I am in Zagreb now, after a week in Split. They are doing a spread out retrospective with 11 features, some short films, here, Split and Rijeka, and Tirana. It is very much a partial retrospective as I have now, 47 long films and I don’t know how many shorts. As seems almost normal now, there is virtually no audience. In Split there were 10 or so people, but they were students there who were obliged to attend – though they did seem to like the films, and we went out after 3 times to talk and have some beers. Some were clearly serious and engaged. Here, in a bigger city, there have been fewer so far – 3 or 5 people in the audience, on a Friday night, and a Sunday morning. I don’t know if the explanation is a lack of a good kind of promotion, common, or something else. My own view is that this kind of cinema is almost of no interest outside a narrow band of people – people who make it, and a few critics/academics who like to think and write about it. Beyond that, for “serious” film, not made for entertainment, there is almost no interest at all in the broader public. Its time has come and gone, and now young people are buried in their “smart” phones, on TikTok, Instagram, their attention spans shattered by the 24/7 assault of our consumerist society throwing a thousand superficial distractions at us all, all day, everyday. Or binging hours of dressed-up narrative television. And older people are exhausted, a tiny fragment still willing and able to go out to be challenged by a film or play. It has actually been this way for some time, at least 20 years and more, worsening with the crescendo of social media, podcasts and the entire array of internet mechanisms.
In turn I wonder why I continue to bother to make such work at all, or go to have it exhibited to more or less no one. Cynically in the case here, at least I am being paid a bit, and given a place to stay, an “experience” in a place I haven’t been to before. Though that experience is soured by the nature of mass tourism, in which all places are turned into a mix of shopping centers with the same global brands thrust in your face, and a Disneyfication of whatever place. The locals are reduced to servants for boorish tourists just for the money, and find they cannot afford to live in their own city or town. It happens every where that is/was beautiful – like Lisboa or Porto.
Frames from Imagens de uma Cidade Perdida
December 14 2025
Since writing the above my life has been one of near constant travel – to Tirana for a week, where I stayed in the former dictator Hoxha’s house, now turned into an artist’s residency, and did some screenings. Then back to Zagreb, and Rijeka and Zagreb again, and a flight to London for three days before flying on to Kolkata. In that time I got my Indian visa problems solved and to spare myself such in the future I got one good for five years. Such optimism on my part as my legs grow leaden and walking becomes difficult….
A friend in Lisboa sent me this article on your mother and her new film. I note that you edited Justa, which is nice for you, perhaps. I doubt I will be able to find it to see – perhaps on-line at some point? I did look up reviews for it, which were the only ones I could find, those on Letterboxd. As usual they were all over the map, from 5 to zero, though weighted mostly to about 2 and a half. I have always felt that no matter what one made, someone would deem it a masterpiece and another that it was garbage. Half of anything one makes is in the mind of the spectator.
Of myself, a few days after I got back to Kolkata I went with my friend Aopala to see the people in D-Block, the slum area where I took many photos in my last visits, and 5 or so hours of video. We were welcomed by those we knew, some perhaps being surprised that we actually returned; though one woman told us she knew we would be back. In Bengali, one woman scolded Aopala for not visiting on her own while I was gone, something I interpreted only by her gestures and demeanor, and which, when I asked Aopala, she said yes, that’s what the woman had said.
Aopala and me.
In talking with the people there that first visit back, I felt a genuine sense of friendship and asked Aopala if we shouldn’t leap right in and ask if they would like to be in a film. At first Aopala paused to think, and then agreed – time was ripe. She asked and they jumped on it. I think some of this came from our having made prints of the photos I’d taken, and laminated them and passed them out before leaving this past May. They seemed to have liked that very much. A handful of people on this visit now said they wanted theirs too! And I took them.
I really have no idea what film I can manage to make with these people – their lives and thoughts are so remote from mine. I only wish to make a film with and about them, and we will figure out how to do that as we make it. I’d like to do a kind of fiction, built out of their lives, perhaps mixed with a kind of documentary portrait of the place they live in, D-Block, Santoshpur, Kolkata, West Bengal. Or perhaps two separate films?
In the last months, or has it been a year now, or more, I have taken a few quantum jumps into being old, which is how such things go. Like adolescence it is not a steady shift, but rather a sequence of phases. In this last year or so, my body has acquired a new set of pains, mostly in my lower back, and down my legs. Stretches perhaps help it a bit, but they remain. My steps have grown shorter, and while I am taking a drug for it, my calves tighten quickly when walking for lack of sufficient blood supply. All these things are common old-age things, at least for many. Overall I seem OK, though tonight I go to a doctor for a general check up, and I think soon I will probably have an angioplasty on my legs – a modest operation using a catheter with a little balloon on its end, to press the deposits blocking the blood flow against the wall of the vein, and perhaps, if it is thought necessary, a stent to hold it open. And I think perhaps having a cataract operation is also in order.
Of our wider world, the news seems ever more grim, with the tragic farce in America, as we slide ever further into some manic “right” direction, a reactionary impulse to be seen around the world as we humans collectively recoil from the world we have invented. At the same time we seem to flee from addressing our real problems – that we are slowly cooking the globe, triggering massive climate change effects; that we are addicted to media, to false images – surely to be amplified with AI; that we are poisoning our habitat with almost everything we do. And it seems we chose to do nothing about it as it would disturb our idea of a “normal” life. Here in Kolkata, and more or less all of India, the air is choked with pollutants, and is unbreathable, but no one thinks to alter their behavior.
D-Block, the main street
I hope, Clara, that despite the seeming trajectory of our times, that you can be happy, and are accompanied by friends and love.
Since writing last, in July, a lot of water has passed beneath my bridge, as well as that of the world. The news grows ever darker as the world recoils from all the consequences of modern life – global warming and its effects (floods, droughts, crop losses, mass migration and on and on), fragmentation through “smart phones” and digital tools of many kinds, and now AI – and takes on the crude political forms we humans trade in. In the US, as I was departing, we veered into a harder phase of real fascism, as I’d expected, and had made me pause about going there at all. As the door closes behind me, it seems I slipped out just in time. I will not go back. Though, despite my worries about going there in June, glad I did, and was able to see and say a probable final farewell to a lot of friends.
