Winter Solstice, 2025

Winter Solstice, 2025. Shortest day of the year up here in the northern hemisphere. Where I am now, in Kolkata, cooler a bit, choking air, but the wobble makes not much difference about when it gets dark. Around 6 or so. Here a dull white sky sometimes allows a yellow disk to penetrate it; the AQI seems to be far worse than a year ago, and a check confirms:

In turn I am hacking, my nose runs, and the people here say “you’ll get used to it.” I don’t think I will; I’ll just shave a few more months off my life.

Three months ago I was in NYC, seeing some friends, some surely for a last time, as I’d done in Chicago, Boston and elsewhere. I don’t intend to return to the USA again, so for some a swan song so-long. In late September flew from NYC to Dublin, train/bus up to Derry where I was greeted by Marcella and Uma, who clearly recalled me, and ran to slobber me with kisses. She knows a good sucker when she’s trained him: he’ll throw balls for me!! He’ll tug my toys with me and toss them!! Play play play!!!!!

So went to Marcella’s lovely place, which she got back in the interim after some repairs sent her to another place earlier. She’s settled into her new job with Repair Cafe, where she’s in a kind of administrative/developmental post. I stayed a month, and we all had a good time – went a few places, took long, slow (because of me) walks in the nearby park, and I got some editing done on Weyauwega film and some other things. It rains a lot this time of year so lots was indoors, good for writing or editing and things. Took it easy for the most part, partly because my banged up 82 year old body was feeling the wages of my travels – walking slow, legs not getting enough circulation (despite the drug I’m taking for it – Cilostazol), and partly because after a near-6 months of pretty constant travel, needed a little break. Because coming up was another month of more.

Left Derry and flew to London where I had a quick 3 days stay, now in another place, with Roland Denning in Camden, as my usual refuge was now occupied by grandchildren ! Stayed in Camden, and managed to squeeze in seeing a few friends, while I tried to sort out my India visa which was becoming, again, a hassle. Then took Eurostar to Paris after having to change – meant to go to Brussels and see people there, but then one of them instead was in Paris, so…. So I saw Mark Rappaport and then, as happened, friend Jane from NYC was there and we shared hotel a few days and had some fun, and I had a breakfast with Vivianne who then invited Jane for a dinner. All so fast.

And then flew on to Split, in Croatia where Tanja Vrvilo had organized a spread out partial retrospective of my films – 12 features and a handful of short works, showing in Split, Zagreb and Rijeka, and tossed in was a week in Tirana, staying in Enver Hoxha’s villa in the center of town – it has been turned into an artist residency thing. So for three weeks I shuttled to one place and the next, showed films, saw new places, and made new friends, saw some older ones. Was a good time, made a little much appreciated coin and had travels covered. And finally resorted to iVisa to get my Indian one, as I’d done last time around as the government on-line service just does not work. I got a 5 year visa this time as the hassle and cost is just…

So flew back to London for a quick 3 day stay, managing to see Hilary and Stuart, and meet with Dahci Ma, a Korean friend from 15 years ago. A bit hectic, but fun. And then flew on to Kolkata, where I arrived 2 weeks ago.

The air here is horrendous, and finds me red-eyed, sniffling and hacking. No fun. On the other hand on getting back I gave myself a day of rest and then went with Aopala to visit. They were all very happy to see me back, telling that my nickname is “White Grandfather!” I told them given my age perhaps it should be great-grandfather, since they start so young. They all wanted their photos taken (more) and were so enthusiastic and welcoming that I asked Aopala if maybe we should go ahead and ask bluntly about being in a film. She was hesitant and then agreed and asked. I was hoping to get 3 to 5, but instantly we had ten. A woman volunteered to sing a Bengali song. The young girl I’d wanted and had been so shy said yes. And others. So I am ready to dig in and try to figure out what can be done, and how. In the next 4 months or so – I hope to go to the mountains in April-May when it will be hot hot hot here. Aopala and Abhirup, her boyfriend, have agreed to come along.

As things are forming up hope to get some kind of film – fiction narrative mixed with portrait of the place? And for sure an on-line photobook of D-Block and its people. Something to keep my hands busy and out of trouble!! Seem to have raised a handful of Facebook friends to donate some old digital cameras to give to the kids there, to let them go shoot their own world and if turns out good and interesting, another part of book on D-Block.

Through all this I’ve been riding the being-old roller-coaster. My lower back/legs shrieking at times, almost to the point of saying, “sorry Jon, you don’t get to get out of bed today.” It says, but never gets its way. Got a prescription for steroids and seems to be helping a lot. However my walking is limited, calves tighten up now in 1/3rd of a mile. Will consider angioplasty after I have doctor examine and ponder. I do, though, manage the morning’s stretchersizes, 30 squats and 50 pushups. Ain’t dead yet.

