Songs for Clara (work in progress)

Two new digital video works by DV-master Jon Jost - both more or less rough cuts. Jost uses the volatility of the new medium and its possibilities for changing. Digital editing means that no version is really final. For each goal, certain material can be changed and adapted. For instance, for Roma - un ritratto improvvisorio Jost processed shots he had made over long period of his home city of Rome (and that eventually have to find a place in an ambitious 12-hour magnum opus about the city) to comply with a request from an Italian television station. Jost regarded his own (ab)use of the material as cynical and didactic, but the result is still a rhythmic visual poem about the eternal city.The tone of the second work, dedicated to his little daughter Clara, is greatly coloured by recent personal developments: following his divorce from his wife, Jost no longer sees his daughter. As if to come to terms with his mourning and with the horror, he made abstractions of older shots of Clara. The result is a melancholy, virtuoso play with light in the hair of the girl that, through the abstraction, could be the hair of anyone's beloved. (GjZ)