Last Chants for a Slow Dance

Forget about Shirley Clarke, John Cassavetes and Barbara Loden – this is the purest example of independent American filmmaking. Though it is de facto a narrative film, it’s nearly a structural film. The film’s dominant aspects are shots/sequences lasting many minutes, multiple takes with a static camera, alternation or rather combining of black-and-white and colour images, loose causality (scenes do not necessarily follow each other in the order in which we see them), improvised acting, compression of time (a fifteen-minute uninterrupted scene in a bedroom covers a longer period of time than would correspond to its length), repeated shots, long scenes in which the image recedes into the background (because we see only the darkness or the passing road) and country ballads. The aesthetic radicalism is in part the result of guerrilla filmmaking. With a budget of barely three thousand dollars, this road movie was written, directed, shot on an eight-millimetre camera (all sound was thus added in post-production) and edited by Jon Jost, who also composed, recorded and performed the music. His critique of masculinity coping with new social challenges is even more forceful than in some New Hollywood films (Taxi Driver, Fingers). If you can find within yourself enough empathy to recognise something likable about a homophobic misogynist with opinions straight from the settling of the Wild West (“all women are pussy”), the shocking conclusion will convince you of what a big mistake it was to try and understand this boorish cowboy. Like Gary Gilmore, whose life loosely inspired the film, Tom resigned himself to integration into the system and came to terms with his role of being socially rootless. Western iconography points out to us that his aggressive and sexist speech represents an update of the values on which modern America was built. The film thus manages to disconcert the unprepared viewer even more than does its experimental form, emptiness of plot and one disturbing shot with a rabbit. 70% (09/04/2017)

A true road movie. It’s not a Hollywood simulation, but the monotony of hundreds of tedious miles on a journey with a futile goal. The content of the film arises from American reality, but it borrows many formal techniques from European films: long static camera shots and a slow pace, but above all the lack of focus on plot twists - the film primarily builds on conveying the increasing feeling of frustrating hopelessness by merging the viewer with the time and feelings of the protagonist through the necessity of being immersed in the depressingly one-way direction of his journey, in which there is no room for the dynamics of the story, only for calming the viewer's pulse in patient anticipation of the outcome. The fact is that everyone can guess how the film is going to end. It is a matter of whether Jost will succeed in conveying the feeling of a stereotypical futile effort to change his own messed up life, manifested in a purposeless highway journey that is not movement on the horizontal axis but on the vertical axis - continuously deeper. He accomplishes this cinematically excellently through several techniques: with the first shot of the monotonous concrete road, Jost already establishes a mediating element that will separate the individual parts of the plot, i.e., shots of isolated roads, always the same, simulating movement par excellence (when you are not approaching an unreachable destination, you are actually standing still). Furthermore, the slow sunsets, the isolation of individuals that the protagonist meets in isolated encounters (direct communication with his own wife only indirectly - through a mirror, over the phone), lengthy speeches without a point or resolution, ending not with understanding but with arguments, etc. The entire film is deliberately structured according to the regularity of American highways, leading their victims, those without money, to disappointment from the fact that they themselves lead nowhere - and also to desperate actions. (10/20/2015)

A definitely interesting film in terms of how it is told and what shots it uses. Playing with long shots, which are essentially static, stretching relatively boring scenes about nothing, and ultimately leading to a finale that can be slightly surprising, considering that the film tries to create a more positive tone mainly through music, confusing the viewer. And it works. Here, you don't know what to expect. (10/28/2015)