Out in the wider world, the USA sprints to a chaotic collapse, with the Trump Gangsta.Guv going nuts and like to be gone in a quick year. Replace by what, who knows. Collapses are always messes. He was the predictable conclusion to “The American Century,” imperial hubris compounded with ultimate corruption. Same thing happening around the world as global warming warms up, volatile weather, warmer air carrying more moisture. Boil a pan of water and watch how it happens.

My coming months will be here, hopefully busy with D-Block and a few other self-appointed things I hope to get done while here.

That’s my seasonal news. If inclined please drop me a note about your life.

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Henry S. Rosenthal and me (Pt 2)

_{Tough guys – Rosenthal playing tough with the band Crime}

Last month, preparing for a trip to Croatia for a festival under the banner, “Invisible Cinema,” for which the organizers wished to show All the Vermeers in New York, and The Bed You Sleep In, both of which were beautifully restored by EYEfilm in Amsterdam, I received the following letter from Mr Rosenthal, as did EYE. EYE cannot send out a DCP without Rosenthal’s consent (and mine.)

The letter is in effect one of blatant blackmailing, and I wrote to Simona describing it as such. Rather than submit to this extortion attempt, I instead published this on my Jon Jost Blog, sending link to it to a mailing list of mostly cinema people. I have heard nothing from Rosenthal after; he did subsequently give EYE his OK to send the films. Read that as you will.

“I always knew something was wrong with me,” Rosenthal admits. “Mentally or physically?” I ask. “That’s a good question,” he replies. From a recent article in the San Francisco Gate on Rosenthal.

TRUE STORIES

Some time, quite a while ago – I don’t really remember – I was contacted by a young filmmaker in San Francisco who wrote of having secured insurance from Rosenthal’s Complex Corp for equipment, as required to rent for a film he was making. Apparently something had gone wrong, something stolen, lost or broken. Rosenthal had told the person not to report it to the insurance company but rather to him. He then stiffed the person who did not get whatever to cover the loss, and he wrote me thinking I could help. I couldn’t. I recall when I was still “a friend” of Rosenthal’s his telling me he would slip people under his Complex Corporation insurance, bill them for it, and as things seldom went wrong, it was “free money.” He thought this was clever. It was also illegal. Sometime after this, I don’t recall how or why, I came across a public notice of the California Department of Insurance issuing to Henry S. Rosenthal, Complex Corporation, 535 Stevenson St, San Francisco, an order to “cease and desist” from fraudulently selling insurance policies. This was after he had fraudulently told the Library of Congress that he had a “letter of assignment” from me turning over the rights to the four films, Sure Fire, All the Vermeers in New York, The Bed You Sleep In, and Frameup, to him and his Complex Corporation. No such letter ever existed, the Library did not ask to see it, and gave him the copyrights to those films. Rosenthal did this furtively, without informing me, and secured control over those films, blocking me from access and use of my own work ever since. Fraud is of no importance to Rosenthal.

At the time, Rosenthal, since 1990, was on the Board of Directors of the Film Arts Foundation, at some point becoming its head. It is clear he used this position to steer people into buying his fraudulent, illegal, insurance.

According to Rosenthal, from an interview he did for the FAF publication Release Print that he became a BoD member because:

“I was targeted as a candidate because I think I represented that bridge between the maker and the world of people [with money] ––I guess they perceived me as someone who has raised money for films, who was maybe more savvy about money, and who could help move the organization to a more stable place financially, and they saw me as a player in that role…. I was one of the bigger contributors to the organization, and tried to rally support everywhere I could.”

Again, this was in effect a fraud since Rosenthal had not produced the films made with me, the only ones he had supposedly “produced” by then, and had, while I was his “friend,” demonstrated his ineptness and incompetence with regard to the film business. I regret ever having let him put his name on those films as “producer.” He was at best a “co-production manager.” I was the other production manager and he was learning through me.

For a full history of the FAF, and its demise while Rosenthal was head of the Board of Directors, you can read this.

Film Arts Foundation 1976-2008: A Regional Media Arts Center With National Impact

As for playing fast and loose with film-world designations, I note that tucked between four of my films listed below, which he did not produce, on his IMDb page we find Gregg Araki’s The Living End, for which Rosenthal claims he was “executive producer.”

One of the descriptions of an executive producer, on the net:

“An Executive Producer (EP) is the driving force behind a film, television show, or other media production. They oversee all aspects of the production, from securing financing to managing the production team. The EP is often the primary decision-maker and the final authority on creative and financial matters.”

In the case of the Araki film what really happened was that I met Gregg at a summer Sundance something in Utah, at Redford’s place there. He had made his first film, critically well-received in LA, and could not raise the money to make the next one. I offered to let him use my equipment (a CP GSMO 16mm camera; sound stuff) and to give him film stock I had bought cheap earlier to make the film. He accepted, and, on my instigation, Rosenthal shipped it to LA by courier. Period. Rosenthal did nothing else, certainly none of the things an “executive producer” supposedly does. Again, Rosenthal is a fraud, eager to snatch credit for things he never did.

