“...(Jon) Jost may truly be said to be an ‘experimental' director, not in the sense of consciously trying to appear avant-garde, but in the more important sense that he is a director who continuously evaluates the methods he is using and actively searches for alternatives” (Allan T. Sutherland, Sight and Sound). Jost began making films in 1963, and though his career was interrupted by his imprisonment for draft evasion between 1965 and 1967, he “almost singlehandedly soldiered the Marxist caucus of the New American Cinema” (Noel Carroll, Soho Weekly News), helping to found the political film collective Newsreel. Jost's films have been shown in film festivals in the U.S. and abroad (at Edinburgh, Berlin, Sydney, and elsewhere). In addition to his many short films, Jost's features include Speaking Directly (1973); Last Chants for a Slow Dance (1977); Angel City (1977); The Chameleon (1978); and Stage Fright (1980).
Stage Fright will be preceded by three of Jon Jost's recent short films: Godard 1980 (17 mins); X2: 2 Dances by Nancy Karp (35 mins); and the short version of Stage Fright, Lampenfieber (35 mins).
Stage Fright
Jost describes his most recent feature, made in West Germany and the U.S. (German title, Lampenfieber), as “an essay-film, which, building step-by-step, provides in purely cinematic terms a rudimentary history of the development of language. Beginning with simple body movement (dance), then facial expression (mime/consciousness), vocal expression (voice/language), then a ‘text' (Cain & Abel), and lastly theatrical self-consiousness in the form of make-up, Lampenfieber lays a ground work for ‘theater.' It then provides a ‘small slice' of theater presented in the abstract: illusion, a cheap political skit, crying, laughing, the classic slapstick ‘pie in the face.' All of these elements are orchestrated to provide in the viewer questions about theater, language, and ultimately life. While the intent of Lampenfieber is to weight some questions about theater and language, the form is poetic and cinematic, and the result is dramatic.”