Screening & Talk: Coming to Terms "Jon Jost"

Istanbul International Experimental Film Festival presents a special screening of “Coming to Terms”, followed by a discussion with it’s director known as the master of experimental filmmaking Jon Jost and Roxanne Roger who is an actress in Coming to Terms.

Coming to Terms

Couched as a fictional story, Coming to Terms is a meditation on a death, and its psychological impact on a fractured and divided family.  Its formal structure is far from normal narrative story-telling  in the cinema.

A man (played by avant-garde filmmaker James Benning), father of two sons by two wives, calls his fractured family to his disheveled home.   He informs them of his state of health, and requests their help in committing suicide.

The film - rendered minimally as a “narrative”- reveals the impact on the family as they confront their father/husband.   The means by which this evoked is visual and poetic, expressed tonally rather than as plot.

Jon Jost

Born in Chicago in 1943, of a military family, Jost grew up in Georgia, Kansas, Japan, Italy, Germany, and, Virginia. Expelled from college in 1963, He began making 16mm films. He is self-taught. He has made some 20 shorts and 16 feature films, all of which he has conceived, written, photographed, directed, and edited. In 1965 Jost was imprisoned by US Federal authorities for 2 years and 3 months for refusal to cooperate with the Selective Service System. On release, he quickly became engaged in political activities, helping start the Chicago branch of what became NEWSREEL, the New Left film production and distribution group, as well as working for the draft and the Chicago Mobilization. Jost made his first feature-length film in 1974, and has since devoted to the making of a wide-ranging series of films, largely focused on specifically American topics, in form ranging from essays, to essay-fictions, to avant-garde and new narrative forms. His work has shown widely in museums, film archives and festivals since 1975. In 1991, The MOMA in New York assembled and presented a complete retrospective of Jost's work encompassing 11 features and 5 programs of shorts.