Chaos and Unity The value of Canyon is that it does not need translation, speaking to the viewer in the universal language of cinema. Perhaps, the period of the golden age of film art largely ended with the advent of sound, forcing authors to invent dialogue and immediately removing the film from those people who do not know the language.
At the same time, Jost's film is also an avant-garde, like the silent "Berlin: The Symphony of the City." Such films are specially shot for the development of film language, expanding the limits of visual self-expression. And sometimes even Guy Debord’s deconstructivism, his persistent attempts to destroy cinema as a spectacle, in accordance with his philosophy of situationism, gave birth to a new film language.
John Jost was, of course, far from philosophical experiments with film language, attempts to subordinate cinema to his system of worldview. His “Canyon”, a short film, shot from one point in one day, depicts the canyon for a day, only stretched to screen 5 minutes using slow motion.
This may resemble the unity of place-time-action from the theory of classicism. However, Jost makes a kind of random sketch of the canyon, a kind of film landscape, striving on the one hand to impressionist capture its pristine beauty, to capture a non-repeating moment of existence. At the same time, remind the viewer about the plot of the birth of the world, as if referring to the heritage of antiquity, as a faithful classicist. But this is also seen as a stylization for silent cinema, because the film, again, is devoid of sound. Silence, meanwhile, is sometimes more expressive than the sounds of peace that the French New Wave, for example, emphasized. After all, the viewer, contemplating a pure image, according to Debord’s thought, can distract himself and think about his life, which also lasts from dawn to dusk. Jost’s film essay is valuable because it provokes the viewer to co-creation, search for interpretation of what he saw, because the director does not give any answers and does not even ask questions.
For those who knew Jost from his later plot works, turning to the origins of his work will be all the more interesting. It has all the features of his style. Jost also rises from a realistic but standard sketch from nature to ontological things, soaring like a bird to immerse the viewer in a meditative reflection about the world and his place in it. Man suddenly realizes how fragile the world is, and how short life is, which is an undoubted miracle. After all, each of us could not have been born if the circumstances were different.
Despite the fact that the Canyon absorbs the features of many styles that have sunk into the summer (classicism, impressionism, situationism), it is not the work of a postmodernist who is convinced of the total inability of art to reflect modern man, and therefore moved to the representation of art itself. Jost remains an existentialist philosopher who believes in uniting people before the chaos of the world. After all, it was out of chaos, as we know from the Bible, that the universe was created, and man, infinitely alone, still remains the image of God on earth.
7.5 out of 10