Erling, Nathaniel, Charles, Barbara, Howard & Lynne
Back in the US, after leaving my friend in Redding, I ended staying about a month with my friends Mark and Jane in Portland. They seem always happy to have me stay and we all have a good time. Went on a few day-trips with Mark to do photos and for him to do time lapse landscape shots. Up the Columbia River Gorge, into Eastern Oregon’s arid farmland, and to the coast. Beautiful and fun. They decided, another time, to head to Montana to go to Glacier Park and Canada’s Waterton Park, and gave me a ride to Butte.
Jane, Mark and me
There I had a screening scheduled and as well an arts thing, showing a passel of my large pastels, done there over a handful of years. Put that up. Stayed with Terri and Rich Ruggles in their lovely turn of century house which they were working on again – going to have a B&B. Film Bell Diamond, screened to modest audience in recently restored Covellite Theater. It had been shot there, with locals in summer of 1986. Butte is one of my touch-stone “homes” – a place dense with personal histories, friends and some ineffable something I can’t explain. I have shot 4 feature films there between 1986 and 2023, and a book of photographs, other visual arts from pastels to photo-collages. And life. My friend Marshall – in four of my films – after taking me to a quirky eatery in Butte, Mr. Hot Dog, drove me to the airport in Bozeman and I flew to Chicago.
Hal Waldrup, who was in Bell Diamond, in a scene, along with Marshall Gaddis, on the head-frame, on the upper right, of the mine, Bell Diamond
There I was met by Peter Kuttner, friend of 1967 vintage. Stayed a few days with critic Jonathan Rosenbaum and saw another ancient friend, Linn, prison-met, an excellent photographer all his life. He’s in waning days, and I, and Peter, are concerned about what will happen to his large collection of work – needs to be in a Chicago archive as almost all are of Chicago. Peter and I are inquiring, trying to find them a home.
Linn and Peter, in Chicago
After those few days caught train up to Milwaukee where I stayed a night with Vicky, sister of Ian Teal. She and husband Steve took me for a meal and then out to a bar which served (only) ice-cream cocktails – was told this is a very Milwaukee thing. Was good and fun. They then drove me on up to Weyauwega to go to an event in the Gerold Theater, a 1915 built opera house, where Ian and Kathy Fehl put me up in the basement dressing room, the same place I’d stayed in spring 2024, and taken 300+ 1 minute video shots of each house in town. This time around I edited – a tedious project – the houses I’d shot earlier: one minute videos of each, now on a time line with fade in/fade outs for a mere 5 hours and 15 minutes, and adjusted as if with architectural camera, parallel to frame edge. Not fully sure what I will do with it but something – a long film no one will ever watch? Video installation on four walls? I have an idea using the book Psycho, written by Robert Bloch while living in Weyauwega, something I think might work.
Houses of Weyauwega
While there pretty much stayed to myself, doing my work, walking around the minimalist town there, streets usually vacant. And going out a few times with Ian and Kathy, who went off on a 10 day trip while I was there, to Martha’s Vineyard where they have friends. Lucky them! They did have an excellent jazz group from LA come in for a concert at the Gerold Opera, Paul Cornish trio – pianist and drum/bass group, contemporary and very good. And as Ian had a very nice collection of guitars I used one, an old Epiphone, along with a big old heavy vacuum tube amplifier with a lovely tone. I wanted to record all my songs, but a mix of my voice being all gunked up and recording problems made me fail. Try again perhaps in India.
On way back stopped in Chicago for last visit with Linn and Dianne, he skeletal and frail, someone I have been close to for five decades. And Peter, of similar vintage, also dear friend but in better condition by far. And Scott, widowed husband of my partner, Marilyn, of the wild 1968 year, in Chicago, whom I missed seeing in autumn of 2023, she dying two days after we’d set a meeting date. My dearest friends are dying off. Chicago is ripe with youthful memories of mine, and now aged ones.
My friend Kurt and I, arrested 1968; Marilyn over her life, with Scott; me and long ago GF 1968
And then to Boston, to stay again with cousin Holly a few nights in her in her just-moved-into condo only 5 blocks from her former home where I’d spent the Covid lockdown in 2020-21. Her new place is equally lovely, just smaller and suitable for one and a guest. Had a “final” dinner with Boston friends in a very nice fish place, The Daily Catch, thanks to Holly. Was a fun time, and again to say a final goodbye to a very old friend, Bill Cunningham, met in prison in 1965. And perhaps to Holly – though she travels so perhaps I see her again. I took a deep breath.
Boston, friends at dinner with Holly
Then went on to NYC where on arrival we promptly went with Jane to a concert near Columbia University on 121 St., of ancient Sephardic music – old instruments and songs done in a modest church. Very lovely. And next day saw rather by accident – he was in city from upstate dealing with family matter – Steve Lack, good friend since shooting All the Vermeers in New York. Had a nice talky brunch and then on coming back to Jane’s shot a little impromptu thing we posted on Facebook. Another evening went to hear a talk on the birthday of New York, once known as Neu Amsterdam, at the Salmagundi Institute. Was very interesting – since I’d researched such stuff when making All the Vermeers in New York, as he painted in same period, the tulip market collapsed back then, and NYC got taken by the Brits. The man doing it was very good at it, informative and amusing at same time. We then had a costly bite in the basement bar/restaurant there. And a night later we went to a very good contemporary dance performance at Lincoln Center – a black choreographer and ethnically mixed troupe. They were quite good.
Then wrapping up I saw another very old friend, Kurt – now toothless, and smiling as he approached, looking a bit more frail and aged than me though he’s only a few months ahead of me, and laughing said, “I’ve learned a new trick!! Falling…” We were at the Frick Museum and spent a bit of time looking at the paintings – including 3 Vermeers – and then went to a nearby cafe to talk an hour and more. And hugged goodbye, surely a last time. Met him in 1961.
