Presented with the support of the Claremont McKenna College Film Studies Program
Program:
Coming to Terms (Jon Jost, 2013, 89 min) | 1:00pm
Director Jon Jost cast fellow filmmaker James Benning as a dying Montana patriarch who gathers his dysfunctional family together for a final request. Jost, a maverick independent filmmaker for the past 50 years, has made a bracing and audacious work that alternates between stark, expressive landscapes and unusually filmed encounters between the father, his estranged sons, and their mothers in which the actors/characters address the audience as much as each other. (MoMI)
Q&A with Jon Jost and James Benning | 2:30pm
Blue Strait (Jon Jost, 2015, 85 min) | 3:00pm | Los Angeles premiere!
In this under-screened Jon Jost film, the dissolution of a long-term relationship gives subtle, narrative shape to an otherwise poetic still-life study of Port Angeles. The story, of “minor importance” by the filmmaker’s own admission, was developed through improvisation with his two actors, Stephen Taylor and John Manno. They play a gay, middle-aged couple whose mundane grievances—neglected chores, accusations of indifference, financial instability—edge their relationship toward a tragic end point. Encircling these scenes are tableaux of sea, sky, flora, and domestic interiors, which, by dissolving glacially into one another, suggest passages of time and the impermanence of everything. Other visual strategies (sliding split screen, oscillating camerawork, overlapping images) attest to Jost’s ongoing explorations in form. Manno, a trained harpist like his character, supplies the picture with its beautiful diegetic music. Blue Strait is a jewel in the experimental DIY director’s suite of digital films. (Vancouver Cinematheque)
TRT: 174 min
In person: Jon Jost and James Benning
"[Coming to Terms is] a remarkable film, with images and transitions of great beauty and intensity." —Chris Fujiwara
"A masterpiece near beyond compare... the scope of Blue Strait's achievement goes well beyond it’s immediate predecessor, which is no small feat." —Carl Mouatt
"This masterful feature [Coming to Terms] from veteran independent Jon Jost maintains a perfect balance between dramatic storytelling and rigorous formalism." —J.R. Jones, The Chicago Reader
"Starting with the very first, each shot [in Coming to Terms] is a surprise. Space and time: each has an energy of its own. As if a whole world would crowd into these images, beautifully framed but above all monumental." —Bernard Eisenschitz
"Coming to Terms brings together, for the first time, Jost’s exquisitely meditative sense of visual surface and texture with his tragic sense of how America has been losing its soul, making this for me in some ways his greatest feature." —Jonathan Rosenbaum
(Available to download after screening date)