Jonathan Schwartz

In order to beat inflation and subsidize their alimony checks, three suburban housewives plot to steal $1 million from a large plastic ball which is displayed in a local shopping center.

Documentary on the 1953 musical "The Band Wagon."

From the 33 1/3 Series (an album of eleven 'in-camera' 16mm films)

Jonathan Schwartz is a young American experimental filmmaker who has crafted a body of short, lyrical 16mm films over the past decade. Working with the legacies of anthropological and observational non-fiction cinema, and in the avant-garde tradition of filmmakers like Warren Sonbert and Mark LaPore, Schwartz makes the camera a catalyst for a transformed dynamic between the figure behind the camera and those in front. Turning his camera on the people and places around him (whether in his New England home or on his travels abroad), Schwartz captures jewel-like fragments of gesture, light and colour that he then meticulously assembles alongside sounds collected as field recordings, creating films of great beauty and feeling that seem to vibrate with a total openness to the surrounding world and its denizens.

A visual essay about the progressive tradition of the United States as seen through grave markers and monuments.

A visual essay about the progressive tradition of the United States as seen through grave markers and monuments.

Potential Northwestern fellow Tess Harper lasers through her best friend's wedding planning like the star doctor she hopes to soon become. In fact, Tess puzzles through any problem - provided it's not her own. When she meets divorce lawyer and groom's best friend, Michael, Tess maneuvers around him like a gurney in the emergency room until she discovers this best man has a few moves of his own.

“hit the slopes with colorful exaggerations, take a long sleep, and hope to wake up without an anxious yawn.” – JS

Den of Tigers (2002), by Jonathan Schwartz, lyrically examined the subtle textures of daily life in West Bengal, India. There you could see ankles lifting up and back down into a flooded street, a small ancient woman pushing on the arm of a water pump, and the hypnotic swinging of a young tightrope walkers hips, the image as taut as the narrow rope pressed to her feet. – Genevieve Yue

…a poem made of imagery from a gardening volume, a book of flower prints, and the sound of a firework display. The images of the colored flowers, when added to the sound of pyrotechnics, become a graphic representation of exploding buoyancy. Like in a Lewis Klahr film, the images appear to collage a story-driven narration. There is motion created by the succession of cuts, and by the hand-handled camera movements so essential to Schwartz’s style–allowing a non-aggressive, handcrafted, and detail-oriented approach to the world. Movement is more essential than any possible tale. The camera follows the shape of printed instructions, drawing verses in the air. The vivid texture and colors of these images transform the ink into trails of meaning, ways to translate inner subtleties into corporeal nature. – Monica Saviron

‘With a car from 1966-1977 and a manual for violence prevention, you drive. The distance is now your compass so follow the shadows to your resting spot. Or: I was wondering if sincerity could override irony and flood out some emotions from our past. Then - all for the extension of time, follow the echo, it might disappear into the clouds.’

Schwartz’s poetic 16mm work meditates on the sights and sounds of slowly crumbling glaciers, charting an interior dance between desperation and hope. The carefully deployed superimpositions, strident soundtrack, and contrasting tones of intensity and tranquility suggest the unpredictable rhythms of metaphysical transformation.

A stark winter, children at play, and an elder in motion augment words - spoken and sung - of paternal ties and loss.

a certain worry enveloped in the covering of the ground, illuminated around a face, light on something ferocious, touch upon something gentle.

Schwartz explores the effect of light as both mystery and revelation. Glazed water in erubescent evenings discloses the shadowed details of the streets of Istanbul.

It's an ironically dark response to its title. It pictures an oversaturated, white and blue stop motion animation of the double image of a man jumping into a river, holding his nose before the final splash. A bug appears for less than a second, making an almost subliminal connection. The act of falling becomes a figurative abstraction, while the entire image gets transformed into dark blue obscurity. -Monica Savirón

A poetic travelogue through the city of Jerusalem.

It arrives, in a fog, with songs, through dance or majestic animals or faces (gliding on the street), and in shapes of light, maybe on a large bird of prey in flight - gesture skyward. Some origins can be difficult to pinpoint, others blink back - infinitely.

From 'A Set Of Miniatures'

Schwartz approaches light traveling through water in all its forms. His macro lens strives to get closer to the essence, to the transparency of things, and yet, the tenebrous and doomed cry of a church’s bell, and the ascending, unstoppable pitch that accompany the images end up close to the sound of a derailed train—and the unfocused, unclear vision that comes with it. -Monica Savirón

Schwartz’s work exists as a dialectic all its own, with a kind of wry fascination with things and a tinkerer’s yearning to take them apart and put them back together again. A Preface to Red exhibits this attitude, while at the same time displaying a rather unexpected level of formal aggression from the usually sedate Schwartz.

That fall it was not intentional to have a Galway Kinnell book on the table near where the caterpillar in the doorway, feeding on our offerings, became the butterfly, feeding on honey water, staying in our house until we let it go. Or it was not known about the deer in Putney or that the baby birds in the raspberry bushes would cry to us in summer. A beloved, old friend once visited Vermont to do some work for Galway Kinnell and she described a stone table in the field where they ate meals in the afternoon - it sounded like a song and so I looked at the book and from Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight here is that line: “The still undanced cadence of vanishing”.

Situated amid the in between of ascending and descending. It seems hard to land and when this happens something else might disappear.

A film with a hypnotizing sense of diagonal light and movement. The title refers to the 1917 Hermann Hesse short story, part of his collection of fairy tales.

«Swimming or fluidly moving in pattern - like lust or love or something weird. A communication halt: cue the apes to speak or make music». - JS

When a character moves off screen, we accept the fact that he is out of sight, but he continues to exist in his own capacity at some other place in the decor which is hidden from us. There are no wings to the screen. Facts are perceptions of surfaces.

Light painting and nature imagery are captured in 13 shots of different points of luminescence, on the 13th anniversary of Schwartz’s mother’s passing, and as a homage to Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s personal 'In a Year with Thirteen Moons' (1978).

The camera remains static to capture the accelerated movements, shot frame-by-frame, of ice skaters in a sunny winter morning. They are not portrayed as living things–they don’t have the ability to speak, and they look like robots from another planet whose language is the sound of sharp razors on thick ice. They may very well be ghosts, and less alive than the figures of nature in an old book.

Refers to Schwartz’s grandfather-in-law’s age during the making of the film–an anniversary celebrated with the gift of piloting a U.S. army light aircraft, the kind he used to maneuver in the Second World War. While he rises and falls, watched by the impassive but attentive look of a woman who could be his wife, he is the protagonist of a flight into the past. Again, there is tension emphasized by an impending sound in crescendo, this time the one of the jet engine. This jump into the void is a recurrent creative preoccupation that might refer to distance, wounds, and risks.

(Maybe) of finding neutral signs in a non-neutral place while tension sits, increases, is shared, builds, or possibly lessens–or maybe is placed elsewhere for a while. Some birds move easily across, from above. You can hear them all over and the breeze that follows feels important. It comes when it wants, breaks up a heat, pauses something, and interrupts without being seen.

An experimental short by Jonathan Schwartz, which is part of the 33 1/3 series.