not move, watching
the film is almost as much like being at the theatre as
like being at the cinema.
The film has no plot, and like 'l, 2, 3, Four' and other
early shorts, the sub-text is in essay form. The argument
has four stages: an introduction, an exposition, a climax,
and a conclusion. The introduction is a short history of
human communication, and, like everything else in Jost's
films, it can be read on more than one level. Firstly we
are made aware that the subject being illustrated is
communication as part of the evolution of mankind.
Secondly we are aware that the story is being illustrated
by actors, and that developments in communication have
also taken place in the theatre. And thirdly we are aware
that what we are watching is a film, another area in
which developments in communication have taken place.
The film opens with a dance representing birth. It can be
seen as the birth of mankind, and, in the way the dancer
communicates through the use of her body, as the birth of
human communication, and of theatre. The following
sequences illustrate, visually and aurally, the
refinement of this process towards communication through
language. First we see the human face, which communicates
states of mind through its expressions, then we close in
on the mouth, and the extraordinary range of sounds it is
capable of making. Then comes the addition of vocal
sounds, and finally, as the image cuts back to reveal the
full-length naked figure, we hear the first word of the
film: 'Human'.
The next sequence follows the development of language,
first with a figure clad in a toga reading Latin from a
book, illustrating the birth of Western civilisation, the
written word, and costume, and then, as letters
proliferate wildly on the screen, the arrival of printing.
The latter scene is the first with no human figure in it,
showing that language has now taken on a life of its own;
and the power of this new medium of communication is
shown in the next scene: we see a close-up of a text, and,
as it is read aloud, drops of blood-red ink fall on the
pages, eventually obscuring the words.
So far, other than "Human", not a word of
English has been spoken; we have been looking at forms of
communication in relation to their source and raison d'tre
- the human being - without being distracted by meanings.
The next scene, in which a cabaret hostess welcomes us to
the show, marks the beginning of the exposition. We have
followed the evolution of language into an important
arena of communication: the theatre; in other words, as
we sit there watching the performance, into our immediate
situation.
The film then takes us through a medley of theatrical
entertainment, while at the same time entertaining us
with a medley of trick photography. The emphasis in these
scenes, in both form and content, is on trickery,
illusion, and falseness, showing how, in the world of
show business, actors are used to create characters and
images which effectively prevent any real person-to-person
communication from taking place.
In a scene commenting on cabaret we watch conjuring
tricks, while the camera is performing its own conjuring
tricks by showing two characters, one shot from a low
angle, and one shot from a high angle, simultaneously.
In a scene commenting, perhaps, on psychological drama,
we see a young actress, in full-face and profile
simultaneously, standing dumbly and nervously as two men,
perhaps the director and producer, smother her with
advice and instructions. The actress has no voice of her
own, she is being manipulated by others, and the only
thing which is genuine about the whole scene is the thing
they are trying to eliminate; her stagefright.
In a scene commenting, perhaps, on contemporary 'internal
monologue' dramas, such as the work of Samuel Beckett, we
see two heads, one upside down, one the right way up,
arguing with each other, merging, and separating.
In a scene commenting on the theatrical performances of
statesmen three actors don masks of politicians and act
out the kind of hand-shaking routines we see in TV and
newspaper pictures. This scene makes two points: it
exposes the public image-making of statesmen as a branch
of show business, and it shows actors having to act out
roles imposed on them by people with political power.
Every now and then during these scenes an actor doing an
absurdly exaggerated James Cagney impression walks across
the screen saying: "No wonder there are so many
casualties." And every now and then a hand holding a
camera reaches down from the top of the screen and takes
a photograph of us, the audience in whose name the whole
bag of tricks is being performed.
The film's climax is a sequence in which the cheapest
trick in show business, the custard pie in the face, is
rendered grotesque and terrifying by being shown in
extreme slow motion. We see every detail as the pie flies
through the air, hits the actor in the face, and begins
to fall away. This is a very long take and its effect is
deeply disturbing.
The action which is normally supposed to make us laugh is
now seen as a vicious and humiliating assault on an actor
whose suffering is all-too apparent. He looks as if he is
being injured, and, indeed, psychologically he is. As
with the scenes of the exposition we are being asked to
question the relationship between actors and ourselves.