Quote from an article in the SF Gate regarding Rosenthal:

I note that Araki in fact made two films with the equipment and film stock I sent him, The Living End and Totally F**cked Up. He sent it all back rather carelessly tossed in the container it had been sent in and never said “thank you.” I am used to such self-centered “artist” sorts.

_{Cosplaying punk drummer}

One of the filmmakers, who prefers not to be named, whom Rosenthal “produced,” told me a story, again regarding the insurance scam. In this case the FAF equipment being used, doubtless theirs rather than a rental house because Rosenthal was on the BoD, and which he “insured” with that “free money” in mind, was stolen. It was a sizable pile of stuff, and not a little money. Under the circumstances, it being FAF and he on the BoD, he actually had to pony up and replace the lost equipment, keeping his insurance scam hidden. After having been friendly with the filmmaker, he blew a gasket, turned on a dime, and was vituperative and nasty when his con turned on him and he had to shell out. It was of course someone else’s fault, not his illegal action to blame.

STALKING

In the times I have had screenings in San Francisco since Rosenthal’s theft took place, he has managed to come to each – once at the New No Nothing Cinema, and the second at the Public Library, back in December, 2017. At the No Nothing, approaching from behind me, I heard his voice, cheery and casual, say, “Hi Jon!” and he passed by me. I ignored him. At the screening in the small theater, he sat in the first row, quite visible during the Q&A, during which he said nothing. In a second screening, at the public library, of Blue Strait, there he was again, in a front-row seat. Stayed through Q&A and when he left he went to back of big auditorium and grabbed a sizable box, which when he lifted it, seemed to be light, and left. At the time I thought maybe he’d intended to give it to me, whatever it was, and as I had ignored him, had to take it back home – a walking distance. No idea. Before he did so he talked with a friend of mine there, Barbara Hammes (lead in Rembrandt Laughing) and had told her that he’d been at the previous screening and I hadn’t recognized him and apparently did not there. After Barbara let me know this, I wrote this to Rosenthal :

_{Barbara in Rembrandt Laughing and now.}

He responded with this email:

More recently, in Spring of 2021, Bruce Posner, a well-known figure in the film scene, invited me to participate in a Zoom thing he was doing during the Covid period. They’d look at a film, and we’d talk about it. I said OK, and signed on.

Not long afterward he informed me that Rosenthal had requested to participate and I asked him to decline it, which he did. This begot this email:

Rosenthal afterwards contacted the library and institutions involved and caused Bruce a lot of problems.
From note from Bruce after I wrote him for a confirmation on this:

More recently, this past June, 2025, I was in Los Angeles, for a partial retrospective done by the American Cinematheque there, in a festival under the banner ‘Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair’. As they wished to show 3 of the films requiring Rosenthal’s OK, he knew of it, and wrote me this some weeks before:

I did not reply to this email.

Rosenthal did show up for the screenings in LA, in his guise of having been the “producer” of these films. I did inform the Cinemateca that he was coming, and asked that he not be allowed to go on stage if perhaps he’d ask; they agreed. After the last screening, at the Aurora Cinema in Santa Monica, a good crowd of people – friends of mine, actors, Erling Wold, and others – were gathered on the sidewalk in front, talking. I went to one cluster to join in, and shortly after Rosenthal came striding in its direction; seeing this I left, and went to another cluster. He came quickly towards that one. I left it and went to wander the periphery of the crowd, Rosenthal following me, stalking, and approached seemingly to “glad-hand” me – I punched him in the gut. It wasn’t too hard as the camera around my neck got in the way. He did buckle over and I stepped towards him to offer some more. Shocked, he backed off, yelling “You’re a coward, you’re a coward.” His car was right there and he jumped into it and sped away.

In turn this begot an email sent to me, EYE, the the USC Archive in LA, mostly dealing with the quality of the files of Frameup and Sure Fire, about which he complained. He ended with this:

_{Rosenthal in Frameup, watching execution}

In his references to an “agreement” made, which was the Lawyers for the Arts arbitration, Rosenthal neglects to note that I never signed that agreement. And had he a gram of self-honesty, he would acknowledge that his “rightful” credits would be co-producer of Sure Fire, and “co-production manager” of the other 3 films. I would be happy to list him as such. I regret that long ago I let him masquerade as something which he was not; something which has caused many others damage. Rosenthal is a fraud and shares certain qualities of Our Great Leader, who is clearly a psychopath.

_{From The Bed You Sleep In}

As I gather still more information on Rosenthal I will do a follow up post on his actions. He complains that I have violated a “non-disparagement NDA” which I never signed. Those who require NDA’s have things they wish to hide.

