Ardent  Vancouver cinephiles will recall l’affaire Rappaport from 2013, when controversial John Cassavetes scholar and Boston University film studies professor Ray Carney refused to return various materials entrusted to him by American experimental filmmaker Mark Rappaport. It attracted quite a bit of film geek attention, with notables including Roger Ebert, filmmaker Monte Hellman, and the Vancity Theatre’s own Tom Charity signing an online petition to pressure Carney to return Rappaport’s films.

One of the strongest voices to put pressure on Carney was that of filmmaker Jon Jost (his last name is pronounced with a “J” sound, not a “Y,” and rhymes with “Toast.”) Jost was formidable in his assault on Carney, albeit to little effect. You can read about the whole scandal from Jost’s point of view on the “Chained Relations” section of his Cinemaelectronica blog. 

Jost was just hot-headed enough during some of his posts that this writer was a little apprehensive about speaking to him. Reached via Skype from his present base in Butte, Montana—which he describes online as “a kind of preview of Detroit, a city tossed on history’s garbage heap when the copper mine extraction business ran dry”—Jost in fact proved quite low key, affable, and agreeable. It was a pleasant interview, especially since I had to confess that I’d only ever seen one of his films previously.

That exposure occurred when I stumbled onto a VHS of his 1990 film Sure Fire, one of a few of Jost’s films to get commercial distribution on home video. I began by asking him how his films ended up on VHS at all. “Three of my films were put out by a now-defunct sleazoid distributor,” he replied. “I think they were called World Film Arts or something like that. I didn’t really have anything to do with doing that, the producer did. They were bad VHS tapes of them.”

But bad VHS or not, Sure Fire was striking, a slice of troubled Americana involving an imperiled family, guns, and a climactic murder-suicide. Blogger Dennis Grunes describes it as “a visionary work that fashions a metaphor for American dismay and desolation,” and praises Jost for his ability to capture interiority on film. Tom Charity, meanwhile, reviewed it for Time Out London before his relocation to Vancouver, one of a handful of Jost’s films that he’d been able to see. Told that Jost was coming to the area, Charity told the Straight that “the chance to have Jon here in person was too good to miss,” and invited him to present two of his recent films, They Had it Coming and Coming to Terms.

“From what I perceive, Jost is more or less an unknown even to young cinephiles at this point, fifty years into his career,” the programmer continues. “And he's largely unknown to me too. According to his blog he has made approximately a feature per year on digital for the past 20 years, and [of those,] I have only seen the two that he specifically expressed an interest in screening here. They were both very strong.”

So where did the Carney-Rappaport affair end up? I make full disclosure to Jost: “I used to really love Ray Carney, his passion, and the films he stuck up for. I heard about you through him!”

“Carney went into hiding, basically, when all that started," replies Jost, "and has not been heard from by anybody I know.” (… besides, of course,  Carney’s written response to Rappaport, which you can read on one of Jost’s sites.) “He’s still got all of Mark’s stuff. He seems to think that’s okay.” Jost gives a dismayed laugh. “He had claimed we were ‘good friends.’ I saw him for about an hour in my life, so—it takes a little longer than that to become a good friend.”

But Jost too once felt Carney a kindred spirit. “I didn’t like all of his tastes, but he was supportive of independent, so-called, work, and he wrote some books on it, but it seems to have gone to his head, so that now he thinks he owns people. Mark threw in the towel over a year ago, and understands he’s never going to get his stuff back from this guy. The silver lining for him is that the stuff that Carney has was not originals, it was prints, and the upshot is that the French film archive has digitized some of his work, and made I think HD copies of some, so now Mark has better copies than he had before. I don’t think they’ve done all of his films, but I think they’ve done two or three so far, and I think the intention was they’ll go ahead and do all of them.”

Was Cassavetes—the main focus of Carney’s studies, and the subject of a book by Tom Charity—at all a hero of Jost’s? “No, I don’t like his films, by and large,” he replies. “They’re too actor-y for me, people arguing and screaming and shouting at each other.” Jost quibbles when I ask him about his role models. “I don’t believe in role models, I don’t have any heroes, but there are some people whose films I like a lot,” he answers. “It’s just my taste.” These include “Bresson, Tarkovsky, Godard, Italian neo-realists, Kurosawa, and a whole range of filmmakers whose films don’t much look like mine!”