Who are actors? What is being done to them, and, through
them, to us? Why are we sitting watching? And who is
controlling it all?
Then suddenly the film cuts to the famous newsreel
footage of a Vietnamese peasant being shot through the
head. We see more of it than is usually shown on TV: the
man falls to the ground and blood fountains from the
wound. At the same time there is a scream on the sound-track,
and the film jumps out of alignment, as if it is about to
break. The effect creates a powerful shock, a shock which
should make us think and force us into an awareness of
the film's message.
The meanings are many. The sudden intrusion of a chunk of
reality throws into perspective the artificiality of the
rest of the film, and, by implication, of all forms of
show business. While people, including ourselves, flock
to theatres and cinemas to be entertained and distracted
by artifice, wholesale slaughter is going on every day in
the real world outside.
The fact that the film appears to break, or come adrift
from the screen, both adds to the visual shock, and
suggests that the medium of film cannot accommodate
reality. It also disrupts our attachment to the screen,
reminding us that this is no mere cinematic event.
Finally, a parallel is being drawn between the actor
being 'shot' with the custard pie, and the peasant being
shot with a bullet; a parallel which suggests that both
men are being manipulated and made to suffer by forces
beyond their control
'Stagefright' ends with an explicit statement of its
message, or at least, part of its message. This is
presumably because, being originally made for TV, Jost
saw an opportunity for his film to reach a wide audience,
large numbers of whom would probably not make head or
tail of it.
The message is delivered by the actor doing the
exaggerated Cagney impression: a device which reinforces
the message by its conspicuousness as a means of holding
our attention. The actor, who has already been
established in a choric role with his repeated line:
"No wonder there are so many casualties", comes
close to the camera, as if taking us into his confidence,
and says (approximately):
"You see, to
communicate you've got to entertain. The great
playwrights, like the Greeks, and Shakespeare knew
that, but today intellectuals seem afraid of it, as
if to entertain was to cheapen, and this leaves the
way open for cheap entertainment, I mean
entertainment with cheap intentions.
"Those with access to an audience have a
tremendous responsibility, which is often abused.
"Everyone wants to be somebody, and in this
wonderful world of the theatre they get a chance, but
as often as not they betray it to someone else.
"They say theatre holds a mirror up to society,
but as often as not it's a vanity mirror.
"The bard said, 'All the world's a stage', and
maybe it is, but what they don't tell you is that all
of life is stage-managed. You got your TV, radio,
theatre, films, and pop music; it's all divertimenti
kids, all divertimenti."
Then the actor,
obviously thinking the shot is finished, relaxes, drops
characterisation, and takes his hat off. Then Jost walks
in front of the camera and speaks to the sound man:
"Did you get it?" "Is the camera still
rolling?" says the confused-looking sound man.
"Are you still filming?"
Then, one by one, Jost turns out the studio lamps and the
film ends in darkness. This ending, of course, breaks the
cinematic illusion, reminding us that everything we have
seen on the screen has also been stage-managed, by Jost
himself.
Slow Moves
With 'Slow Moves' (1983) we are out of the studio and on
the 'Last Chants' road again. This time the casualties
are a couple, and the stories which distract them and
mislead them into making a mess of their lives are the
stories of themselves which they carry in their own heads.
'Slow Moves' tells its story through the juxtaposition of
a variety of narrative techniques. Along with the action,
dialogue, and mise-en-scene, we have a verbal commentary
from the actors, both in and out of character, and from
Jost a musical commentary in the form of Jost's song
lyrics, and a visual commentary in the photography and
editing. What emerges is a film which, while offering
multiple points of view, sustains a carefully controlled
narrative from beginning to end.
The film tells the story of a young couple, Marshall and
Roxanne, who meet, live together for a while, then take
to the road. This is the first of Jost's films to focus
on a personal relationship. It is an implicit criticism
of the artificial way relationships are normally
portrayed in films, and draws on a number of themes
opened up in the early shorts, specifically the male/female
conflicts of '1,2,3, Four', and the portrayal of ordinary
people and everyday events of '13 Fragments'.
The twin themes of imprisonment and escape, seen both in
the characters' lifestyles and states of mind, are
responsible for much of the film's structure and imagery.
