Plain Talk is a complex essay-film, a follow-up a decade and some years later to Speaking Directly, and so another State of the Nation discourse, made for Britain's Channel Four in the year 1986-87. The work involved extensive travel around the United States, and poses an examination of just what America is/was, or what do we mean when we speak of it. Done in a series of radically different sections which collide with each other in a manner intended to provoke thinking, Plain Talk, which was made by an American and intended for American viewers, was indeed broadcast in Britain, but somewhat predictably, not in the USA.

A telling story of an unemployed Vietnam vet in Butte, Montana, whose wife leaves him after seven years when she feels there is no longer communication between them and - more painfully and pointedly - because she is unable to have a child owing to his sterility from exposure to Agent Orange. Told in a gentle style, richly emotional, Bell Diamond was made with non-professionals drawn from the community of Butte.

An essay-film on language and theater, on human communication - intellectual in content, but purely poetic in terms of form: image, sound, language, cinema. Stagefright, with the exception of one shot, was all filmed in a small puppet theater space, actors against black.

This film is a portrait of the passage of one year in the lives of some San Francisco friends, circa 1988 (before the dot.coming of the city), a slow marijuana hazed story which drifts like the fabled fog, encompassing the quirks and habits of a generation that made the city theirs, if only for a while. Very obliquely Rembrandt Laughing sketches the time and place, encompassing the AIDS epidemic, the casual sexual revolution, the debris of '68 lingering in the air. A quiet, very San Francisco comedy of life among a small group of friends. Rembrandt Laughing was improvised over the period of about a month by Jost and his friends, mostly acting non-professionals.

A man who is dissatisfied with his family life leaves home for weeks at a time, drifting from town to town.

A portrait of alienation is sketched out, focusing on a young art student who passively, but consciously, rejects responsibility for the political storms swirling about her. The epitome of bourgeois mentality, she insists she is, or at least will be, an artist. She says, all she is responsible for is “art”—though she admits she cannot tell you what it is. Beginning with TV images from Viet Nam being turned off, the film ends with the 13th fragment, TV images of Viet Nam being turned on again. We are bracketed by history, like it or not. (Jon Jost)

Impressions from the American Independence Day celebrations in Butte, Montana: evening mood, American flag on the veranda, barbecue, firecrackers, fireworks. A quote from Donald Trump: “Marxists, anarchists, troublemakers and looters destroy our statues, erase our history, indoctrinate our children and trample our freedom. Your goal is no better America, your goal is the end of America. ”A short, to-the-point comment.

A parable of the missteps of life enacted in the hothouse world of late 1980’s New York, in which the art market and the stock market each boomed, and in process spawned a smorgasbord of “yuppie” delusions which still persist. Anna, a French actress studying in New York, crosses paths with a successful stock-broker, Mark, standing before a Vermeer portrait at the Metropolitan, thence ensues a peculiar romance of missed meanings and connections, with tangential asides to the steaming arts world and stock market, loft-mate conflicts, and, perhaps, love. Wrapped up in their blindered worlds, Anna and Mark deflect away from their chances, leaving at the conclusion the wistful face of Vermeer’s portrait enigmatically asking questions. All the Vermeers in New York is a comedy of manners which, as gently as a Vermeer, looks beneath the skin of this time and place, and of these characters.

This is a very serious film of a fragmented family called by the father to assist him in committing suicide. Formally it is in no way a conventional film.