Jon Stephen Jost (born 16 May 1943 in Chicago) is an American independent filmmaker.
Born in Chicago to a military family, he grew up in Georgia, Kansas, Japan, Italy, Germany and Virginia. He began making films in January 1963 after being expelled from college. In 1965 he was imprisoned by US authorities for 2 years 3 months for refusal to cooperate with the Selective Service system. Self-taught as a filmmaker, he made his first full-length film in 1974, and has since that time focused on a wide range of American issues in his films, at present having made 40 long-form films. Jost's work has shown since 1976 in major film festivals around the world.
A fictional/documentary tone-poem, making for a kind of portrait of the town of Walkerville, Montana, and of the lead actor, Gary Winterholler, who had suffered a severe stroke several years earlier and was in a process of recuperation. There is no "story" ...
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Ex-con is released from jail, goes through release procedure, buys a gun, tries to pick up girl in bar, tries to sleep, meets up with ex-prison buddy, goes to take revenge on drug deal gone sour. A minimalist drama of dire simplicity, using avant-garde met ...
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Jon Jost describes his 2021 collage-as-narrative feature "Tourists" as "an exploration of many things—the writer Raymond Carver, the town Port Angeles, the nature of writing stories and poetry, the interplay between writing and acting, the nature of fict ...
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Impressions from the American Independence Day celebrations in Butte, Montana: evening mood, American flag on the veranda, barbecue, firecrackers, fireworks. A quote from Donald Trump: "Marxists, anarchists, troublemakers and looters destroy our statues, e ...
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Over 30 filmmakers and friends of Strand Releasing have come together to honor the company's indelible contribution to independent cinema over the past thirty years. The participating filmmakers have each created a short film for the project, all shot on i ...
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A film that Jon Jost dedicated to his daughter Clara, an artistically designed home movie and at the same time a look back at his life, mostly commented off-screen by Jon Jost. He used the technology of the digital camera which contrasts nicely with his ne ...
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Jon Jost: MURI ROMANI II is a "slow film" showing the walls of the center of Rome in a manner which is both beautiful and mysterious, and hopefully prompts a meditative state which unconsciously raises thoughts of the deep history of Rome and of humanity. ...
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The war in Mali is seen through a kaleidoscope that gives the whole thing an unexpected beauty and fascination. An anti-war film. A sung requiem provides the soundtrack. ...
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From Jon Jost's Site: "Canyon is in effect a re-make of a film I shot in 1970 in 16mm, which ran 5 minutes. It was a look down into the Canyon for a full day, made from a sequence of shots, taken from the same viewpoint, Yavapi, dissolved one to the next. ...
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Mountain landscapes enveloped in foggy fields that slowly merge into one another. Sometimes the fog clears and details become visible. Sometimes the landscape blurs into an abstract drawing. From photographic images by Danila Rumold. ...
Watch NowComing out of an accident with amnesia, Sophie Bauer tries to reshape herself in the eyes of those who knew her best. ...
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A tone poem about problems in a romantic relationship of a middle aged couple. ...
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A movie by Jon Jost, who is the maestro of the American experimental movie world. The film tells us the strange incidents that happen in the ruined old village. Comparing to Jon Jost's previous movies, this film has a clearer narrative and is more experime ...
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Bowman Lake is a single image film of Bowman Lake, sunrise to sunset. ...
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One day, father makes a shocking decision in a family gathering. The family disagrees with it and against him in the very beginning. However, they make up their mind to support him at the end. A portrait of family disorganization casting the master of expe ...
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Taking inspiration from the collaborative 1967 militant anthology film Far from Vietnam, five of the boldest and most prominent American militant filmmakers unite to create this searing (and seething) omnibus work, employing a variety of approaches to reve ...
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"Imagens de uma cidade perdida" is a portrait of an old area of Lisbon, primarily the Alfama, but also other central areas - Castelo São Jorge, Graça, Bairro Alto, and elsewhere. It was shot in 1997-98, over the span of more than a year. Like those place ...
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An experimental sketch that came about while Jon Jost was teaching at Italy's National Film School. He strolled through the San Lorenzo district, observed the celebrations, the lively street life and didn't miss the nearby cemetery. ...
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In October 2008, Jon Jost is standing with his camera in the waiting area of a train station in the USA, filming the other travelers: a mother with a child, the cleaning service, businesspeople on the phone, the conductor who falls in love and says g ...
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Jon Jost: "RANT is a discursive portrait of Steven Lack, actor (Cronenberg's Scanners, Alan Moyle's Rubber Gun, Jost's All the Vermeers in New York) and full-time painter/artist in the New York scene since the late 1970's. The film provides a glimpse of th ...
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After being thrown out of his house, a cowboy hits the road in a senseless wave of robbery, murder and rape. On a bucolic farm a seemingly retarded woman is kept on a rope by a mute farmer. Soon, the cowboy shows up. "Parable" is a radical reflection on th ...
