Last Chants for a Slow Dance (Jon Jost 1977)

Abstract

First published in Movie 27/28 (1980), the chapter begins by challenging Movie to address the various new forms of cinema within the Americas that had become increasingly visible since the 1960s. That opening and the sections that follow define a context in which Jost’s use of the long take in a film “addressed to Hollywood” took on significant polemical (and political) force. The film is placed in relation to aspects of Brecht’s epic theatre and to Peter Wollen’s definition of “counter cinema.” The chapter then analyses in detail ways in which Jost’s varied long take strategies challenge and pose alternatives to Hollywood norms, and argues that the film as a whole exemplifies the possibility of an accessible but radical alternative cinema.