After watching Jon Jost's Last Chants for a Slow Dance, I can't help but obsess over Jim Hillier's 1981 comment that the film "...does what virtually no other film in the 1970's does, it exemplifies the possibility of a radical alternative cinema, radical and alternative in economic, aesthetic and political terms..." While I don't necessarily agree that virtually no other films approached Jost's territory in terms of his aesthetics and economics, he has a point in raising questions about this film's particular place in time. The more I read about this film the less it seems critics talk about such aesthetics and economics, but in their place, a faux nostalgia (conveniently in the present where nostalgia seems to enjoy hanging around). They say non-productive things like "the film represents a type of film that Americans could have embraced but didn't."
This is the same vague, irresponsible type of idea that dominates American criticism, where rather than talking about images, their forms and languages they conclude that because mainstream cinema in the United States didn't go in that direction (as if it ever had a chance) then there is nothing worth talking about in respect to those films other than the fact that they represent a "type" of film that never materialized. In this criticism, films aren't even allowed to be films, they must be symbols of other films that strangely, we didn't embrace.
Yet, the most interesting aspect of the film itself, shot on reversal 16mm kodak stock with a total budget of $2,000 in 1970's dollars, is the presence of absolute respect for the viewer's intelligence in every shot. Jost's haunting film materializes throughout a handful of formally complex and idiosyncratic long takes. In each shot, his unwavering technical precision and formal restraint develops into moments that represent that which Jost seems to do best; he shows the viewer to themselves by inviting us to places in the cinema we think we've been before, and dragging us to places we never thought we'd get to see.
Sunday, August 16, 2009
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