“I Don’t Concern Myself With Festivals or Exposure Anymore”
Jon Jost in conversation with Snigdhendu Bhattacharya
Jon Jost turned 80 in 2023 and it also marked six decades of his filmmaking career, having released his first in January 1963. For several years now, he has switched from the traditional camera to smartphones for shooting, iPhones to be precise. He was in Kolkata, India, for nearly three months in 2022-2023, with a brief trip to Dhaka, Bangladesh. In Kolkata, he shot for this upcoming film, on an iPhone, as usual with friends and acquaintances serving as actors. He is literally practicing zero budget filmmaking, freeing the medium from the economic constraints, and himself from commercial obligations. Often called one of the last few representatives of American independent cinema, Jost spoke to Snigdhendu Bhattacharya at his rented place in south Kolkata for a few hours one evening in February. Here’s an excerpt :
All photographs credit: Snigdhendu Bhattacharya
Filmmaking has traditionally been different from painting, sculpting or literature in the sense that film is more of a teamwork, even when the director remains the key person. But you have brought filmmaking to a personal level, where you are doing the scripting, shooting, direction and even editing. You only need some actors and they too are usually your friends. Tell us about this experience.
I have acted as well, in several of my own films. I never wanted to be a filmmaker. I never dreamt of it as a career. I started making movies at 19 without really thinking about all those stuff. I didn’t even read any books about filmmaking. I never went to a film school. All my early films are just me and a friend or a pair of lovers and we are just shooting. I never cared about industry and all that stuff. I just thought that I would go around with friends and make movies. And here it is, 60 years later, what am I doing? I am making films with my friends. In Kolkata, I have a handful of good friends. I tell them, if it’s not fun for you and me, I am not going to do it. I am not under any pressure. I really don’t seem to concern myself with festivals or exposure anymore.
But the journey from film camera to iPhones must have been a transformative one…
Filmmaking has become much easier for me in some respects, and more difficult in some others. With films, the making was much more difficult, financially and mechanically. It now costs almost nothing. A camera and a computer is enough for making feature films, just like I have been making them for the past 20 years now, at a cost of $50 to $500 (laughs). That means, so can everybody else. When digital video first came up in ‘97, I was much of a proselytizer for it. But I always knew there would be an Everest of shit, because anybody could make a film without knowing what the fuck he or she was doing. Now, there is a tsunami of bad films. How to survive or even get seen in that Tsunami? I don’t even try! I only make films. If someone finds them out, it’s okay.
But you did make films for the larger audience also, in the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s…
They were sort of by accidents. Back then, when it cost some money, there was always this usual pressure at the back of your mind, no, at the front of your mind, that I am doing this to make money. I should ensure at least some return. But that was unconscious. I had to stick to a deadpan palatable form to get back the $10,000 or $100,000 that someone is going to be spending. So, it had to be something that I could sell to TV and Europe or something like that. It was in my unconscious but it was there. Something in me said I got to make a narrative movie, with certain acceptable qualities. The Bed You Sleep In and All The Vermeers in New York are marginally marketable to just get the money back. But since video came along, I have been under no obligation to sell films.
Speaking of obligations, Vermeers ends with that Proust quotation regarding obligations. How did it come to be a defining theme of the movie?
I never read Proust. A writer friend of mine saw the film while I was editing it and he said, “Oh, I remember this passage.” So, I looked at it and found it to be quite fitting. I don’t even remember what the quote was. What was the passage exactly?
I don’t remember the exact wordings but it roughly said that if we look at the earth and life, there is no governing law, nothing binds one to do good things, not even to be pleasant to others.
It was just a serendipitous accident. My friend saw it and drew my attention. But I find it funny that people assume I have read it.
The so-called mundane life, mundane events of the day, have featured in your films quite significantly. When nothing happens as such. Just the water flowing or an empty table. Just some poetic imageries, without any storytelling. I wanted to ask about influence of poetry and painting.
