Jon Jost,after seven feature films, retains his respected status as a trulyexperimental filmmaker working in the narrative form, still withseemingly impossibly low budgets, still "test(ing) the limits ofthe audience," as he puts it. He last visited PFA in 1981, withChameleon; Stagefright (1981) and Slow Moves (1983) followed. Like LastChants for a Slow Dance (1977), Bell Diamond was filmed in Montana, thistime in Butte, where the abandoned Bell Diamond mine becomes a metaphorand a site for lives nearly lost to mediocrity, souls to disuse.Improvised acting in the Cassavetes vein, but low-key, closer to theground, and a real-time narrative format work towards the slow unfoldingof the story, which tells of a Vietnam veteran, Jeff (Marshall Gaddis)whose wife, Cathy (Sarah Wyss), is leaving him in frustration. There isno loving this seemingly insensate man, yet Bell Diamond captures him ata moment of awareness, thus of hope. And despite the rigor of Jost'sstyle, the film is a moving portrait, particularly in directing ourattention toward the pain of Jeff and his equally inarticulate malefriends' struggle to communicate with one another-something that seemsto happen so easily in other people's films.