Steve, Caveh, Kurt, Asher and wife & child, Jim & Patrick
As well I met twice with the man who did sound recording for Vermeers and The Bed You Sleep In, Jack Murphy. In old fashioned bars, the Old Town, and the Ear Inn. More discussion and perhaps I see him again next summer in Lucca, Italy, where he runs a summer school in filmmaking. And Jim Stark, a producer whom I’ve known since early 70’s. And then met with several young people too, one whom I met when he was 14 and had contacted me 10 years ago because he liked my films!! 10 years ago. And then a young couple I’d met a few years ago, who’d seen me on the street in China town, recognized me and approached, “Are you Jon Jost?” and I’d answered yes. New friends. He’d seen me on a YouTube thing, being interviewed! And a young man whom I met originally when he was 14, in Houston, Texas. He’d seen my films at that tender age, and contacted me and we became friends back then. He lives now in New York, makes good money doing video editing, and I see him when in NY. He’s 25 or so now.
Taylor and Lori-May with me; Leopold
A few days later I flew to Dublin to grab shuttle bus up to Derry, to spend some weeks with Marcella before making a pit stop in London and then heading on to India. A festival in Zagreb, Croatia, Film Mutations, as invited me, Nov 23-29. They will be doing a retrospective focus on my work, showing 10 or more films. They’ve done similar before with Bela Tarr, JLG, Haroun Farocki and others like that. And seems they can arrange other things in the region, in Rijeka and Split. Screenings, talks and perhaps a place for some video installations. So I will spend 3 weeks or so in Croatia, and then go to India. Back in Kolkata I hope to carry on with documentary portrait of slum area, D-Block and if lucky get some people there to cooperate in making some kind of narrative with them.
Kids in D-Block, Kolkata
So it has been a busy time since July. Through it all I’ve had to cope with the physical realities of age – being old. In my case seems mostly confined to to hips and legs, seems owing to poor circulation and just the usual wear and tear. A very common thing in older people. Fortunately for me that appears to be it, so I don’t get tired too quickly but owing to tightening in my calves, must stop periodically while walking – just 30 seconds or a minute usually – to let blood get back into the muscle. And my lower-back/hips start the day with pain, sometimes sharp, which diminishes after an hour. I do stretching exercises for it. Again, perfectly normal being-old stuff.
Once upon a time….
But, being honest with myself the writing is on the wall and my rambling ways are coming to a close. Which raises the question of where to plot to hit the brakes. Not in the USA, for sure. Things to ponder now.
I read on your blog and find a few photographs of you on your Instagram page, and so get a small glimpse of you and your life now. I am glad to see you have found a footing in the arts world, and film, and it appears are finding a place of comfort for yourself. Of course I would like to see what you do, and have written you an email asking to see the paper you wrote. As it seems you now live in the Algarve, or so a recent bit of your writing for À pala de Walsh seems to say, I have sent you a link to a film I shot there, when you were only a year and some old, shot in Cabanas, Nas correntes de luz da ria formosa, there are some shots at the beach in which you appear, or perhaps it is just your voice. I haven’t seen it in a long time. And I haven’t seen you in a very long time – nearly 25 years. Not a choice of mine, but of your mother’s.
While the world seems ever more tragic, and my own country – which I do not intend to return to – is spiraling into an ugly All-American form of fascism (which I said decades ago was where we were headed), I hope despite all this, that you are able to be happy, surrounded with friends and doing what you wish to do.
It has been some time now since I last wrote, early May, just before I left India. After a brief stop over in London, I went to Derry to stay with Marcella a few weeks, pondering whether I should or should not go to the USA for screenings I’d been invited to do in Los Angeles. My concerns were with the political atmosphere there, the veil of fascism descending across the country. A few friends clearly said “stay away” while others said as I am not a Latino or some other undesirable non-white, there should be no problem for me. I did want to go on a last American swan-song trip to see my remaining friends, those still alive. I have lost now a number in the last few years. And the screenings paid the airfare, round-trip, a good per diem I’d save, and frankly, I can use the money. So I decided to go despite my concerns. Had a nice time in Derry, though my walks with Uma and such were shortened by the increasing problems of circulation in my legs, leading to a tightening in my calves, a shift in my gait and the signals of aging. I am an old man, plain and simple.
I then returned to London briefly, where saw some old friends, and again found myself introducing my friend Robina Rose’s digitally restored film, Nightshift. This time it was for the BFI in their theater on the South Bank. Robina had died at the end of January, and a number of her friends came to see her film, many of them having been in it; it was sold out and the discussion was good. Shamelessly at the end I noted I needed a place to stay for some days, and some old friends of hers, Anna and Martin, from her neighborhood of Notting Hill, invited me to stay with them. They were stalwarts of another era of filmmaking, the London Coop and a fistful of once well known filmmakers, many of whom I met way back then.
I was only a few days there, and then flew on to Los Angeles, a long direct flight of 11 hours. I took a deep breath and decided the risks of going were not yet strong enough to keep me away. On arrival a very long walk from the plane to the customs and border area taxed my legs and I wondered who had designed such an idiot system. Approaching the passport check-point, I pulled mine out, had it in hand, but rather than look at it the official told me to just look into camera as I was scanned. AI apparently now has enough facial identity capacity to link to whatever data-base they have on you, and decide, go this way or that. I evidently passed the test and went quickly in. I was picked up by a driver sent by the people who’d invited me, the American Cinematheque, and taken to a hotel just across Hollywood Boulevard from the famed Graumans Chinese Theater, where I stayed four days.
I was there for a “festival,” a block in their programming under the banner “Bleak Week Cinema”. Out of the blue some months earlier I’d received an invitation to show five of my films in it. A paid trip to US and a bit of coin. I accepted, though cautioned them at the time they should get a ticket one could fully refund as the situation in the US was such I might cancel up to the last moment.
