I've always considered Jon Jost one of the grand contrarians of American
filmmaking. For around thirty years, Jost has been exploring the boundaries
of feature narrative in films like "Last Chants for a Slow Dance,"
and more recently, "Sure Fire" and "The Bed You Sleep
In." "All the Vermeers in New York" may be his most
widely-seen work, shown a few years back on PBS.
Working on the most meager of budgets, often exploring the lives
of the less articulate members of the American underclass, Jost has
worked in a form one critic has described as "avant-garde naturalism."
In recent years, while living in Europe, Jost has begun making "electronic
films," like "London Brief." Jost describes this hour-long
dissection of commuting rituals in London as an "accidental film"
made for less than $1,000. He sent some footage to a Japanese documentary
festival, which asked for a longer version. The result is hypnotic—both
for Jost's keen eye for detail and his attention to sound and music
(the fine, trancey score for "London Brief" is by frequent
Jost collaborator Erling Wold).
Jost, known for strong opinions, shared a few perspectives on his
productive new direction. He says he'd worked with VHS and Hi-8 cameras
since around 1985, but "I thought it was a problem that my brain
and spirit kind of went into limbo owing to the lack of expense involved,
and also that the aesthetic quality really didn't quite please me."
Before Digital, the route to finishing a piece was circuitous. "To
get any quality at all with the VHS and Hi-8, you had to do some kind
of edit, bump it to Beta, do an on-line edit in Beta, and by then
it was costing a lot of money for not-so-great tech quality."
Jost finds more than the economics liberating in shifting to DV.
"I started over three years ago, and the quality and technical
realities—no degeneration of very good sound and image during
computer manipulation and editing—took a quantum shift. I frankly
don't think of it as 'video,' more, if you will, as electronic film.
The economics are "extremely" liberating, as an hour of
excellent erasable, repeatable, copyable, first-rate image and sound
costs on tape a fat $7 or so if you buy in bulk."
The economics of working with film stock, as even the most rudimentary
filmmaker will tell you, are far different. "Compared to film,
about one minute of 16mm stock costs that, plus the added lab costs
all the way down the line, adding up to maybe $70 a minute at the
lowest. There is no comparison between $7 an hour and $70 a minute.
DV is also much more amenable to working on than is film. All it costs
a simple outfit and your time and energy."
But Jost shares one of my fears about the so-called "revolution."
"The flip side is this stuff is so good and so cheap there will
be an avalanche of absolutely horrible things made by utterly talentless
people who can do it since it costs so little. I can bear the price
I guess."
There's another price Jost feels he no longer has to pay. "I
am trying to avoid film, avoid dealing with the assholes and crooks
who govern the money side of film, and to be out in the front of setting
the groundwork for a whole new view of this, from production on through
distribution and exhibition."
Jost sees the non-narrative character of "London Brief"
as a call to pursuing another sort of freedom. "One of the things
I like about it is that it is both a 'serious' piece, that is, a poetic
kind of critique of urban life, and simultaneously a kind of lark,
something playful and fun. To shoot, to edit, and for me at least,
to watch. Though it is not meant to be 'entertaining,' but rather
in a sneaky way a bit provocative, to subconsciously force one to
think about two-hour urban commutes, dead office jobs, shrieking and
selling, going crazy, tuning out via repetitious zoned-out music—disco—which
curiously replicates the monotony of the repeated commute-work-commute
zombie routine."
But with the latitude of video, the finished film is composed with
the effortlessness of a notebook piece. Yet it's as good and important
as Jost's other work, a case where video has given voice to much-less-than-mainstream
sensibility. "The intention was to promote the subconscious to
get critiquing, to push the viewer to say 'enough already,' enough
with this urban insanity, boredom, phony escape mechanisms. But what
I like, aside from the technical and aesthetic aspects is that economically
it allows me to go out and shoot and then sit at home and do things
that I simply wouldn't even think of in film because I have an a priori
economic filter that doesn't let me think of things I know I cannot
afford. In DV I can afford about anything except Leonardo di Caprio,
and I wouldn't want him."
-Ray Pride
