#john steppling

[yr-bed]

Young men like to tinker with motorcycles or weapons, or DIY building projects. Leisure time is taken up with imitations of work, but they feel as if they were freely chosen, hence owned. It must be clear by now that technology developed along lines determined by the ruling class. All that the working class can own today are facsimile versions of their own domination.

John Steppling

[yr-bed]

The erosion of a critical vocabulary, or more, a vocabulary that registers heterogeneity, has seemingly made it ever harder to express seriousness. The rise in corporate media coincides with a growing criticism of the working class. This the right wing pundit syndrome that cites the poor and workers for laziness, criminality, and a host of other character flaws. There is a paucity of answers to this from below, partly because, in the U.S. anyway, of the fetishizing of *individuality*. Rather than answering as a class, and critically dissecting social domination, the answer is too often framed in individual terms. There is hence no shortage of stories about some singular individual who bucked the odds and found success. Those odds are rarely even examined.

From “The Unserious” by John Steppling

[jonjost]

In autumn of 1977, I returned to Los Angeles after a swirl of festivals with Angel City and Last Chants for a Slow Dance.  By chance I met with a friend, whose floor I was crashing on in Venice, over a meal with Michael Crichton’s sister, two wanna-be producers.  They said they were hot to make a movie, and could readily raise $35K, in Hollywood at the time nothing, but for me a fair bit. [I shot the film in 16mm and made a 35mm blow up for that budget, at the time a miracle of economy.] The following period equaled a nightmare, but out of it came Chameleon which went on to a mess of festivals, and suggestions that Hollywood would soon be knocking at my door.   Had they ever seen or understood Angel City or Chameleon, one would think not.  The experience of making Chameleon, at however a low level, turned me off any interest whatsoever in working there or in the film business.

    CHAMELEON

1978, 16mm blown to 35mm, color/snd, 90 minutes

Produced, written, directed, photographed and edited by Jon Jost. With Bob Glaudini, Nick Richardson, Lee Kissman, Kathleen McKay, Ellen Blake, Norman Gibbs, Fox Harris, Lola Moon, Winifred Golden, Gene Youngblood, and others

Shown at Taormina, Toronto, Sydney, Melbourne, US (now Sundance) Best of Fest, 1978; Edinburgh Festival, Deauville, Florence 1979; and others.

Broadcast by UK’s C4, 1982

A scathing portrait of the Hollywood/LA arts milieu of the late 70’s, Chameleon follows the amorphous day of its lead character, an Armani-jacketed tony peddler of high-class dope, fraudulent art, and preening postures suit-to-fit the victim.

  Critics comments:

“Jost’s Chameleon cost a mere $35,000 to make (including the 16 to 35mm blowup) and is a triumph of artistry over budget. Jost’s day in the life of a lean, mean Los Angeles hustler (Bob Glaudini) is a cautionary tale about the self-destructiveness of American opportunism. The main character – hero or villain, according to taste – moves reptilelike through a land of easy-prey gullibility, sucking dry his victims and his own humanity alike. The film is packed with bold visual metaphors. When a gun is fired, the whole screen explodes into white; when the hustler changes his “act” for different clients, the screen, chameleonlike, changes its colors. Chameleon is a nervy, intelligent, exciting advance on Jost’s last film, Angel City.”

Nigel Andrews, American Film

“…but I also like the film because Bob Glaudini’s performance as Terry is absolutely riveting (why this man isn’t better known I’ll never understand) ; because Jost seems to have captured, more or less exactly, the kind of California life-style that makes a convention of the unconventional, and because Jost’s inventiveness, undoubtedly born out of necessity, has an irrepressible edge to it that stops pretension in its tracks. In a way he is the American Wenders, equally attracted to but critical of Hollywood prototypes.”

Derek Malcolm, Guardian

“Jon Jost’s Chameleon was probably the happiest instance of a mixed marriage at the Festival (Edinburgh 1979): combining a freak, trippy (in fact almost Corman-esque) saga of a dope-dealer and all-round hustler with an abstract distillation of patterns of color and light. The place of the latter in the film is both somewhere within the drug-laced nimbus of its title character, Terry (Bob Glaudini), and somewhere outside its ironic description of the rampant merchandising of all other human activities. In a way, this abstract element almost serves as a secondary narrative, or at least becomes the ‘point’ of the film. At the beginning, Terry is seen hustling a painter of just such abstract designs to come up with six imitations of another painter which he can unload on the art market. With some ‘persuasion’, Terry overcomes the painter’s reluctance, and at the end of the film returns to collect his merchandise. But the rolls of paper his is given turn out to be blank, and the painter defiantly protests, ‘My life is color, form, the shape of things…’ before Terry knocks him down and leaves him lying in a pool of spilled colors that returns us to the abstracts which were shown in detail in the opening shots. It is probably not too deterministic a reading to see Jost as the painter and the blank sheets as the conventional movie which he has refused to provide for audience consumption.

But in between, his narrative not only holds together but unfolds through a fascinating succession of moods as Terry drives about LA, moving from appointment to appointment, from role to role. At one point, at the end of a long sequence in which he seems to be renewing a personal acquaintance on a hilltop some way outside the city, he and his companion go into a brief song and dance (I want to be phony, I want to be fake, not real:). The unreality of Los Angeles clearly serves as a prime cause, and natural cradle, for the dreaming of cocaine dreams, and through it Jost even makes contact with a literary source.. Terry refers to science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick and comments, “This feller seemed like a casualty straight from his pages.”

