Filmmaker Jost chronicles America

Jon Jost may well be the most important American filmmaker who remains virtually unknown to moviegoers. Since 1974 he has made about a dozen features and 20 shorts, all of them grappling with some aspect of the American experience, yet only a couple have received even limited theatrical release. His films are usually seen only at festivals and in special presentations at academic and cultural institutions, where they have garnered considerable acclaim.

In his films, Jost, who resisted the draft and was subsequently jailed for more than two years in the mid-’60s, is intent on capturing what everyday life is like for most Americans and focuses in particular on pressures men face and the difficulties they have expressing emotion.

Jost, who turns 64 in May, writes, directs, photographs and edits his own films and produces most of them as well. Perhaps Jost’s work doesn’t reach a wider audience because he works in an uncompromising fashion and on a shoestring budget with nonprofessional casts. The perverse irony is that although his films aren’t readily accessible in theaters, they are in themselves highly accessible.

In 1992, Jost took off on a 10-year sojourn in Europe, and much of his work made there has yet to surface in the U.S. He returned to Europe last year, where in Italy he shot “La Lunga Ombra” (The Long Shadow), which the UCLA Film and Television Archive will present Sunday at its Billy Wilder Theater in the Hammer Museum in Westwood. His years in Europe have enriched him as an artist, and with this film he, in turn, has challenged his audience stylistically as never before -- at least not since his experimental filmmaking early in his career.

“La Lunga Ombra” is a beautiful, elliptical meditation on the aftermath of 9/11 in Europe, in particular its effect on three Italian women deeply touched on a personal level by the chaos in Iraq and Afghanistan.

When the husband of Anna (Agnese Nano) leaves her at the beginning of “La Lunga Ombra,” her friends writer Costanza (Eliana Miglio) and TV journalist Giulia (Simonetta Gianfelici) take her to a seaside villa. In her despair, however, Anna is inconsolable, which causes her friends to consider their own lives and the increasingly unstable world in which they live. Their conversations, reveries and individual experiences are punctuated by grainy, distorted images of the destruction of the Twin Towers. Jost’s command of images and pace is so strong that these allusions are remarkably subtle, suggesting how they seep into the collective subconscious.

Whereas “La Lunga Ombra” marks a dramatic departure for Jost, in that he focuses so intensely on the interior lives of women rather than on the American male, his “Homecoming” (2004), which screens Thursday at USC, epitomizes what he has been attempting in film and, more recently, the digital form, for three decades.

On the surface, “La Lunga Ombra” and “Homecoming” could scarcely be more different. The second may be rigorous and economical, for all its long, reflective takes, but its intent is clear, unlike the more reflective “La Lunga.”

“Homecoming” represents a deeply evocative portrayal of the betrayal of the American people by the Bush administration with its invasion of Iraq, in particular an ordinary family living in an Oregon coastal town, a setting in which the natural beauty of the setting is at odds with the utter blandness of the community’s nondescript residences and stores.

Jeff (Keith Scales) is a hardworking real estate agent baffled and exasperated by the alienation of his 26-year-old stepson, Chris (Ryan Harper Gray), drifting ever since he changed high schools when the family moved into a new home. Meanwhile, Chris’ stepbrother Steve has always excelled, as Chris once did, and is now serving with the armed forces in Iraq. Jeff’s wife, Mattie (Katherine Sannella), in quiet desperation is trying to hold her imploding family together.

Every frame of “Homecoming” is suffused with Jost’s love and compassion for his country. The film reveals a family and a nation divided by war yet amazingly never preaches like “La Lunga Ombra.”

All kinds of men

The men in Jost’s movies are varied: the immature young husband and father played by Tom Blair, an irresponsible drifter and male chauvinist (“Last Chants for a Slow Dance,” 1977); a sophisticated drug dealer (Bob Glaudini) to L.A.’s rich and trendy (“Chameleon,” 1978); a withdrawn Vietnam vet played by Marshall Gaddis (“Bell Diamond,” 1986); a San Francisco skyscraper construction worker (Gaddis) who loses his nerve (“Slow Moves,” 1983); a dreamy but intense go-getter (Blair) with a fervent belief that his remote Utah is a potential gold mine in providing homes for vacationers and retirees (“Sure Fire,” 1990); and a struggling small-town Oregon lumber-mill owner (Blair) whose problems evoke a profound sense of loss of control over one’s destiny (“The Bed You Sleep In,” 1993). This confluence of a betrayal of self and others and a betrayal of the American dream marks an increasingly dark vision that continues with “Homecoming.”

On a lighter note, Jost made “All the Vermeers in New York” (1990), a poignant romantic fable about the painful discrepancy between art and life -- and a comment on the values and instabilities of the ‘80s, and “Frameup” (1993), a wondrously deadpan send-up of the overly romanticized lovers-on-the run genre.

Among other projects Jost is working on is a long essay film, a follow-up to his “Plain Talk and Common Sense (uncommon senses)” (1987), an intensely personal definition of America, expressing his concern for the country’s progression from nature to technology at nature’s expense, which in turn was a continuation of his 1973 “Speaking Directly.”

“La Lunga Ombra” (The Long Shadow), 7 p.m. Sunday, Billy Wilder Theater, Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd. Info: UCLA Film and Television Archive: (310) 206-FILM.

“Homecoming,” 7 p.m. Thursday, Room 108, George Lucas Building, USC School of Cinematic Arts. Info: (213) 740-3334. Jost is scheduled to appear at both screenings.