The opening sequence introduces Roxanne as a girl
condemned to perpetual imprisonment, and Marshall as a
man condemned to perpetual escape.
An early shot is taken over Roxanne's head as she gazes
out to sea. Then the camera pulls back to show that she
is standing on a bridge, seemingly trapped between the
imprisoning bars of the parapet in front of her and the
ceaseless flow of traffic behind. Marshall approaches,
leans on the parapet beside her, then speaks the first
words of the film: "Isn't that Alcatraz over there?
I don't see why the prisoners couldn't have swum across."
Roxanne doesn't want to know. "I came out here to be
alone," she says, and walks off. Marshall chases
after her and offers to buy her a coffee, she accepts,
and they start chatting, or, in the language of the film,
telling each other stories
Marshall's comments: "And they began to dream
together," while at the same time we hear a song
about the unpredictable effects of time, warning us that
this shared dream may not last forever. Marshall's
comment is made out of character; he uses the word 'they'
rather than 'we', and this temporarily disrupts our
attachment to him as a fictional character. Roxanne also
gives a commentary in which she shifts her role from
character to actress: "I could have lied and told
him I was thinking of jumping from the bridge. Actually
the day we were out there making this film a woman really
did jump. There was a story about it in the paper the
next day."
These comments disrupt the conventional relationship
between ourselves and characters in a film. The character
in the story makes us aware of the actress in the film,
who makes us aware of the real world, and its stories in
newspapers. Similar disruptions of the illusion have been
noted at the beginning of 'Last Chants' and the end of 'Stagefright',
but these were made to appear almost as accidents. Here,
being situated some way into the narrative, the
disruption is conspicuously deliberate, and its effect is
to engage us, with Jost and the actor and actress, in the
process of creating the film and locating it in relation
to our real lives.
The characters in the story are not so aware of the
misleading nature of stories as the actor and actress are,
and the stories Roxanne and Marshall tell each other form
the basis for their relationship and the hopes they build
upon each other. Roxanne presents herself to Marshall as
something of a drifter, saying that she has lived in San
Francisco for four years, but that four years is too long
to stay in one place. He presents himself to her as a
sailor who has returned from the sea. He says he has
worked in construction recently, as a riveter on
skyscrapers, but is temporarily out of work.
"And, like most people, they told their stories
badly," comments Marshall. Their stories are full of
holes, holes which the partner fills in by projecting his
or her own fantasies.
The visual metaphor associating the couple's shared dream
of freedom is taken one step further when they go into a
camera obscura together, and we are treated to a
beautiful shot of the sea and the beach taken through a
telephoto lens on a camera panning on a tilted axis. The
image, reinforced by romantic music on the sound-track,
suggests an unreal, distant, dreamlike world in which it
seems impossible not to be free. But this dream-world is
inaccessible, a point which Jost makes by accompanying
the scene with a mini-history of cinematography,
suggesting that the world can only look like this in
films.
The conflict between the couple is similar to that in '1,2,3,
Four', and that between Tom and his wife in 'Last Chants'.
For Roxanne life is centred around the home, and she
wants Marshall to settle down to a steady job to provide
money and security. While Marshall (and Jost provides an
amusing commentary on this by letting the camera linger
on the kitchen sink) feels imprisoned in Roxanne's world,
and has spent money they can ill-afford on a car, telling
Roxanne it is to help him look for work.
Marshall's purchase of the car causes an argument between
the couple, and by now, thanks to the fragments of
commentary, we can see that they are mismatched. But
while the multi-layered narrative can give us privileged
information, it can also withhold information, and there
are times, such as in this argument, when our point of
view is limited to that of the characters. We don't know
why Marshall has bought the car any more than Roxanne
does, and in fact, although we do not realise it until
the end of the film, for much of the time we are only
seeing Marshall from Roxanne's point of view, and large
chunks of his 'story' which he has withheld from her, are
also withheld from us.
But there is one important section, in which we are shown
their separate activities during the day, where we are
given insights into their characters that are unavailable
to each other. With Marshall, in a sequence in which he
tries to claim money from a workers' compensation board,
we are given a complex study of an individual in relation
to society.
