I've always admired Jon Jost more than I liked his movies, but I've hardly seen any of his movies. I haven't seen any since he switched to digital video and that was twenty-four years ago. I saw a clip from one that looked beautiful.
Over the last several years, he's attacked Kelly Reichhardt, Werner Herzog and Jim Jarmusch; he wrote unkind things about a couple actors he worked with and he was harshly critical the movie Spring Breakers. So I don't feel as bad as I should criticizing his work.
I watched The Bed You Sleep In again on YouTube. A Russian fellow posted it, I assume without anyone's permission. Last time I looked, it was the only one of his movies available on DVD from Netflix.
It was slow cinema. A lumber mill owner in Toledo, Oregon, has a daughter in college who's joined a consciousness-raising group. She writes a long letter to her stepmother. Images flashed in her mind and now she's convinced she's uncovered repressed memories of her father doing horrible things to her as a child.
Jost seemed to have bought into the discredited belief in recovered memories. The movie could be taken as being about a guy being falsely accused, but it follows the guy's wife as she tells her friends what a monster her husband is, not the falsely accused husband consulting an attorney.
The subject matter is so grim and it's never handled well in movies. People thought the Dogme 95 movie The Celebration (Denmark, 1998) was a comedy.
Nearly two hours long. You could cut it down to forty minutes without losing much plot.
The actors underplayed it. They weren't screaming their dialog. Which is good. I've long believed that James Dean should have calmly observed, "You're tearing me apart," instead of screaming it like an idiot.
There are static camera shots of the town and the lumber mill. Boys walking home from school look at the camera but they keep moving and let the grown-up do his work.
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