Produced with a stringent economy of means, my work is minimalist in form and maximalist in ambition. Moving images, (often at the threshold of being stills,) while carefully composed, can be almost brutal in their primitivism: "here is the front of a building; here is a field of grass." The conventional montage that transports a spectator from master shot to close up without announcing itself is nowhere to be found. The sense of cinematic space is created in the juxtapositions - sometimes obvious, sometimes unlikely - between words and images. Spoken words, unable to perform their traditional cinematic duty of giving the illusion of life to a dramatic scene, are free to be about anything at all. The narration, the result of years of research and writing, encompasses personal memory, historical and political discourse, even a few jokes. To describe the whole trajectory of the work: I begin by describing the circumstances of my formation, and I end by reflecting on society as a whole. I make essay films addressed not to passive consumers, but to citizens (ideally, all spectators) who think as well as feel when they attend the movies.
William E. Jones returns to his hometown to construct an unconventional and moving autobiography. Challenging some of the most firmly entrenched notions of filmmaking, MASSILLON tells its story without a single human actor, by combining beautiful images with a seductive voice-over narration.
"Ever-provocative and decidedly original." - Kevin Thomas, The Los Angeles Times
"William Jones' MASSILLON is that rarity that eluded the queer new wave, a homo road movie in which gay icons are nowhere to be seen. MASSILLON uses the quiet landscapes of the American Midwest to look at a history disfigured by myths of the family, patriotism, and religion." - Lawrence Chua, Artforum
"The film's payoff is its seamless coitus of the personal with the political." - Edward Ball, The Village Voice
Exhibition: Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1993; LA Filmforum; Pacific Film Archive; Artists Space; Pleasure Dome; Cine-City Exhibition, Getty Center.
1991, 16mm, color/so, 70m, $200
Finished is a detective story and a love story, a film noir bathed in sunlight. It's a film of contradictions: pornographic yet chaste, distanced yet mesmerizing, reticent yet moving. It reminds us that life in the movies is not like life at the movies.
"In the future, everyone's 15 minutes will be capped by a documentary that seeks to explain or simply justify their lives. The best of these works will likely take some of their cues from such groundbreaking works as Superstar, Todd Haynes'brilliant sketch of Karen Carpenter's life, or Rock Hudson's Home Movies, Mark Rappaport's sly and subversive reading of Hudson s filmography; they'll be darkly humorous, vigorously intellectual, and achieve a universal poetry that transcends the specifics of the life examined. William E. Jones Finished is such a film. A few years ago, Jones saw an ad for a phone-sex hot line and clipped the photo of the model, Alan Lambert. The seeds of a mild obsession had been planted. A year later, though, the 25-year-old Lambert committed suicide in a park of his native Quebec.
"Finished, admittedly initiated by Jones' lust, tries to answer a host of questions surrounding the unanswerable why of Lambert's final act. A man who listened to Mozart while he turned tricks in his apartment and had bookshelves filled with Marx, Lambert reportedly once told a porn-film co-star that he was superior to most human beings. He espoused radical but confusing political theories, eagerly anticipated the fall of capitalism, and was obsessed with the apocalypse. Most of the revelations paint him as insufferably pretentious. But the film goes beyond Lambert's life. It offers pungent critiques of society's definitions of masculinity and gender. It challenges the aesthetics of porn, even as Jones admits their power. But Finished delivers its most devastating blows in showing how politics, commerce, sexuality and the individual are engaged in a deadening if not deadly dance. With its lingering shots of crashing ocean waves, billowing clouds, and busy L. A. freeways, the film certainly won't satisfy anyone's prurient interests. But by the last frame, Finished has proved itself a powerful, disturbing meditation." Ernest Hardy, L. A. Weekly
Screenings: Sundance Film Festival, Rotterdam Film Festival, Vienna International Film Festival, Los Angeles Filmforum, Pacific Film Archive
1997, 16mm, color/so, 75m, $225