Marshall says that he can't work on skyscrapers any more
because of an accident. His claim, though he is barely
able to articulate it, is that although this accident
didn't cause any detectable physical injury, it caused
him to lose his nerve, in other words that his 'injury'
is psychological. The board don't accept this, and don't
even understand his claim, and politely show him out of
the office,
The insight yielded into Marshall's character through
this confrontation is similar to that yielded into Tom's
character through his confrontation with his wife. On the
one hand we could be critical, seeing him as a lazy
irresponsible parasite, trying to con his way into a hand-out
rather than looking for an honest job. But on the other
hand it is clear that Marshall's choice of behaviour is
limited by his personality, which has to a large extent
been formed by society. He is doing the only thing he
knows how to do, trying to escape responsibility and take
the easy way out. On this wider level Marshall's claim to
be suffering from psychological injury has some
justification, and his approach to the compensation board
could be seen as a quasi-legitimate, though misplaced,
request for help from society.
With Tom and Marshall Jost is treading the difficult
ground which often comes to the fore in murder trials. To
what extent can such an abnormal man be considered
responsible for his own actions? Is he evil or ill? What
is the distinction? And what are society's
responsibilities towards such an individual? We have no
ready answers, but Jost is presenting the problem more
responsibly than the many films which glamorise crime and
violence, making it look an attractive proposition for
those who have, or who have been made to feel that they
have, no other choice.
That this more general reading of the scene is
appropriate is suggested by the language with which the
manager turns down Marshall's claim: "You're
rejected," he says. "Rejected?" says
Marshall. All society can do for a man like Marshall is
to reject him, brand him as an outcast. Whose fault is it
then, when he slips towards the only role that seems to
be left for him, that of outlaw?
The episode has political overtones too, for it takes
place high up in a skyscraper, just the kind of building
Marshall used to work on. Marshall's labour went into the
construction, but there is no reward for him, no help
when he needs it from those who now occupy the building.
When the turning point comes, and Marshall has decided to
take to the road and wants Roxanne to come with him, the
scene is set in a dockyard, a location evocative of
travel and escape, while at the same time the bar-like
pillars and cranes against the sky suggest imprisonment.
Roxanne has a hard time deciding whether or not to go,
and when she does decide to go their journey begins,
oddly, with an image of her apparently being left behind.
This seems to suggest that while she is going along with
Marshall's wishes, she is still imprisoned by her need
for security, domesticity, and 'divertimenti'. While
Marshall was making his compensation claim we saw Roxanne
selling theatre tickets and buying a paperback novel. And
now, on the journey, she is listening to rock music on a
personal stereo.
The couple find temporary happiness and freedom on the
road, but, as the contrasting shots taken from the left
and right sides of the car suggest, they are really on
two separate journeys. From Marshall's side we see the
masculine, practical world of the road, lorries, and
industrial buildings, while from Roxanne's side we see
the feminine, romantic world; the trees, a river, and,
occasionally, interpolated shots of the sea.
These two do not really know each other at all. Marshall,
as we realise at the end of the film, is acting out his
fantasy of their being a couple of outlaws on the run,
and thinks Roxanne can be a Bonnie to his Clyde. Roxanne
thinks they are just travelling to another town where
they will settle down and Marshall will get a job. The
contrasting shots from the two sides of the car seem to
suggest that their once-shared world is rapidly coming
apart.
At the same time the narrative itself starts to come
apart. At a motel Marshall suddenly produces a wallet
full of bank notes; neither Roxanne nor we know where he
got it, and although Roxanne chooses to ignore the fact,
we realise that there is something about Marshall that
neither she nor we have been told.
In another scene we see them eating in a restaurant. The
scene is a long-shot, distancing us from them, and after
a while we realise that the dialogue on the sound-track
does not match their actions. We are simultaneously
losing our grip on the characters and on the narrative.
Holes are appearing in the story which equate to the
holes left in the stories they told each other.
In a later sequence the narrative breaks down altogether.
Marshall and Roxanne have stopped in a little roadside
town, but their visit is presented to us in a sequence of
disconnected shots separated by frames of black, giving
an impression more like a slide-show than a film. We don't
know what is going on, the gaps are taking over from the
narrative, and our story, like theirs, is breaking up.