I am very interested in painting and I paint. For me, making a film is not storytelling and it irritates me when people say, oh, the central thing in a film is the story. I say, for everyone else it seems to be storytelling but it does not have to be. They ask, why do you take these long shots of the cafe, the landscape…
A water-colour painting by Jon Jost
Like the one of people having their lunch (In The Bed You Sleep In)
Yes, at the diner. I say, this is the world where the story takes place. It is as important to the story as where it came out of – this kind of town, this kind of cafe, this kind of landscape, industrialized and rural areas. They are just as important as the story. Since most of the people are completely trained by the kind of cinema where the story, the plot, is the most important thing, it bothers them. Why do you take the picture of this, they ask. Because, that’s where the guy lives.
Landscapes play an important role in your films. Are they too characters?
Yes, they are. They have very clear characters. They impact the characters who live in them.
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The director at work in Kolkata
In The Bed You Sleep In, the film begins with a conversation in which for the first 8-10 mins the two characters are never seen in the same frame. One starts to suspect that the two characters have been shot separately. Then you show them in the same frame just for a fraction of a second. I just wonder, were you consciously trying to build suspense about the making?
I don’t exactly remember. Usually when I shoot, I am not consious about what I am doing. I just know I hate over-the-shoulder shots and establishing shots. You know they are talking to each other. I don’t remember why I showed them together at some point, maybe I did for some reason, but I don’t need to. Are people really that stupid that they need an opening shot with the two people together?
How would you describe the main difference between your films and the conventional or mainstream films?
In hindsight, after I made any number of movies, I saw that, most Western films, which will probably include Indian ones as well, are made like playing chess. I think I am playing the game Go, the Chinese, Japanese, Korean game. In chess, a board is 20 lines into 20 lines and they intersect. One person has black things and the other person has white. What you’re trying to do is surround somebody’s group, so there is no blank space in between and then you get to take them on. You target the important pieces. Go is a very different game. A long time ago, during the Vietnam war, I read a thin little book that compared American military tactics to the Vietnamese one and said that they were playing Go and we were playing chess. Why are they behind our lines, we wonder. It’s because they are playing a different game! I saw, in hindsight, that I kind of make my narratives like Go.
I remember film critic Roger Ebert wrote after seeing Vermeer that he would have expected this kind of an ending in a French movie with English subtitles but English movies are never made that brainy enough. We, too, felt a sense of some influence of, or similarities with, the Nouvelle Vague films. Did French movies influence or inspire you in any way?
Some of my early films, my short films, are definitely a mix of Italian neo realism, and Godard, which came through my second feature film, Angel’s City – definitely somewhat influenced by Godard. Back then, I was never really a film goer. When I decided that I am going to make films, I spent a month watching movies. I was waiting for a boat to go to Italy. There was a repertory theatre in Chicago that showed two or three films each day, and it was a mixture of European soft porn, European contemporary movies (Truffaut, Godars, Desica, Bergman, Antoniony etc), and American classics – the old Hollywood movies. This was basically my first introduction to movies. This must be 1962. Whatever I saw was my influences. I definitely had influences.
Who among these directors influenced you the most and why?
The films that tended to influence me the most were the ones that I could identify as very cheaply made movies. Like, say, Eric Rohmere needed only a camera and tripod and some people. Godard’s early films are, without a strict planning, clearly taking advantage of reality. I saw them and realised, you don’t need to spend all the money and build sets. None of these were conscious. I didn’t think about it that way. I just absorbed them. I mostly stopped watching movies thereafter. So, when I made movies, these influences came – from Godard, Romere, and Italian neo realism. If Romere made All The Vermeres, nobody would have been surprised. But I, an American, making something in the same realm is a problem (laughs). After my third feature film, Last Chance for a Slow Dance (1977), my major influence was me and the experience of making movies the way I make them.
Did you follow Godard’s work after that?