Others in the program, also invited, were Michael Grandrieux, Costa Gravas, Claire Denis, Gus van Sant, and others. I didn’t meet any of them, though, as the organizers made no effort to bring us together. I suppose many of your mother’s films would have fit in well to the theme. My own screenings went well – some with a full house, good attentive audiences, and lively discussions. For a few of them some of my actors came and I had them come up for the discussions. One film, DeadEndz, which I had never seen on a big screen, and which I had never seen with an actual audience, was quite a surprise for me – strangely very powerful, and despite its very radical form, it held the audience well and they liked it very much. Got a very lively discussion. I was surprised!
Frameup, Last Chants for a Slow Dance, The Bed You Sleep In, and DeadEndz
While there a friend, John Cannizzaro, had a dinner for me – he does each time I pass through LA – with a mix of people, ones I know and some not. And I managed to see a handful of the remaining friends still alive and in LA, among them actors in my films (Roxanne Rogers, Frank Mosley) and others. Also with me was Patrick Miller, who is shooting a documentary about me, who came out from New York. Lastly there was a bit of unwanted drama – the fraudulent “producer” of four of my films, Henry Rosenthal, 3 shown in festival, came down from San Francisco, to be there. He’d written me a letter saying he looked to see me there; I had not replied as I have zero interest in seeing or speaking with him, thanks to an ugly 30-year old story I will be telling soon in a blog post. He had blackmailed me all that time. He came to the first screening, and afterwards chatted with some of the people he knew – my composer Erling Wold, who’d come down also from San Francisco, to be there for screening of two films he’d done music for, Bed and Sure Fire, and a few others who knew him. I avoided him. At a later screening, afterwards, a cluster of 20 or so people, ones I knew and fans, were gathered about talking in front of the cinema. I was with a cluster of 4 or 5 people, talking, and Rosenthal came headed towards it, clearly aimed at seeing me. I promptly left, and wandered to another group and shortly he came again, stalking. I left that group and went away from the people there, and he came again, thrusting his hand out, and as he approached I punched him in the belly, unfortunately a bit constrained by the still camera hanging around my neck. I stepped forward to hit him again and he fell back, yelling, “You’re a coward, coward…”, and ran to his car immediately nearby and fled. Later I, and the festival organizers, got a letter from him saying he’d filed charges against me – assault, defamation, and “elder abuse’ – he is about 20 years my junior!! The next day I left LA for Austin, Texas, to visit with friends in Lockhart, a small town some 30 miles to the south of the city. I went there last autumn as well.
My friends, Jason and Nicole grabbed me at the airport, and we went through the Texas flatland to their place, a lovely typical regional house which they’ve fixed up, very nicely. Stayed with them two weeks, going nearly every evening to the local bar, the OPB or Old Pal Bar. Texas Shiner beer for me, tequila for Nicole, and same for Jason, plus the beer . More than one beer. Music most nights (too loud), and all very Texas. I made a big photo-collage for a library fund-raiser. While there we went to the country rodeo – recalling ones I went to decades ago in Montana and Oregon. Real “American”. Lockhart is famous as the BBQ Capitol of Texas and we went out for that as well. As well we went into Austin and visited a good museum they have there and also Ellsworth Kelly’s Chapel. Can’t say I was impressed, reminded me of the same deflation I had when visiting the Rothko one in Houston. But the museum had a lot of interesting things outside the standard stuff.
As it happened the county rodeo was on while I was there and we went to it, one of the real “western” things of the real America. Was fun, if a bit corporatized, like everything here is now. And the last night I was there we went to a music thing at the county courthouse square – a good zydeco band from Louisiana that had people up and dancing. The next day I returned to Los Angeles.
Big photo-collage made while in Lockhart and printed by Jason
My friend John picked me up and we drove to the lovely place I’d be staying, home of a filmmaker, David LeBrun, of my generation who’d offered it at the earlier party. Nice man, good filmmaker, new friend. We had a breakfast nearby and I then rushed to Pasadena to be at wedding of another friend, Daniel Kremer. He was having a full-blown Jewish wedding at a wonderful old 1920’s place, Castle Green, seemingly unchanged from those times. I have never been to such a wedding – have been to very few in my life – and it was rather a spectacle! In this case made a bit different in that Daniel and his husband, Evan, are gay.
Things in David LeBrun’s home
Stayed only a few days, but was able to see Alenka, my partner in 1981-85 (and more) and have a nice long talk sharing our different memories of that time. As well I saw Alicia Wille, and her husband Morrie. We’d been together 1979-81. She is slipping into dementia, her body a near skeleton – a bit younger than I am. Painful – she had seemingly avoided communications for a handful of years, and a mutual friend of hers and mine arranged the meeting. I don’t think she intended to avoid, but just would not remember the email she’d just read. Morrie, her husband has been struggling with illness now many years, but was more alert and alive, despite his circumstances. I doubt I’ll see either again.
James Benning
I had another screening with an outfit called Acropolis, a new, to me, place to show experimental and independent work in Los Angeles. They had a funky place – but with good projection – and James Benning came to moderate. I showed Coming to Terms, in which he plays a major role, and then Blue Strait. We are now aged survivors, friends, and both of us still on our feet and working. I hadn’t seen the latter film in some time and it seems to grow better with age. The audience liked it a lot.
James Benning in Coming to Terms; John Manno and Stephen Taylor in Blue Strait
After that I flew to San Francisco, there to see friends, and commence interviews with a man, Charles Neal, who is doing a book on my work – at least the celluloid work. He picked me up at airport, and I stayed a few days with him, visiting San Francisco friend over a few days: Barbara Hammes, friend since 1971 or so, in a few of my films; Nathaniel Dorsky, filmmaker, dear friend, also in one of my films; Erling, my composer for many films, and his wife, Lynne, a designer; and Chuck Hudina, who came down to see me, a photographer/filmmaker friend since mid 80’s. It was wonderful to see them all, even if under the penumbra of “a last time.” I then moved across to the East Bay, and stayed with Howard Swain, lead in Frameup and a fixture in the Bay Area theater world. His wife, Nancy Carlin, also lead in the same film, was up in Ashland, Oregon, working in a play. Ashland is a famed theater place hosting a permanent summer Shakespeare festival, and other theater events. I’d already seen Nancy in LA, as she came down to see the film and be there for discussion at screening. She remarked she’d found it much funnier than she recalled from 1993!!
