At 7 pm at the Ross Cinema this coming week, Thursday March 29,
in the Digital Cinema program my own work,

6 EASY PIECES (76 mins, 2002)
will be showing.

This film screened at the New Directors/New Directions in New
York (Lincoln Center) in 2001; was a prize winner at Yamagata and Jeonju, and showed in the following festivals:

Yamagata Prizewinner, 2001
Rotterdam 2000
Palermo Immagine Leggere
VideoLisboa
JeonJu (Korea)
Popcorn (Stockholm)
Golden Horse (Taipei)
New York Video Festival
Chicago Underground Film Festival

Here's come critical commentary on the film:

From this week's Omaha City Weekly:

"Since his conversion to digital video, Jost has returned to “my
initial filmmaker practice of walking around with a camera and just shooting… as if I had taken up a new occupation, perhaps something akin to painting or music, in which the parameters about ‘what is work’ had been completely shifting.” One can witness this exploration of alternative media and form next Thursday at the Ross with his exquisite and eloquent “6
Easy Pieces,” a series of six vignettes, a kind of cinematic tone poem that is demanding and engaging, impressionistic and expressionistic.

As in all of his non-linear work, Jost offers the viewer a new
perspective on his familiar world and even a new way of seeing. Some images make us think, others feel, and many just enjoy for their creativity. In one episode, the fluid beauty of row upon row of architectural columns, voice over and violin music wax poetically in a kind of delicious vertigo about artistic vision and rivalry. In a second, we see in a split screen the juxtaposed images of two beautiful women, one a free-flowing
nude dancer, the other a mechanically perfect sharp shooter. The one improvisational and artful, the other formal and artless. " Michael Joe Krainak
For entire article go to:

http://www.omahacityweekly.com/article.php?category=culture

BRIGHTLIGHTSFILM Jon Jost: 6 Easy Pieces (2000)

Jon Jost is one of cinema’s true independents, insisting on
living and working authentically regardless of the costs. And these have not been inconsiderable. An army brat born in 1943 who grew up in the U.S., Japan, Italy, and Germany, he was expelled from college in 1963 and later spent more than two years in jail for draft dodging. After prison, he
helped form a leftist filmmaking collective and then moved on to making his own films.
Long before Dogme 95, he was writing, photographing, directing,
and editing highly personal shorts, features, documentaries, and an uncategorizable hybrid of the latter two using nonprofessional casts and absurdly small budgets (his 1977 feature Last Chants for a Slow Dance allegedly cost $500).
These works, which show a highly developed sensibility in total
command of the formal elements of filmmaking, are rarely screened outside museums and universities, the only exception being All The Vermeers in New York (1991), which played a few theatrical dates and on PBS.

Historically, Jost has used his films as platforms to assail
America’s murderous middlebrow culture, taking on everything from the violence in the
family and interpersonal relationships to money worship and
consumerism to the brutalities of the country’s ruling elites. Jost doesn’t make his
critique easy for audiences to decipher or accept. Bell Diamond
(1986) is typical, presenting a disintegrating relationship by
foregrounding an unwatched TV blaring away while the ghostlike figures of the doomed couple move mysteriously, and only occasionally, in the background. As so often with Jost, the individual falls apart against a backdrop of social decline,
as in Bell Diamond’s seemingly abandoned industrial landscapes.
There’s also a strange combination of ego and self-criticism in films like the “essay-fiction” Speaking Directly (1973), which shows him being reviled by a girlfriend, then talking about his penis, then masturbating in close-up for some minutes. Not exactly the stuff of PBS, or even the Sundance Film Channel. Since 1993, Jost has lived in exile in Europe; since 1997 he’s
worked exclusively in the dream format of the impoverished
auteur, digital video.

It’s a little surprising, then to see Jost’s late work drawing
on his technical brilliance and poetic imagination, with the
provocateur/polemicist receding into the distance. 6 Easy Pieces shows increasing evidence of the director preoccupied with the timeless rather than the timely.

Even the title is playful, a witty (and typically misleading) reference to Bob Rafelson’s classic counterculture film. 6 Easy Pieces was shot in Portugal and Italy from 1997 to 1995, according to the endnote, “using Sony DX700 and 1000 cameras and edited on a PC using Premiere 5.1 editing software,” and “released” (presumably meaning copyrighted) in 2000. Despite the
technospeak, and indeed the sophisticated visual manipulations,
this is an emotionally charged work that derives much of its power from its sense of discovery, whimsy, and an awareness of the indifference of the universe to the individual.

Jost’s “brave new world” appears in the first sequence, a
nighttime drive through “the justly fabled fogs of the Venetto.” Here the legerdemain of the digital is employed to make a simple driving trip both an abstraction, by
fuzzing the image into a kind of pointillism, and palpable, a
painting in motion. Writer Edoardo Albinati’s text, subtitled in English, evokes what Jost shows as a kind of cosmic construction whose beauty will outlast the human presence: “Edifices arising as crystal, erupting as extravagant growths, excreted as stalagmites from the thin ethers of mind
and spirit…”

This compelling blend of the concrete and the abstract pervades
the film,
most effectively in the simplest sequence: images of water in a
Venice canal
with Jost’s voice in the background. The effect of the
shimmering water is
heightened by digital manipulations, which make it hypnotic as
the patterns
shift, stop, and start, lulling the viewer into a feeling of
peace, even
transcendence while Jost carps in voiceover about the Venice
Biennale. The
triumph of nature over the filmmaker’s petty complaints is a
major thread
here, and evidence of Jost’s increasing maturity as an artist.
Water is also
the ruling element in a lovely sequence in which two young
women, mostly
unseen, talk about their plans and their lives while swimming.

One of the most startling sequences features a split screen. On
the right is
a woman methodically loading and discharging a rifle. On the
left is that
dreaded creature, a mime, this one naked no less, and like so
many mimes
these days, actually talking, though mostly in grunts and
monosyllables. Jost brilliantly mixes the menacing with the sardonic as the mime multiplies into several images, gesturing, dancing, and muttering inscrutable phrases like “fall … a sadness … an absence … an improbability…” The contrast between the sharpshooter’s rigid silence and methodical, compulsive behavior and the mime’s garrulous self-expression makes this a riveting
dance between characters occupying different cinematic spaces but the same
screen. 6 Easy Pieces shows Jost at his most exciting as both the mime and the
sharpshooter, the artist and the technician, occupying different
cinematic spaces but the same screen.

Jon Jost
www.jon-jost.com