UCLA Film Archive Offers Jon Jost’s ‘Uncommon Senses’

Since the earlier work of independent/experimental film maker Jon Jost was so inaccessible as to defy watching it, his more recent films come as a decided, exciting surprise. “Uncommon Senses,” which screens Tuesday at 8 p.m. at UCLA Melnitz with Jost present, has his characteristic rigor yet proves to be a stunning experience, a totally original and challenging essay on America.

In his two fiction films, “Bell Diamond” (1986) and “Slow Moves” (1983), which screen Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Jost lays aside experimental techniques to create two movies that knock us out with their straight-as-an-arrow directness, works of the utmost freshness and simplicity richly deserving of the enterprising distribution that paid off so well for Jim Jarmusch’s “Stranger Than Paradise.”

No film maker could be more in the American grain that Jost, and in “Uncommon Senses” he attempts no less than an intensely personal definition of America in words and images. Jost, however, couldn’t be further from Norman Rockwell.

Like Godfrey Reggio, in “Koyaanisqatsi,” Jost is disturbed by our progression from nature to technology at nature’s expense, but his vision of our country is far more complex than that of Reggio.

For example, Jost sees the innocent visiting of tourists to Four Corners--the quadrant that divides Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah--as a subliminal expression of our preoccupation with conquering the land. To Jost, “Out there” is the quintessential American expression, suggesting that our every kind of quest has a geographical dimension--that the answers to all questions, theoretical and practical, are perceived as somehow always lying outside ourselves.

There’s much wit but not an ounce of sentimentality in Jost’s austere landscapes, his zeroing in on normal American faces, his consideration of every sort of historical document, statistic or measurement. (What Jost is really trying to do is to be semantic in his view of America, showing us the difference between the map and the territory--morally and spiritually as well a geographically.) There’s tremendous irony in his revelation that the unspoiled South Dakota fields that mark the geographic center of the country also hide ICBM missiles.

“Uncommon Senses” ends with an epilogue in which Jost, facing the camera, criticizes our “nation-state,” culminating in his declaration that it oppresses the body and the spirit rather than protecting them.

Jost really knows how to make images work for him. He makes them endlessly expressive of the thoughts and feelings of his people in “Bell Diamond” and “Slow Moves,” which were improvised with their non-professional actors but are as formal and precise as the films of Robert Bresson, who also favors non-professionals.

Rangy Marshall Gaddis, who has the masculine sensitivity of a Frederic Forrest, plays in the first film a withdrawn Viet vet, apparently left sterile by Agent Orange and laid off from work by the closing of the Bell Diamond copper mine in Butte, Mont. Now, he’s facing the breakup of his seven-year marriage to a woman (Sarah Wyss) he loves but with whom he is unable to share his pain.

In the second film, he’s a San Francisco construction worker specializing in handling steel girders at great heights who’s lost his nerve after a minor injury. He drifts into a romance with a highly disciplined, hard-working young woman (Roxanne Rogers) that catches them up in the American dream of the open road. For all his social consciousness, Jost never preaches but instead takes us deep inside his people whose fates are gratifyingly unpredictable.

Jost and his films are being presented by the UCLA Film Archive: (213) 206-FILM, 206-8013.