Nathaniel Dorsky, Erlng Wold, Lynne Rutter, Barbara Hammes, Charles Neal, Howard Swain
So I saw these friends, and a few others, Nancy Karp, a dancer, who I did a film with long ago in Berlin, 1979. It was a busy time – swan-songing is not so easy! The area already holds some ghosts in my life – Jon English, composer/musician and friend, lead in Rembrandt Laughing; Jim Nisbet, writer; Roger Ruffin, lawyer and actor for me; his wife Bebe; Ed Green, frame-maker and actor in Rembrandt. And soon there will be a cascade of more.
From the Bay Area I took a train, dropped off at a Metro station by Howard, on to Sacramento where I shifted to a bus – the lowliest form of public transportation in America – going on to Redding, California, to visit another friend, Charles Lasater. Ten minutes out of Sacramento a man sitting near me, who’d clearly looked like trouble as he walked in, went to the chemical toilet in back, and shortly cigarette smells were wafting through the bus. A woman opposite me seat went to the driver to complain and shortly after the bus pulled to the side of the highway, and waited. 10 minutes. 15. 20. 25. The passengers began to argue with the creep, who denied, blamed others and then realized the police would be coming and went to have the driver let him out and give him his luggage from below. He stood by the bus, pulling a beer out of his bag, standing drunk and probably on drugs. The police arrived and after a bit, another and then another. He was taken away in handcuffs. I have been on buses in America before, and this is kind of normal. A writer friend of mine, Joanna Pocock, has just written a book about a bus trip she took a few years ago here, titled Greyhound, of which I read the final draft before printing. Good book. Out now. I recommend it to you.
I got off in Redding, in the north end of California’s Sacramento Valley, in a blazing heat. My friend Charles met me after a little mix-up, and we drive to his place, out on a dead end road 25 miles away. His place is a derelict one, a bit familiar in my life, where a man has holed up, gathering things around himself, seemingly meant for some purpose, but doomed to rust and collapse, an unintentional graveyard of hopes and dreams.
I just stayed two nights with Charles, whom I met far back in 1972. He’s a heavy but more or less functional doper, smoking a joint in the morning that would waste my day, but he has 3 or 4 more over the next 16 hours. I said good-bye, surely a last time, and took another bus north to Portland. In this case an uneventful ride, just long and tedious. My friends Mark and Jane grabbed me at the station and took me to their house, one of my “homes” where I have stayed many times, for weeks or a month and more. Good friends since 1993. Been here now 5 days, and will write of it later. My coming months remain unclear though I will go, to Butte, Chicago, NYC, and Boston, and then to the UK and somewhere in Europe before returning to India to carry on with the things I was doing there.
It is middle of summer now, and global warming is being felt all around the world, ever hotter, with atmospheric rivers, and conversely plunges into arctic temperatures in places near-tropic. Adding to that, the political climate around the globe also seems to get worse and worse: America now run by a crazed infant with hatred in his heart; genocide in Gaza and the West Bank carried out by Israel; the war in Ukraine, and a seemingly endless list of other tragedies in Yemen, Sudan, India, and a thousand places unmentioned in the news. It is difficult to be positive in such a world but being sad and unhappy merely compounds the dark atmosphere.
I hope, despite all the grim realities of our world, here and now, you are able to be happy, share life with friends, and do what you wish to do.
My days, like my steps, grow shorter. Your time to meet with me, to deal with the truths of your own life, likewise shorten. You should think hard and deeply about it.
In a week I will be flying to London, after 6 months here in India. Most of my time has been here in Kolkata, though I did take some trips, as I wrote earlier. Went to Pune, where the second major film school of India is, spending some days with students, talking, screening films, opening eyes. Then to Delhi, where my friend Prabhash took me around, visiting Agra and the Taj Mahal, and other sites. As well, there I met with film students in several different schools. And then some days in a kind of cooperative yoga retreat. And returned to Kolkata for a bit before spending two weeks in the mountains, where my friends Abhirup, Aopala and others who are in Rhiddi’s circle, are shooting a new film. It was nice to be out of the city.
Back in Kolkata I am trying to gather enough material to make a video documentary/essay about D-Block, a slum area nearby where I live. I think I won’t be able to do it all while here, and have asked my friends Aopala, and her boyfriend Abhirup, to shoot some further material over the next months. Including some shots during the monsoon season, when it rains and rains, streets are rivers, and life is changed.
I think to make a video essay/documentary, but also a book. Aopala has interviewed a handful of women, and we’ll get some more. We’ll transcribe those and I will write a kind of essay about its making, and Aopala will also write something. And as well, I have many photos, of the place, its small streets, and portraits of people.
While here I’ve had a little health shift – typical of being old, which I most certainly am. My feet began to swell – caused by edema – and when walking, my calves quickly tighten and hurt. A year ago I could walk, with an occasional pause, for 3-8 kms. Not anymore. The cause is the muscle not getting enough blood/oxygen, and lactic acid building up. I had some tests, arterial doppler readings, and they showed blockages in my leg arteries, and as well a kind of valve system in your veins that helps to get blood back up, is worn out. So far the drugs I have taken for it seem to do little though there is another I will try. But, being a realist, I have to accept that my rambling life as a traveler is coming to a close, and I need to figure out where to go to “settle down.” It needs to be a place I can afford and I have begun to check it out. I only know it will not be in the USA.