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Taking Stock : 82

Marking time, the conclusion of my 82nd orbit of our nearby star, without which we would not exist (along with myriad other factors – distance from, timing, nuclear cycles, all remote from our hands.) Depending on the culture you live in and how much one complies with its views, we’re here by some divine appointment, or, in my view, by a near impossible roll of the dice, though however infinitely small the chances of simply being here, as we are, is, infinity seems big enough to allow 9 billion of us at the moment, never mind those who preceded us, and all the other millions of billions of other equally amazing creatures which are “life.”

_{My family 1946 or so, Hinsdale Illinois}

My own little trajectory, commenced in Chicago, May 16, 1943, has been, so others tell me, lucky/adventurous/amazing, which is all from some perspectives, true. A sperm met an egg, and bio-logic happened, and I arrived. Later my mother told me, in utter innocence and naïveté, that I hadn’t been planned/wanted, and had abortions been as available then, as when she told me this – sometime when I was in mid-thirties – I wouldn’t be here. She had not given a thought at all about what this could do psychologically, and fortunately, as I had long before withdrawn from my erstwhile family, the impact was more one of amused detachment, wondering how a mother could so casually tell her child such a thing.

When I was born, as had been the case with my brother, I had pyloric stenosis, to say a blockage at the bottom of my stomach, at the valve which keeps food from passing on to the intestines for digestion. In my brother’s case, apparently nothing was done, or perhaps they did not know, or a procedure for “fixing” didn’t exist. He was not the brightest bulb in the world, though not “retarded” at all; I think he likely suffered from infantile malnutrition and his brain development was hampered. He apparently cried and puked to the wall his first year, surely not exactly endearing himself to his way too young parents of 18 and 19 years of age. I think this in turn ended in psychological damage as an infant and young child. He escaped the house as early as he could, lying about his age to join the military.

In my case, my birth-defect was detected, and I had an operation in a day or so, removing the blockage. It left a tiny scar, which as I grew older, grew bigger with me – about an inch and a half vertical incision above my navel, to the right hand side. Busy with that, they did not do the, at that time, ordinary matter of circumcising me, leaving me a minority among my peers, with a foreskin. Sometime – not really sure just when I was told this story, it occurred to me that my life was all owing to accidentally borrowed time. In hindsight I think this in a way liberated me from complying with all the conventions that define a culture and its society. Early on, I was an outsider.

From this perspective, one which many friends who in the last years have ended their trip in this world and did not enjoy, mine has been a normal journey: it is speckled with long ordinary days, ho-hum biding-time days; and then the occasional tragedy – a deeply loved daughter, Clara, whom I’d raised for 3 and a half years, almost alone, then kidnapped by her mother, sequestered and brain-washed (common in these cases) and blocked from access to me, ending utterly alienated from her father, mired in a life of lies, now 24 years later. A long ago “friend” committing a betrayal of a vicious and palpable kind; another thought-to-be friend doing something similar. And auto injuries caused by other people, imposing life-long consequences. And on the other side, times of transcendent joy – whether triggered by some deep creative impulses; the brief glance of a landscape; or a quivering heart snared in “love” (whatever that is) – evanescent as life itself, in which the past and future are ever linked, with an instantaneous now, ever fleeting. This, and all the mundane things, “of the world,” (as noted in an early short film, 13 Fragments & 3 Narratives from Life _{Pswd FRAGS}) which in passing seem dull and boring, when added up and called “a life,” become in our minds intensely important.

_{From 13 Fragments & 3 Narratives from Life, 1968}

Entering solar orbit number 83, my obit coming up, my life spreads out behind me, like the wake of a ship, a fractal matter of repetitions, looping eddies, the cycles of days and years diminishing in the distance, lost on the horizon. Ahead is the dead certainty of erasure.

I’d meant to write something else today, but sitting to think and type, whatever it was evaporated and out came this. I thank myself that here at the edge of my life, I’m not a cranky old man, despite the physical and psychic bruises and pains life has issued, but instead seem to contain an inward contentment, calming and happy. Whatever I have done – the catalogue of films made, paintings, poems, silly C&W warbles – are all nothing to me. I did what I did because there was and is no choice. We all do exactly what we do, and we can do no other. It is our fate to be who we are. And similarly here at the closure of my life, my only wish is for those few whom I have come to know, that in whatever small and modest way possible, I can help them be as inwardly as happy as they can be.

Philosophically these days I am a mixture of a Pogoist, and a Pessoaist:

Whatever the ideology, religion, philosophy, all of our “problems” are rooted in the same reality, and that is the problem: humans act like humans, and the honest and clear-eyed truth is that we are the problem.

“I am nothing.
I’ll never be anything.
I couldn’t want to be something.
Apart from that, I have in me all the dreams in the world.”
― Fernando Pessoa

_{Photo by Joseph Podlesnik}

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