Third Man Records and the Belcourt Theatre bring you the next installment of the experimental film series Light and Sound Machine. Thursday’s film is Speaking Directly.
Attempting the summarize SPEAKING DIRECTLY, the first feature by the defiantly independent American auteur Jon Jost, is a bit of a feat. Like nearly all his subsequent films, it was produced on a pauper’s ransom, in this case a meager $2500 loan from Jost’s wealthy ex-lover. Yet, having been produced shortly after Jost’s release from prison for draft resistance, the culmination of two-plus years worth of ideas on cinema and society explode off the screen as though they were conceived in a pressure cooker. Its collage of kitsch Americana, socio-political essays, home movies, and interpersonal interviews opens itself to a myriad of interpretations. Self-described as a “State of the Nation address, from the perspective of someone other than the President”, it also serves as exploration into the complexities communication, an audit of one’s own existence, and can even be seen as a precursor to the sort of reporting by way of personal experience popularized today in outlets like NPR’s THIS AMERICAN LIFE. However you choose to read Jost’s impressive and complicated debut, one thing is for certain, as critic Jonathan Rosenbaum noted, you can think of no other film quite like it.
I pulled that quote from the Belcourt and Third Man sites.
Speaking Directly will be preceded by Owen Land’s short New Improved Institutional Quality: In the Environment of Liquids and Nasals, a Parasitic Vowel Sometimes Develops (1976, USA, 16mm, 10min).
Over on the Nashville Scene Country Life blog, Jim Ridley has a great write-up about Speaking Directly as well as previews of upcoming Light and Sound Machine picks. (Hint: buy your tickets in advance for the October screening!)
Tickets are $10 at the door or $8 in advance for Belcourt members.
As always, thanks to Ben Swank and James Cathcart for putting this on!
The Light And Sound Machine
Co-presented by Third Man Records and the Belcourt Theatre
Speaking Directly
September 19th, 2013, 7pm, $10 ($8 Belcourt members)
@ Third Man Records
623 7th Ave S – Nashville, TN 37203