6 Easy Pieces (200) and Coming to Terms(2012)
May 6 I fly to London, where I’ll have a screening at Birkbeck College in the University of London, showing Coming to Terms, and 6 Easy Pieces (much of which was shot in LIsboa) on May 9. On the 13th, I’ll be helping to introduce my friend Robina Rose’s Nightshift, which I shot for her (and provided my camera and gave her the filmstock and much more). The next day I’ll go to Northern Ireland to visit with Marcella in Derry. I was supposed to go at end of May to Los Angeles for a series of screenings – 5 of my films in a festival called “Bleak Week.” The American Cinematheque there is doing this, and will show a handful of other films of mine later in the summer. And there’s another cinema showing two other films of mine later in the month. However, owing the the political situation in the US I think it is highly unlikely I will be going. Fascism has arrived there, in all its ugly aspects, and given my open and easily found political views, I think it is just too risky for me to go. If things change drastically in the coming weeks I may change my mind.
A week or two ago, while looking for something completely unrelated, I bumped into the exchange we had on Facebook in April, 2022, when I was in Lisboa for screenings at the Cinemateca, the time that you and Teresa blocked the scheduled screening for Pequenos Milagres. In that exchange you insisted that you had not been “brainwashed,” and adamantly asked that I cease saying so, that it was harassment, criminal, and you might take legal action. It was, of course, sad for me to read. Though it did provide very clear proof that, yes, you have been very successfully “brain-washed.”
On reading this again, at this distance, I was struck by the logical fallacy implicit in it: if someone who has not been “brainwashed” and is told they were, their honest answer is just that “I have not been brainwashed.” And at the same time, someone who has been “brainwashed” responding “I have not been brainwashed” is proving the case. The person is, in their mind, being honest, as they are unconscious of the process to which they were successfully subjected, but they are doing just what a well-brainwashed person would do.
On reading that exchange this struck me. It is an instance where logically there is no seeming possible resolution. Friends, professionals in the area of parental alienation and similar psychological things, tell me that, yes, this is all buried deep in your mind, and may or may not ever come to your awareness and consciousness, but that when and if it does, it will only do so when you feel safe to acknowledge it. There is no Gordian Knot solution. As I wrote you a while ago, it will be the most difficult thing in your life, excepting the experience which you went through in being kidnapped back in 2000, and what followed.
Summer is approaching, which perhaps in this era becomes less and less a good thing, given global warming and its consequences. And in the current world, those only add to the pressures which are creating the political climate of “strong men” and “populist” movements, reactionary impulses, recoiling from the present, imagining some once-safe/good past which never was. So, being honest it is difficult to wish you a happy summer, but I do. Despite the state of the world, being sad/angry within oneself helps no one – not you, not your friends, and not the world. So best to be aware, conscious of the truth, to acknowledge the hard and unpleasant realities, but not letting that bend your psyche in a negative manner. And do what you can to help make things better, whatever that is.
It is 28 years since I ran down the steps in the Alfama, from our home on Largo do Outeirinho da Amendoeira, and we drove swiftly to the Alfredo da Costa Maternity Hospital, where Teresa and I entered the large birthing room. I was the only man who was there, to be with Teresa in this important time. And to be with you when you came into this world. I found it strange that the other fathers-to-be chose to stay away, outside in a waiting room.
I recall that night and I recall the great joy I felt. Little did I know that the next three and a half years would be the happiest of my life, as I spent each day, all day, until you went to Montessori school in Rome, at the age of two and a half, which I took you to and from. It was a constant joy. I did all the things which normally a mother would be expected to do, and in truth far more, while Teresa was busy with making her films (Os Mutantes and then Agua & Sal) and then going to festivals and doing the film-world game. She was most often away. I stayed with you all the time, or, a few times we all went together – once to Yamagata, where I showed a film, once to Cannes where Teresa had a film.
And little did I know at that time also that the most unhappy years of my life would be prompted by your birth. Three and a half years after you were born, after a summer in Cabanas where your mother shot her film, Agua & Sal, a film in which you played the role of a young girl who is kidnapped, Teresa gave me a note as you and I left for Roma, our home then, saying our relationship was over. Two months later, on returning to Rome, in one day, she kidnapped you. And, as things I have already sent to you show, she began, promptly, to brain-wash you. She was successful in doing so, as you appear to remember nothing of those early years, or of me. You remember only the life-time of lies which she has gifted to you, including whatever portrait she painted of me.
Despite this sad history, I hope you are happy, and that this birthday is a joyous one for you, and as well the coming years. And I hope in some time you are able to face the truth of your own life, so as to build true happiness rooted in reality.
The last weeks and more have been busy for me, with travels and work, and with events in life, impactful with reverberations ringing through my life. I took a trip to Pune, a city of some size, and home to one of the two most important film schools in India, spending 4 days with students, having a good time trying to help them, as well as screening 3 of my films at the big cinema attached to the school. They had never seen films like mine, and it seemed to make a big impact on them. I showed All the Vermeers in New York, The Bed You Sleep In, both old (1990, 1993) 35mm works but with lovely new digital restorations; and then Coming to Terms, (2012, HD). They begot long conversations. One of the students sent me this letter after I left:
Hi Jon
Hope you are in Delhi by now and the weather is keeping you pleasantly cool, albeit the air pollution levels nowadays. Nevertheless, I hope you do have a good time there.
I had come home to Mumbai, the day you left Pune. And I have been reminiscing about the bygone week with you. I do not want to bore you with the details of what our curriculum turned out to be like and what it is like to simply resist and exist and be a student in a Central government institute in such times. Neither do I put you on any messianic pedestal of life and vigour.
However, I do want to tell you Jon, you have infused a certain hope in all of us. Spending time with you has been liberating in a certain sense, for each of us, and I wish to carry on with this ahead. You have essentially unlocked a very simple entanglement in our minds, as filmmakers, as citizens of the world and as humans – which is, to exist through all the trials, with all of honesty and with love and joy, and I think it is a precious feeling in today’s times, especially for younger people grappling with the world.
Thank you for the simplicity, wonder, love and joy that you have imparted.