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Placed in a small seaside area north of Rome, of late popular with the intelligentsia and artists, La Lunga Ombra provides a portrait of 3 professional women under the hidden duress of post 9-11 Italy, and more broadly, Europe. ...
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An enchanting moving painting. Digital colour shifts like a palette knife in greasy paint. For those who want to undergo the drug intoxication without chemicals. The work is made up of a compilation of material that the film maker has developed and process ...
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Newport, Oregon. In a coastal town, Jeff and his wife Mattie work together facing the economic shifts. One son Chris, is unemployed; the other, Steve, is away on military service. Chris is lackadaisical and shiftless, Mattie perhaps drinks on the sly and t ...
Watch NowA short landscape film made by Jon Jost in 2004 in DV. ...
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Vergessensfuge is a meditation on the psychology of obedience and submission, in this instance springing from a handful of photographs taken in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp immediately after its liberation in 1945. The images are of young women, ag ...
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A digital diary reflecting Jon Jost's experiences in India in 2003, when he was teaching filmmaking with digital cameras there. The material in this impressionistic film is adapted to the Indian way of life, with the cheerfulness of vibrant colors contrast ...
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In the fall of 2003, Jon Jost walks with his camera through the garden of Waseda University in Tokyo. He films the bamboo forest, tree tops, grasses, bushes and leaves. The exposure changes and the most beautiful painting is created. ...
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Arbor Fugue is made from "outs" material from the installation piece, Trinity. I felt that the material made for an interesting re-working of the nature of the musical form of the fugue, in which motifs are returned to again and again in new forms. This wa ...
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I walked around Trondheim, shooting this and that, and at one point I saw these girls walking across a little footbridge. After I got the shot of them, I spent a little time trying to imagine what they might have seen on their little walk. This is the resu ...
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A wedding in Rome. Jost watches a bride and groom on the street, their swinging white dress, his festive suit, walking together on cobblestones. Filmed in slow motion, a beautiful flow of black and white movements emerges. ...
Watch NowA 2000 short film directed by Jon Jost. The film screened at International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2002. ...
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The Portuguese Revolution (1974-75) seen through the eyes of some of the most important photographers and filmmakers that witnessed the event. Their dreams and expectations and what came out of the revolution. With outstanding historical footage. ...
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Muri Romani is a somewhat radical type of documentary. In appearance, it is utter simplicity. For example, the image of a patch of wall in Rome, today. As one watches, the wall seems to change, invisibly, without technical means. The sound is a collage of ...
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ROMA is a hastily drawn together documentary/essay on Rome, drawn from a large amount of material collected over two or three years, and put together in haste for an Italian television commission. The material had all been done for myself, but this particu ...
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Nas Correntes de Luz da Ria Formosa (In the Rays of Light of Ria Formosa) is a kind of documentary shot over a period of 3 months in summer of 1997 and then edited over the next 2 and a half years. The work is a spiritual portrait of a place and time. It i ...
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A portrait of the London city - including tourist sites and trading markets. ...
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An American independent director comes to Italy to shoot a film. But inconveniences and obstacles stand in the way at every step. These are the years in which "Tangentopoli" rages and the golden rule of officials and collaborators is "one (bribe) to you, o ...
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Times are hard for Northwestern lumber-mill operators like Ray and his wife Jean. Ray and Jean's lives are thrown into chaos when their daughter writes home from college, claiming to have a horrifying revelation. ...
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Ricky, a dim-witted ex-con, meets Beth, a dim-witted waitress, in an Idaho diner. They take off in his car to Washington and begin an affair. Beth, a lonely romance-novel addict, is hopelessly enamored; Ricky is just in it for the (constant) sex. Beth's lo ...
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Two HIV-positive young men — a semi-employed film critic and a hot hustler — tear off on a cross-country crime spree. ...
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A parable of the missteps of life enacted in the hothouse world of late 1980's New York, in which the art market and the stock market each boomed, and in process spawned a smorgasbord of "yuppie" delusions which still persist. Anna, a French actress studyi ...
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Set in the quasi-Biblical splendor of the Mormon Dixie of central Utah, Sure Fire follows the trajectory of an American archetype, the small town entrepreneur seized by visions of fortune. Wes, eager to sell out the local grandeur to the wealthy hordes of ...
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This film is a portrait of the passage of one year in the lives of some San Francisco friends, circa 1988 (before the dot.coming of the city), a slow marijuana hazed story which drifts like the fabled fog, encompassing the quirks and habits of a generation ...
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Plain Talk is a complex essay-film, a follow-up a decade and some years later to Speaking Directly, and so another State of the Nation discourse, made for Britain's Channel Four in the year 1986-87. The work involved extensive travel around the United Stat ...
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A telling story of an unemployed Vietnam vet in Butte, Montana, whose wife leaves him after seven years when she feels there is no longer communication between them and - more painfully and pointedly - because she is unable to have a child owing to his ste ...