Another filmmaker worth mentioning in regard to Jost is experimentalist James Benning, whose Unabomber documentary Stemple Pass played the 2013 VIFF. Benning acts in Coming to Terms, one of the two films Jost will be presenting at the Vancity. (Benning explains in a quick email that he “drove to Butte, MT with my daughter to act in Jon Jost's film. My daughter was a bit apprehensive, saying she heard Jon could be difficult. As we left Butte after four days of extensive filming my daughter said, ‘Amazing, Jon's a Buddhist.’”)

How did Jost get to know Benning?

“I met Benning I think back in 1978 at the Edinburgh Film Festival,” Jost answers. “And I’ve crossed paths with him any number of times at festivals and such. Before he was in my film, I’d say he was an acquaintance, somebody I liked. I wouldn’t have called him a friend, because I hadn’t spent that much time with him, but we did the film, he had a good time, I had a good time, and he did a wonderful performance.”

The film is one of Jost’s few ventures into green screen, and has a stylistic connection to They Had it Coming, which also screens, though the echo in the title of both films is entirely coincidental, Jost explains. “I was going to call They Had it Coming ‘True Gentry County Stories,’” he says. This refers to the part of Missouri where it was filmed, and the local stories and anecdotes told to him by filmmaker Blake Eckard, who appears in Jost’s film. “Mark looked at it and asked, ‘Is there someplace where somebody says, ‘they had it coming?’ Because that’s your title. I agreed. I thought, ‘that’s a much better title than what I was going to use.’”

As for Coming to Terms, “I had had an idea for a film ten or twelve years ago, also called Coming to Terms. The topic is the same, but the film is totally different from the one I originally was going to call Coming to Terms. It’s about coming to terms with death.” Benning plays an ill father who is being pressured by his family into what Jost describes as “somewhat of a coerced assisted suicide. It’s about a family and what a father does with the family. Most of my films are about families, but they’re really about your next door neighbour’s big family, America, so one can read it as a metaphor about America. But you’d have to work hard to do that.”

Jost has been vocal about his dislike of the word “independent” when it applies to independent cinema, enough so that Tom Charity deliberately refrained from using the word from describing Jost on the Vancity website. “I’ve been making films fifty-plus years, and I’ve seen this term ‘independent’ and all these other words that have been shuffled through about film: underground, avant garde, experimental, blah-blah-blah. Somewhere in, I guess it would be the late 1970s, early 80s, it became a word that has morphed from films that were aesthetically different from your normal Hollywood product, to what it means now, a film which is basically Hollywood-type filmmaking, except for all the expensive explosions and CGI crap. In my view,” with most “independent” film, “there’s nothing, from a creative/inventive view, and certainly from a cinematic view, that I couldn’t turn on the TV and see. If that’s ‘independent,’ then I’m not an independent filmmaker.”

Fair enough, but he IS an independent filmmaker, really, isn’t he?

“Well, I’m independent in that I don’t rely on anyone money-wise, because I know how to make films so cheaply,” he acknowledges. “Like, the two films that I’m showing there in Vancouver, the one cost $2000, and the other cost a couple of hundred dollars. And they’re both very nice-looking, beautiful, so-called ‘professional’ films” (he chuckles a little at the word). “But they’re aesthetically not like anything Hollywood has done or would ever do.”

Jost has a long history with Vancouver, in fact. His 1973 film Speaking Directly premiered here, with Jost in attendance, having navigated a somewhat imperiled border crossing (“the people at the border wouldn’t let me in at first because I made a mistake and told them the truth that I only had $25 in my pocket”). My tape malfunctions midway through the anecdote, however, so interested parties will just have to ask Jost himself about it at Saturday’s screening. They’ll also have a chance to catch up with other of his somewhat hard-to-see films. He has his own digitized tape transfers of “all forty” on DVD and Blu-ray, which he sells via his website. He’ll be bringing a sampling of them to Vancouver.

“Most of them were made at the Dutch film archive. They’re digital video, they’re not HD.” He sells them for $30 each. “A price I would never pay,” he adds, “But I’m not a film watcher.” 

Jon Jost comes to the Vancity Theatre on Saturday (September 12)