I watched his films into the ‘80s. He was very much a technically innovative person. I liked those hardcore political films, some of them, not all of them. I liked Numero Deux (Number 2). It was an interesting, complex film, politically, aesthetically and cinematically. But I could not watch his later films. They are just too full of themselves and Godard…
You mean the JLG Vs JLG kind?
Right. They became kind of a cult thing. So, I lost interest in him.
Any director whose work you follow currently?
As I said, I do not watch movies anymore. I tune my radio in and when there is something new and interesting, once in a while, I go and sometimes I am pleasantly surprised.
Some of your long takes reminded me of some takes by Bela Tarr. Did you see any of his films?
I have seen some Bela Tarr but I didn’t like them so much. He has a kind of ‘the long take’ trick. Okay, we are doing a long take, here we go and here somebody is waiting down the street. Once or twice, that’s okay. Thereafter, aesthetically it becomes a trick. And I don’t like his Eastern European lower class-level slum atmosphere. Like the scenes in bars where people are talking philosophy but they are grungy… all these alcoholic people taking high philosophy and the philosophy is more like preaching… I don’t like this. I have not seen Satantango, his eight-hour-long movie, and I don’t think I will be able to see through it. Can sit through a lot of Lav Diaz films. But eight hours!
You have been in West Bengal three times. Did you get to see any Bengali movie?
My friends suggested I must see Ritwik Ghatak. They thought I would like the political nature of his films. I started watching one. I don’t remember the name. It started well but I lost interest after fifteen minutes. Ghatak was too theatrical for me. I watched Ray films a few decades ago. Ray was too conventional for me. Theatre doesn’t just interest me and I don’t want to see a perfectly made version of a film I have seen a hundred times already. I want more adventurous camera work.
Tell us about your newsreel period.
It was a very short period. Six to eight months. They were many collaborative things. The dominant impulse of the time was political. And they tried to draw in artistic filmmaker like me. And then they rolled away with the steamroller. And, I was like, I don’t want to make the kinds of films you want me to make. The guys who took it over, it was a pre-punk era, they wanted their camera for their politics, the ideological things.
Propaganda films…
Yes, and I left. Like every ideologue, they had a very narrow mind.
I found your films to be anti-capitalist and anti-consumerist. Do you agree?
Yes, well… yes. But I try to show the contradictions in a poetic way. In The Bed You Sleep In, here is a guy who runs a lumber company and he loves to be outdoors and he appreciates nature but at the other end, capitalism is compelling him to destroy what he loves. He loves forests, going fishing in it, but he chops down forests to make some money (laughs).
The conflict between capitalism and environment was also reflected in dialogues in Vermeers…
The actors decided their own dialogues in Vermeers. There was no script at the beginning whatsoever. We were at the Wall Street trader’s gorgeous loft that he let us use for free for a week. We went on a Monday. I said, okay, we got the loft, you’re the opera singer, you’re this, you’re that. We didn’t shoot anything for the first two days. I was thinking how do we start. I didn’t have a script. I asked the actors, do you have any ideas? I have done it a number of times. But actors usually don’t have any ideas, until you give them. So, on the third day, I said, let’s get started. This is the opening shot and the camera moves like this. And the actor asks, “But where are my lines?” (Laughs) We shot the film in those three days. Things started flowing organically once started.
Does it happen that you start with a certain script and then it changes as you shoot?
I almost never have a script. I may have a little outline but we don’t know how it’s going to end. I didn’t know the end of The Bed You Sleep In when we started it. The German guy, the Evangelist… he was someone I knew. He suddenly came and I made him the Evangelist. I had no control over the way things followed. If I remember correctly, I had no idea that this man was going to commit suicide.
In Vermeers, the only thing I knew was that I wanted the shot of zooming through the woman’s head to the Vermeer. Everything had to lead to that. I did not know at all what everything else was, except that it was about Vermeer, about the stock market… When the first stock market crash happened in Holland in 1640, it was the time when Vermeer painted, it was when New York was called New Amsterdam— all those things are subtexts in the movie but fortunately they are invisible. I had all that in my mind but when we started, we had no idea what it would be, how it would be, except that end image.
