Jon Jost Retrospective to Start Thursday at UCLA : Although his work is largely unknown to the public, the veteran filmmaker has evolved into a compelling storyteller.

Independent filmmaker Jon Jost has been making films for 28 years but is still unknown to the public at large. Instrumental in the founding of Newsreel, the dynamic activist filmmaking collective of the ‘60s, and a frequently off-putting experimentalist in the early part of his career, Jost has evolved over the years into an increasingly compelling and accessible storyteller. He will receive a long-overdue complete retrospective of his work, courtesy of the UCLA Film Archive and the Independent Feature Project West, starting Thursday at UCLA’s Melnitz Theater.

It’s been aptly remarked that Jost’s main concern is with defining the American character (especially male), and he has said of a number of his 11 features that his intent was “to capture the spirit of a time and place.” His style, by now stripped to the essentials, is marked by long takes, which once provoked tedium but now are suffused with meaning and emotion. Jost has been uncompromising in his search for precise, totally personal self-expression, and since the late ‘70s has presented both an acutely observant view of both rural blue-collar life and sophisticated urban existence. As different in locales and in the personalities of the key figures in the three major narratives screening during the retrospective’s opening weekend are, all three pictures are alike in their strong visual expressiveness, revealing Jost a master of composition, especially in expressing his heroes’ fundamental isolation.

With his latest release, “All the Vermeers in New York” (screening at 7:30 p.m. with the filmmaker present), which Jost made last year in association with PBS’ “American Playhouse,” he is in danger of surfacing, not in the mainstream exactly, but at least out of the usual non-commercial alternative cinema venues and on to art theater screens. Essentially a vignette, it is beautifully articulated and sustained, underlined by a splendidly moody jazz score composed by Jon A. English and also by luminous cinematography. Invariably his own cameraman (and editor), Jost shot the film in 35-millimeter with available light, using a new Kodak fine-grain, high-speed stock.

Described by Jost as an elegy for the ‘80s, the film centers on a hotshot Wall Street broker (Stephen Lack) of unassailable confidence and impeccable taste who is transfixed by the similarity of appearance between a beautiful French actress (Emmanuelle Chaulet, of Eric Rohmer’s “Boyfriends and Girlfriends”) and a young woman in a Vermeer painting they both happen to be admiring at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. What develops is a poignant, romantic fable about the eternal and painful discrepancy between art and life--and of the values and instabilities of the ‘80s.

Jost’s 1977 “Last Chants for a Slow Dance” (screening Sunday at 7:30 p.m.) introduces us to a radically different man and place. Tom Blair is thoroughly scary as an American archetype, an immature young husband and father, an irresponsible drifter and male chauvinist pig whose clean-cut All-American looks make it easy for him to score one-night stands. Essentially the film is composed of a half-dozen long takes in which we watch Blair’s unemployed Butte, Mont., mine worker become increasingly rootless with consequences that jolt us but which at the same time take on a quality of absolute inevitability.

Judging by these two films and by the 1978 “Chameleon,” which screens following “Last Chants,” Jost sees three very different American men as fundamentally self-deceiving, destructive to themselves and finally to others. If Tom Blair’s dim, rage-filled wanderer is dangerous, Bob Glaudini’s Terry is a figure of knowing evil, a man of reptilian charm and surface aplomb, a sophisticated drug-dealer to the rich and trendy. He’s a thoroughly organized smoothie who reminds himself that he must skim Patti Smith’s “Babel” and the new Montgomery Clift biography and presents an important client with a necklace designed by Robert Mapplethorpe (at least he says it is). All three of the these Jost films reveal a concern with decay and corruption in American society, more clearly so in “Chameleon.” Like “All the Vermeers in New York,” “Chameleon” offers some satirical thrusts at the shallowness and pretentiousness of the art gallery scene while revealing the vulnerability of the artist of integrity.

Full schedule: (213) 206-FILM, (213) 206-8013.