Richard Combs, American Film

https://vimeo.com/ondemand/chameleon2

LA Again: Chameleon In autumn of 1977, I returned to Los Angeles after a swirl of festivals with Angel City…

[acehotel]

INTERVIEW : JOHN STEPPLING // CINEMATHEQUE

John Steppling is a playwright, screenwriter, educator and cultural inciter with a bevy of credentials under his belt reflecting a life spent in love (sometimes tense or tortured love) with film. Mr. Steppling hosts a weekly film night at Ace Hotel Palm Springs called Cinematheque. He talked with us a bit about entertainment vs. art, those who love Escalante vs. those who love romantic comedies, and film nerds.

You used to teach at the Polish National Film School, and curated their Cinematheque. You mentioned that it was the most rewarding and fun job to teach film students about the art of film. How has this inspired you in this new Cinematheque, and do you think of guests as students, if only for a few hours?

Well, I think I realized at the film school how important it is to provide a dialogue and a context for great filmmakers. It's difficult to just drop someone into Lancelot du Lac and expect them to understand intuitively what Bresson was all about, what the project was for him and (since we are using Lancelot as an example) how a later Bresson exists in rather rarified air. Same for Dreyer say, or Fassbinder or Ozu, but also for John Ford or Hawks or Hitchcock. We live in a time where critics are mostly just consumer advocates and they review -- they don't write criticism.

Some of the films you show are obscure or somewhat difficult to appreciate without a film education. Personally, we like diving into stuff headfirst, even if we don't understand it all at first, but have you ever experienced any misgivings from audience members who were expecting a Rom Com? How do you make the films accessible to newcomers?

I think people are more open than one might expect. I had students really rebel against Dumont, and weeks later they were downloading Dumont, and Escalante and Bunuel -- they were totally with the program. But sure, in an era where the idea of "entertainment" exists almost tyrannically, it's often challenging to explain that art is not therapy, nor is it even communication.

It's meant to disrupt and to awaken. I mean Hitchcock is usually entertaining, in the sense that he has a great sense of humor, so it's easier to dig deeper with him, get into his mise en scene, as it were. But a guy like Dreyer, that's not easy at all. And even Godard. One has to see the entire body of work, what in theory Godard was attempting. But let's take genre films, which I love. Val Lewton's films are among my very favorites -- but it's a different challenge to explain why I Walked With A Zombie is a masterpiece. Not just a masterpiece of genre, but simply a masterpiece. It's great art.

You were teaching a writing workshop in the desert and decided to start this film night up at Ace Palm Springs -- does the workshop setting influence how engaged you like to get after the lights go up and the discussion begins at the screenings?

Well, I teach in LA, too. I teach playwrighting and screenwriting both. And sure, I guess I love to teach. I like to argue about this stuff. I think culture matters. I think it matters greatly, in fact. Without it we sink into barbarism. Adorno said the rise of fascism in Germany came about on the heels of the erosion of public education.

Why is Ace a good match -- is it aesthetic, cultural, or something else entirely?

I really like the Ace people. And I like the folks from the [Palm Springs International] film festival in town, too. And the Ace is just such an open and cool space. Maybe that sounds funny, but I mean it in some 'proto' sense. Its a logical fit.

You have said you "wish people were coming to blows about art" and that art is a hedge against the sort of fascism of pop culture. Talk about how your love of film feeds the flame and sense of resistance about this.

Sure -- I remember in Poland, Polanski (who graduated from the Lodz school where I taught) used to say students came to blows about whose master shots were best, Hawks or Ford. Now, I don't think pop culture per se is reactionary -- but I think a society so inundated with marketing and with the commodification of everything needs a return to genuine dialogue about art. Its almost as if "art" is a bad word these days.

Now, film doesn't help create a revolution, or maybe even activism -- but it does contribute to an awareness of the world out there. Mainstream news is useless, so one must engage with the world on another level, and I think one has to learn to think critically about all this. I mean Wilder's Ace in the Hole, as an example, really was ahead of the curve on how media co-opts thinking. It's as if the corporate media (and I mean a large part of Hollywood in this) simply colonizes the mind. 

Where do you pull films from, do you show any bias in your screening selections, and which ones seem to go over the best with non-film nerd audiences?

Haha, I don't know. My biases are my own I guess. I love Fassbinder, but I also love Lewton and a lot of noir, and a good many westerns. It was great seeing Hellman's The Shooting at the festival. Reminded me of Man of the West, One Eyed Jacks, The Searchers and all the other great westerns out there. The Shooting is like what Kafka would done if he had made a western.

I'm not at all elitist about this stuff. I think today, actually, a good amount of so called "indie" film is awful. I mean, Corman made Man With the X-Ray Eyes...a really extraordinary film. But I sort of don't like the Coen Brothers much, nor do I like Inarritu -- or Aronovsky. But I'm happy to argue this stuff. The best of film of last year was Animal Kingdom, a low-budget Australian film. A crime film, ostensibly. A film like Los Bastardos remains hugely ignored. We'll get around to showing that (at Cinematheque) for sure.  But with showing double bills, one gets to create a contrast. I'm showing Guy Ritchie's first film next week. Very well-received film, but I'm showing it as a means to have a discussion about genre. We'll also show part one of The Red Riding Hood Trilogy -- which to me is vastly superior. I think people will argue that...potentially anyway.  I suspect though that after a while those same people will view the Ritchie film in a different way. And probably value it a lot less. But we shall see.