You think of music on the edit table, or while shooting?
I shoot to have the music. I do shots for the music that doesn’t exist. In Vermeer, I knew that my composer is a jazz musician and i knew it would be jazz, something or other, but I had no idea what it would be.
People have described you as an underground filmmaker. What do you think of this description?
Critics almost always clinically need labels. I did’t choose anything except for the way I wanted to make my films. Experimental, underground, New American Cinema… all labels that I have been tagged under are just categorisations that simplify the critics’ works. When you brand me experimental, it translates to the fact that you don’t want to see my films (laughs). In the real world, nobody wants to see experimental films. Only weirdos like experimentalism. Underground is another way to tell people that this person’s works are bizarre, you don’t want to watch this person’s films. These brandings are a form of censorship and I don’t appreciate them. But I am not going to fight it anymore.
You’ve been quite distinctly anti-Hollywood. Everything that’s not Hollywood. For example, Angel City…
I am actually not. I would say, yes, 50 years ago, I was consciously counter-Hollywood. Angel City is about Hollywood, Chameleon is about Hollywood. But I am less interested in being anti-Hollywood than being pro-creative, non-industrialised. Hollywood is a mode of mass production but has nothing to do with aesthetics. There are really expensive stars with really expensive cars in really expensive sets but what is it more than a very expensive fashion shoot? I am anti-Hollywood in the sense that Hollywood is kind of a supreme expression of capitalism. So and so are famous and when we put them in the lead role, we can make $50 million in the box office. Let’s pay them $20 million. Who is worth that kind of money?
There is one Hollywood filmmaker, about whom we would like to hear from you, in case you have watched his films. Hitchcock…
I have seen a fair number of Hitchcock films and I liked them. He was a creative, cinematic maker. He was not American. He worked in Hollywood but worked in the British film industry before that. He did not just make normal movies. He painted sets like in Vertigo. He was thinking cinematically about very interesting things. But he molested his lady stars (laughs).
Has anything in Hitchcock influenced or inspired you?
I remember a scene from Vertigo. Very clumsy because of the technology of the time. I think somebody is up some big tower, a bell tower or something, and there was a dolly down with the zoom back. So, you were going down but you weren’t. It did not really work because the technology was not fast enough. But it was nice to see someone thinking on those terms. But I saw Hitchcock some 30 years ago or more. So, I am not really competent to talk about it now.
You must have seen some of Jim Jarmous or Werner Herzog works?
As a filmmaker, Jarmous is actually very conservative. Taking no risks. He is following his own format, which is a kind of European minimalism. Like the Coen brothers. Slightly different from the usual formula. And Jarmous, like Wim Wenders, is way too much into being hip. I don’t like that in general. Too self-aware. Herzog makes wonderful documentaries but I wish he would get himself out of them. I don’t like people who make myths about themselves.
Distribution becomes a challenge when you work outside the system. How do you try to reach your prospective audience?
I make my films for myself. Festivals won’t show them, even though I am doing some of my best work in last 20 years. Clearly as good as anything I did earlier. But everything has become more commercial, including the festivals. I can feel bad, pit my head against the wall when I know that no matter what I do, they are not going to show my work, but nothing will change anything. I am blacklisted in some way, a good blacklist I would say. People who have made one-tenth of what I have made have books written about (laughs).
Why do you think you are blacklisted?
My films are certainly juicy stuff for any academic film writer. Lot’s of things to write about. But it does not happen. There has to be something behind it. I don’t understand it and I don’t really care. Humanity will go in another 150 years. So, there is no posterity to worry about (laughs). Not that i would worry about it if there were another 1,000 years for humanity.
When a filmmaker is getting no support from any system, how does she or he survive? Filmmaking takes a lot of time. When or how would the filmmaker who gets no support earn his living from?