I do hope your health gets better, and that jazz remains only in the music and not in your nerves. Do pay a visit to the doctors if you feel the need.
Additionally, in case your Delhi itinerary permits, I would surely ask you to meet with some wonderful people who I know there. Do let me know. Take very good care of yourself.
Waiting to watch the film you will be shooting in Kolkata.
Love,
Aditi
Owing to technical things around my visa, I wasn’t paid and had to cover travel too, but things like this make it all worthwhile. Glad my presence and the screenings helped them.
After five days there, I then flew to Delhi, staying with a younger filmmaker friend, Prabhash Chandra, whom I met after seeing a film of his while on being head of jury at Dacca, (Bagladesh) film festival. His, I Am Not The River Jhelum, was the only good film I saw there, and I contacted him later and subsequently helped him on a visit to America to screen his film. He is now in UK for several weeks screening it there.
Delhi, like Kolkata, is a huge city, with many places worth seeing. Prabhash took me to some – the Tomb of Humayun, and the largest mosque, Jama Masjid, in the city, and other things. Had a wonderful time, despite the air pollution which stung the eyes, gunked my throat and gave me a morning headache. It is terrible, casting a white toxic fog across nearly the whole of India south of the Himalaya mountains. Truly bad, unhealthy for everyone.
And we spent a day taking a long drive to Agra to see the Taj Mahal and Red Fort there. As someone keenly interested in architecture it was one of the places I had long wanted to see, though I admit I was a little disappointed by it. In part owing to the effects of mass tourism, such that this contemplative place was swarmed with people taking selfies, and also its symmetries gave it a vaguely sterile and rigid quality, as if missing some elements of spontaneity and life. But, perhaps, as it is a tomb, that makes a certain sense. Still glad I went.
I also had a few screenings in Delhi, at two different universities arranged by another friend, Mohit, who teaches yoga but also film. My last evening there we went for a dinner with two people I had met in in Tehran in 2018, Uday and Ira. She taught film, and he was a ship captain in the Indian Navy, both now retired. I met them at a film conference I’d been invited to in Iran (giving a keynote speech!), and we went together on a guided trip outside, to Isfahan and another city famous for its baths. One evening we were in their hotel room, chatting about life and what we do, and somehow – perhaps they asked if I was married or had children – you came up and as I was telling them about you, your kidnapping and after, I burst into tears and weeping. Usually I can talk about this story coolly and calmly, but that night something slipped beneath my scar-tissue and the deep pain came out. They were very kind about it, and I suppose it made our sense of friendship firmer. I have corresponded with them since, and was glad to be able to visit this time in Delhi. I gave them a file of Pequenos Milagres to watch.
Uday and Ira to right, Rebeahe who I am still in contact with to left
The last few days I have been up in the foothills of the Himalaya, in the countryside near a city of 800,000, Dehradun. The air is far clearer, and it is nice to escape the energy of a big city. At least for a few days my eyes don’t burn and my chest feels less clogged. I am with Mohit, the friend from Delhi at a kind of yoga retreat.
Also in the last month, a very dear friend of mine, Robina Rose, whom I visited in hospital in November in London, and whom I wrote about to you before, was moved to a hospice and died January 26. When I left her in November I knew I would not be seeing her again. The BFI will be screening her film Nightshift at their cinema on the South Bank on May 13, and I will be introducing it. I shot, acted in, gave my camera, sound equipment and film stock for her to make it – and did much more. An interesting story. She was a wonderful friend.
Tomorrow I will fly back to Kolkata, and intend to dig in quickly to shoot documentary portrait, maybe essay something of D-Block, a slum area near where I am living there. My friend Aopala, who is helping me with it, and I have visited it now many times, and have made friends. Hoping it goes well and in a few weeks I have enough shot, and have secured their trust enough to have a handful of people to act in some kind of fictional narrative, stories from their lives. It’s been going well, and I am having fun doing it. There’s a few other things I hope to get done as well by the beginning of May when my visa runs out and I go to the UK, London, and then Derry to visit Marcella.
I have found your pages in Au Hazard Cinema, and other things. While it would be nice to communicate with you directly, I am glad I am able to learn a bit about you in this way. I would like to get the PDF of your thesis, and will send a note through that website asking for it.
I hope in these grim days – at least from the perspective of America and its impact on the world, that you are busy with what you want to be doing, and surrounded with good friends and love.
It is the shortest day of the hemisphere’s year, tomorrow the light begins to return. Here in Kolkata, after a long dry spell it rained a bit last night, and the dusty brown streets are wet and near-black. I wrote a solstice letter for my friends and give you the link here.
Time slides by, languidly, a bit as in Lisboa, but very different. The air here is foul with smog and the last 10 days or so I have had a nasty cough from it. Me and millions of others. I’ve begun work on a few films, one dancing around Kathak, a traditional dance here, which my friend Aopala does. The other a perhaps documentary or perhaps narrative in a nearby neighborhood, very poor. Aopala and I have been there and begun to make friends. See how it goes.
Shireen, me, Aopala, Abhirup, Riddhi. Shireen is Riddhi’s sister, Aopala and Abhirup are partners.
In the last weeks I received word that my dear friend, Robina Rose, was moved from a “frail persons” unit in hospital to “palliative care.” She’s been diagnosed with cancer of the liver, and has little time left. My thought when I left her three weeks ago looks to be correct. I will not see her again, nor she me. My friends are slipping away, one by one, ever more frequently.
Here is a post about my current state, from another blog: Taking Stock
I hope all is well with you and you’re among friends. Of course I would love to hear from you.
I am in Kolkata now, a handful of days. Just about over the strange physical pull of jet-lag, my internal clock finally adjusted to the local time – almost. I find as I age my inner clock is less flexible, just like the rest of my body, and changing time zones seems to take longer. I had thought I’d be going quickly to the mountains north of Delhi, to a small place called Manali, but my friend Riddhi, who was going there to research and work on a new film, is detoured owing to problems in his family’s business. So we will go later.