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A bluesy lyrical romance of two ugly-ducklings who meet on the Golden Gate Bridge and after a brief and awkward courtship, live together with the usual problems of money and work, take flight to an illusory freedom on the road, and dances inexorably to a d ...
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As night falls, the receptionist of a small hotel dutifully performs her routine tasks while strange lodgers descend upon the dark corners of the inn. ...
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An essay-film on language and theater, on human communication - intellectual in content, but purely poetic in terms of form: image, sound, language, cinema. Stagefright, with the exception of one shot, was all filmed in a small puppet theater space, actors ...
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The famous French film director Jean-Luc Godard is interviewed by British film theorist Peter Wollen and the editor of Framework Don Ranveaud. He talks of the developments in his work, the change in style epitomized by his most recent film, Sauve Qui Peut, ...
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A scathing portrait of the Hollywood/LA arts milieu of the late 70's, Chameleon follows the amorphous day of its lead character, an Armani-jacketed peddler of high-class dope, fraudulent art, and preening postures suited-to-fit the changing victims, though ...
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A man who is dissatisfied with his family life leaves home for weeks at a time, drifting from town to town. ...
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A detective fiction mixed with an essay-documentary about Los Angeles, Hollywood and the film industry, Angel City is a satiric comedy with serious intentions. ...
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Speaking Directly is an essay-film making for a kind of State of the Nation address, from the perspective of someone other than the President of the United States, circa 1973-5. This film addresses both the political and cultural situation of the US at the ...
Watch Now"PRIMARIES is a simple film which merely establishes a definition of 'politics'. Its narrative moves in paragraph blocks, with each sentence accompanied by different pictures of a young woman's hands, feet, torso, face… A TURNING POINT IN LUNATIC CHINA p ...
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"A silent perusal of the Grand Canyon, morning to night, from a single, fixed camera position, by means of constant dissolves spaced a few seconds apart. Man — entirely absent — is no longer the center of the universe; the canyon exists outside of him. ...
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A homage to nature and a plea for a careful approach to it. In one of his early films, Jon Jost shows impressions of a stream in the forest and a couple streaming through the forest: direct looks into the camera, cross-fades, multiple exposures, playing wi ...
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A portrait of alienation is sketched out, focusing on a young art student who passively, but consciously, rejects responsibility for the political storms swirling about her. The epitome of bourgeois mentality, she insists she is, or at least will be, an ar ...
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Working for the first time with sound, I made TRAPS, a film scripted in jail on hearing of an acquaintance's suicide, and LEAH. Both are "portraits" of alienated young women. TRAPS is harsh in both form and content, with long takes speaking to the camera j ...
Watch Now1964, Autumn in Chicago. This was my 4th film, shot while waiting to go to prison for refusing to serve in the US military. Silent. B&W. I think it captures the sense of depression, of loneliness within the city. Looking back it seems almost archaic, Chica ...
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The aesthetic moves progressively from loose "underground" means using expressionistic camera movement, multiple exposures, droning sequences and shock cut towards a static, didactic form of "documentary" marked with long takes, minimal camera movement, a ...
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Perhaps at first glance, the filmography of Silvio Narizzano appears unremarkable. Thanks to his sleeper hit Georgy Girl (1966), he's known largely as a "one-hit wonder" director. Upon closer inspection, however, likely no other filmmaker used cinema as ef ...
Watch NowA film that Jon Jost dedicated to his daughter Clara, an artistically designed home movie and at the same time a look back at his life, mostly commented off-screen by Jon Jost. He used the technology of the digital camera which contrasts nicely with his ne ...
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Empire Prairie, where Lonnie Enright grew up. He's headed home now, to see his ailing father and little brother. Bad things are coming. ...
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Teenage London is trying to find meaning in the world, or a leather jacket of her own. Unaccepted by neither the Mods or the Asian biker gang, she tries to find her own path. Meanwhile, the two gangs maintain a mutual vendetta sure to erupt in a smorgasbor ...
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This film is a record of the first Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival. It reflects the various ways the festival was given shape by nascent global changes embodied by Perestroika, the Tiananmen Square massacre, and many other contemporaneous ...
Watch NowA bluesy lyrical romance of two ugly-ducklings who meet on the Golden Gate Bridge and after a brief and awkward courtship, live together with the usual problems of money and work, take flight to an illusory freedom on the road, and dances inexorably to a d ...
Watch NowAs night falls, the receptionist of a small hotel dutifully performs her routine tasks while strange lodgers descend upon the dark corners of the inn. ...
Watch NowA scathing portrait of the Hollywood/LA arts milieu of the late 70's, Chameleon follows the amorphous day of its lead character, an Armani-jacketed peddler of high-class dope, fraudulent art, and preening postures suited-to-fit the changing victims, though ...
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