I have asked myself that many times. I don’t know how I manage. I live really cheap. Why am I here? Because I got a free place to stay for five months. What I eat costs one-tenth of what it costs in America, and I don’t mind that. I like to travel, see different places, experience different things. There is no formula. The guy who just left when you came in asked me the same thing. He is in a school learning script writing, which he thinks would help him get enough money so he can make the movies he wants to make. My observation is that usually that does not work. Those who think on that line never make films anymore. They just get caught up in the survival battle. It ends up sucking up all your energy. I know, statistically I am highly unusual. Most people I know either teach or do commercial work. I still don’t know how I am getting away with it (Laughs).
It’s strange that you have survived as a filmmaker for 60 years without taking up any commercial work
I don’t know why, but I was never asked to do either. Lots of people I know, who are presumably my peers, they get asked to do music video or things like that. I never got asked to do those kinds of things.
Why do you think so?
America has always been very hostile to internal critics. I am a very vocal critic of America. Alexis de Tocqueville, a young French intellectual who travelled America in the 1840s, wrote in his this book called Democracy In America. that Amercians understand the value of everything by how much it would cost or how much will it make. Boy! Didn’t he nail America?
What response do you get in Europe?
​It used to be good, now it’s not. Places where I have been on their own jury, I am no longer wanted.
Godard used to say, America will one day eat up Paris…
In many ways, it did.
Your films speak about The American Dream. Would you say the American Dream has now spread all over the world?
Yes. I met many people here, who were influenced by the American Dream. And I told them that you have been sold a myth. In America, anything that people need, like medical care, food, turns into an extortion racket. I lived in Italy for a while and had a back operation there. In America, I couldn’t have afforded it. America is a schizophrenic nation. Why do we have people shooting 30 people every other day? Becasue we drive them crazy and then we give them easy access to guns. We have made a society that’s so alienated from itself and fucked up… even though they don’t realise that they are fucked up.
How did Vietnam war and other major international developments of the 1960s influence your thinking?
I got deeply involved. In 1962-63, had I refused to join the military. For that, they put me in jail in 1965. I spent 27 months in prison.
What did you learn in jail?
I met a whole class of people whom I otherwise wouldn’t have met. Made some good friends, who I am still in touch with. It was boring. Two years is quite a long time. But it’s okay.
How much has America changed in these 60 years?
America has gone far worse. In The Bed You Sleep In, it was not about this Oregano family but it was The American Family. And, 30 years ago, I was saying that we are lost, the community trust is gone, and we are going to kill ourselves. Now America is a bunch of big cities surrounded by rural places who cannot communicate anymore. Rural America thinks very differently. A lot of rural America is like fundamentalist Christians. Completely schizophrenic. They hate anything that’s not like them. They are all into guns, machoism. All small towns fell apart because they were left behind in globalisation. I understand their resentment. I understand the stress they were under to fall for Trump.
Let’s talk about your latest venture, the film you were shooting here. Tell us about it.
I did not come here to make a project but usually when I am in a place I try to make a film there. I have no idea what I am making. I may or may not have enough stuff to make a film. If it’s a film at all, I don’t know what it is. It is a bunch of fragments of something and 2,00o photos. Right now, I will also be distracted from it because I managed to raise the money to go to Spain and make a film there. Totally different environment.
What are your plans for the next few months?
From here, I will go to London for three nights, and find the cheapest way to go to Cuba, where I will be teaching for two weeks and possibly stay a little longer. Then I will go to Chicago to visit my old girlfriend and stay there for three weeks. I also have a screening in Chicago. From there, I will go to Spain and theoretically make the movie. I will possibly end up going to North Macedonia for an artist’s residency – to have a partial retrospective and a workshop where I can hang around and make paintings. And then maybe I will visit a rural festival in America where I will be the focus of the festival. And then, maybe, I will be back in Kolkata.
To shoot?
Primarily bacause now I have friends here and it’s cheap. But if the film is not finished by then, maybe I’ll shoot a little more.
All photo credits: Snigdhendu Bhattacharya