A terminal "road-movie," Last Chants single-mindedly
follows the path of its central character, Tom Bates, through an unspecified
period of time as he talks to a hitch-hiker and then throws him out
of his truck, visits his wife and has a fierce argument with her, talks
to a man in a breakfast cafe, picks up a woman in a bar and has a one
night stand with her; leaves the woman, and finally, cruising in his
truck on a back road, pulls over to help a man with his broken-down
car, and, for a few dollars, shoots and kills the man.
1977 | 16mm | Color | Sound | 90 minutes
Producer, writer, director, editor cinematographer
: Jon Jost
With: Tom Blair, Steven Voorheis, Jessica
St. John, Wayne Crouse, Mary Vollmer, Jon A. Jackson
Shown at Edinburgh Festival
1977, Toronto 1978, Florence 1979, Sydney, and others
In the collections of British Film Institute (BFI),
Australian Film Institute, Portuguese Film Archive.
Broadcast by UK’s Channel Four, 1981
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"It is tempting to say that Last Chants is remarkable enough
in its own terms but, remarkable though it certainly is, that would seriously
underestimate the film’s importance. For Last Chants does
what virtually no other film made in the USA in the 70’s does --
it exemplifies the possibility of a radical alternative cinema, radical
and alternative in economic, aesthetic and political terms -- which does
not inevitably condemn itself in advance to an avant-garde elitist or
otherwise narrow audience. One of the primary reasons it is able to do
so is that it draws fundamentally upon cinema’s narrative tradition,
incorporating some of its pleasure and fascination, while seeking to sever
that narrative tradition from its accumulated ideological functions and
disguises."
- Jim Hillier, Movie, 1981
"Last Chants for a Slow Dance is a film of extraordinary
restraint and formal elegance - a paradox which provides an exceptionally
telling indication of the nature of Jost’s attitude to film."
- Alan Sutherland, Sight and Sound
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