I have many things to do here, so shortly I’ll begin one. Probably a project taking a week or so, to visit the market area in the north of Kolkata, to take 100 video portraits like those here, each a minute long. These are “coolies” as they call them here, the men who run things about in the markets, carrying heavy loads on their heads, or pulling carts. They mostly come from Bihar, a very poor state to the north of Bengal. If I am fortunate, perhaps one of them will let me do a short portrait of their day – at “home”, doubtless with 10 or more others, and what they do during their day. Perhaps I can do this in the next weeks.
Aopala, a very good friend here, and Upasana on the right.
In a few days I go to see a woman who lives near by the markets – it takes 90 minutes (two “auto” rides to Metro, and then another one after that), to get there from where I am staying in Santoshpur and I am tired by the time I get there. Upasana lives a 15 minute walk away or a quick 3 minute “auto” ride. Autos are motorized three-wheeled vehicles that are often crammed with 5 passengers, and cost very little – a standard mode of transportation here. We, Aopala and I, go in the next days to visit Upasana to confirm I can stay at her house while making this, or whatever it is.
Aopala second from left
Aopala is a dancer, of a traditional Indian form called Kathak. It is a courtesan dance, and I am trying to have a discussion with her about it – it was performed for courts, and not that long ago those doing it were considered something like prostitutes. Recently here in India a woman intern doctor was raped and killed in a hospital here in Kolkata and that triggered a now months long national protest, and Aopala and her friends have been out many times for demonstrations. The government is permitting them but with the tactic of boring and tiring them out – and then nothing changes. I think doing this dance in an oblique way gives a kind of confirmation/support for the patriarchal system which it comes from, and which produced the rape. We are having a discussion about it.
The Nilpukur Ghat, which sits outside the window where I am staying in Santoshpur, Kolkata
There are a few other things I have in mind to do here, aside from the on-going work to organize another book of poems – there are really now quite a few to deal with; learn the editing program DaVinci Resolve, and, well, my usual keep-myself-busy things: poems, painting, playing the guitar, walking, making photographs, thinking.
Today I just learned of a friend’s death in Missoula, Montana. She was an artist, and had been in two of my films – Kristi Hager. She was nearly 4 years younger than I am. A lovely person.
A recent poem:
everything was going haywire nothing worked that’s the way it went like your back, time-bent memory back-tracked recalled an old friend’s name first time in decades but forgot to take the keys
Along this line, in my last days in London I lost my iPhone 12. It appears to have been, in English language, “knicked” – taken from me somewhere around the British Museum. 3rd or is it 4th in the last 3 years. Must buy a new one as I am giving my equipment away to my friends here, and if I carry on making films, it’ll be with the phone. And I must put a leash on it!
I hope where ever you are – Lisbon or Belgium or where ever you go these days – that you are well, busy doing what you wish to be doing and among good friends. And that you are happy, even if the larger world is not so happy.
Amo-te
Teu pai
Jon
Two paintings and a photo from my last stay in Kolkata, 2022-3
In another day I’ll be leaving London, an early flight on Nov 7, for Kolkata. I’ve been here less than a week, seeing some friends – in one case a bit heavy, a hospital visit. As usual skies are mostly gray, a little sun slipping in once in a while. I managed so far one museum, the Tate Britain, which has many rooms of JW Turner paintings, which are gorgeous. And I managed yesterday to lose/have stolen my iPhone. Not very convenient, but such is life – especially mine: I seem to have a talent for losing iPhones. That was number 3.
The hospital visit was emotionally powerful. Robina is in a very bad state medically, lying in bed, unable to get up, in pain. Cancers and other things. She imagines she will get well, and leave and resume her life. I doubt very much that such is her future. She was a very dear friend, since 1978 when we met in Edinburgh at the festival there. I would see her almost every time I passed through London, visiting her in her home which fell into ever greater disrepair, and succumbed to her hoarding instincts. I don’t know really, but she says she was picked up by an ambulance and whisked away to the hospital, and has been there now two or three weeks. The room she is in has 4 older women in it, which to to my eyes all appear to be in their last steps. And similarly Robina. We managed to talk of past times, a bit about the film NIGHTSHIFT, and some things about her relationship with once-best friend Nicola. She was clearly very glad and happy I’d visited – which is the least I could do. l loved and love her very much, all these years, and she loved me. As she noted, we’d never been lovers, and perhaps what we had was much deeper. She was in tears as I left. My eyes also were not dry. I do not think I will ever see her again. There is a long, somewhat complex, story to tell about Robina and her life, and perhaps later I can find a way to tell it.
Owing to the visa question I changed my flight date, at a heavy cost, nearly $500 – and as turned out, probably unnecessarily – but so life goes. Another day here tomorrow and then a very early Uber to Heathrow for the long flight to India. And another adventure – a handful of days after getting to Kolkata, I will go with my friends Riddhi, Abhirup, and Aopola into the mountains north of Delhi, to Manali, and they along with a few others will make a new film using my camera and other equipment. I intend to leave it all to them, to share with others, when I leave in May. Down-sizing as far as making films goes. Or perhaps I will just edit the many things I have already shot and never really finished. I suspect there’s 2 or 3 long films, or more, hiding in the disks. Or perhaps I will just stop! If so, I suppose I’d keep writing, doing photographs and painting. I don’t think I know how to just stop everything.
A poem from the last week or so – based I think on some of my friends who have slipped away rapidly in the last year or two:
slipping slowly into dementia’s doldrums what was that you said hard of hearing? no something else not exactly sure just what yes, this morning my it wasn’t exactly clear these days nothing really i think i am but not so sure
the synapse symphony danced old memories names i’d long forgotten surfaced trout leaping for a late evening dragonfly
Of course I would like to hear from you, to know of your life. But, as I quote Walt Whitman in your film, Pequenos Milagres:
“I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you when I sit alone or wake at night alone, I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again, I am to see to it that I do not lose you.”
Letters for my daughter (4) 