The scene only comes together when Marshall and Roxanne
are having their final confrontation. They are 'on the
rocks', literally, beside a river. "I've got to have
a house!" shouts Roxanne. "You've got to settle
down and get a job!"' The river flows behind her, a
reminder of the beautiful open sea seen at the beginning.
"OK," says Marshall, "I'll settle down and
get a job. I love you." This proposition, like the
one at the end of '1,2,3, Four' (I love you, therefore I'll
never use electricity again.) comes across as a statement
of the impossible.
Later they stop at a grocery store. Marshall enters alone,
while we and Roxanne, who is totally wrapped up in the
music on her personal stereo, lose sight of him. We have
arrived at the gap in the narrative, which is filled in
when Roxanne eventually goes into the store and finds
Marshall dead on the floor with a gun beside him. He has
apparently tried to rob the store and been shot in the
process.
Roxanne, in a belated expression of the need for real
communication, tries to rouse Marshall and weeps over his
body, while the camera pans in a circle, revealing a man,
absorbed in a book, sitting beside the body, and the
paltry commodities in the shop, commodities for which
Marshall has died.
The 'romance' between Marshall and Roxanne has, by
conventional cinema standards, been underplayed almost to
the point of non-existence, and when they try to talk
about love they seem to be talking about different things.
Marshall says he finds Roxanne a source of inspiration,
while she is looking for a feeling of personal attachment.
But, different as their ideas are, something holds them
together, and Jost superimposes the word 'Lovers' over
our last sight of them, while on the sound-track we hear
a bitter, cynical song about love. Perhaps love, or the
badly told story of love, is the most insidious 'divertimenti'
of all.
Conclusion
'Slow Moves' is an anti-love story love story, 'Stagefright'
is an anti-theatre theatrical piece, 'Chameleon' is an
anti-art art-movie, 'Angel City' is an anti-detective
story detective story, and 'Speaking Directly' is an anti-feature-film
feature-film. It may appear that Jost, and he has been
accused of this, is an anti-film film-maker. Jean Luc
Godard has come to Jost's defence on this point, saying:
"He is not against the movies, he makes them move,"
the point being that it is only the conventions Jost is
attacking, not cinema itself, his aim being not to
destroy, but to re-invent.
Looking at Jost's first twenty years of work then, we can
see a development of themes and methods which is
remarkable for its consistency, and for its progress from
short 'single idea' films to complex multi-layered
narratives. He is always exploring the medium and
extending its potential for communication.
His films, though always rewarding, are not always
pleasant to watch, and, as he has said himself, if they
were so they would have failed in their purpose. Jost is
concerned that we live in a society riddled with conflict,
alienation, loss of meaning, and the debasement of values,
and he sees that our reluctance to face these problems is
half the reason for their existence. His films are
disturbing because they are an attempt to face these
things which we, to our detriment, prefer not to think
about.
Perhaps what most distinguishes Jost's work from that of
commercial directors is his uncompromising respect for
both the medium and the audience; he never abuses either,
and his comment, (from 'Susannah's Film'), defines the
point at which the viewing, and the criticism of his
films must start and finish: 'Film is like a mirror. If
an ape looks in an apostle cannot look out'.
* All quotes from the films and the interview are
approximations taken from notes made immediately after
seeing the films.
Filmography
Shorts
Portrait 1963
City 1964
Leah 1967
Traps 1967
13 Fragments and 3 Narratives From Life 1968
Primaries 1968-70
A Turning Point in Lunatic China II 1968-70
l, 2, 3, Four 1968-70
Susannah's Film 1969
Canyon 1970
Flower 1970
Fall Creek 1970
A Man is More Than the Sum of His Parts/A Woman is . . .
1971
Beauty Sells Best 1976
X2: 2 Dances by Nancy Karp 1980
Godard 1980
Features
Speaking Directly 1973-75
Angel City 1976
Last Chants For a Slow Dance 1977
Chameleon 1978
Stagefright 1980
Slow Moves 1983
Interview
Jon Jost GB 1982. Directed by Keith Griffiths and Jon
Jost. Made for Channel 4's 'Late Hour'.
Links:
Jon Jost's web site
Jon Jost's blog
cinemaelectronica
© Ian Mackean, January 2006 |