| Jim Jarmusch | |
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Jim Jarmusch, May 19, 2005. Credit: Alain Zirah. |
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| Born | James R. Jarmusch[1] January 22, 1953 Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, United States |
| Alma mater | Columbia University (1975) |
| Occupation | Film director, screenwriter, actor, producer, editor and composer |
| Years active | 1979–present |
| Partner | Sara Driver |
James R. "Jim" Jarmusch ( /ˈdʒɑrməʃ/;[2] born January 22, 1953) is an American independent film director, screenwriter, actor, producer, editor and composer.[3] Jarmusch has been a major proponent of independent cinema, particularly during the 1980s and 1990s.[4]
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The key, I think, to Jim, is that he went gray when he was 15 ... As a result, he always felt like an immigrant in the teenage world. He's been an immigrant – a benign, fascinated foreigner – ever since. And all his films are about that.
Jarmusch was born to a family of middle-class suburbanites in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio in 1953.[4][6][7] His mother, of Irish and German descent, had been a reviewer of film and theatre for the Akron Beacon Journal before marrying his father, a businessman of Czech and German descent who worked for the B.F. Goodrich Company.[1][6][8] She introduced the future director, the middle of three children,[5] to the world of cinema by leaving him at a local cinema to watch matinee double features such as Attack of the Crab Monsters and Creature From the Black Lagoon while she ran errands.[9][10] The first adult film he recalls having seen was the 1958 cult classic Thunder Road (starring Robert Mitchum) the violence and darkness of which left an impression on the seven-year-old Jarmusch.[11] Another B-movie influence from his childhood was Ghoulardi, an eccentric Cleveland television show which featured horror films.[10]
Despite his enthusiasm for film, Jarmusch, an avid reader in his youth,[4] had a greater interest in literature, a pursuit in which he was encouraged by his grandmother.[1] Though he refused to attend church with his Episcopalian parents (not being enthused by "the idea of sitting in a stuffy room wearing a little tie"), Jarmusch credits literature with shaping his metaphysical beliefs and leading him to reconsider theology in his mid-teens.[11] From his peers he developed a taste for counterculture: he and his friends would steal the records and books of their older siblings – William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Mothers of Invention.[4][12] They made fake identity documents which allowed them to visit bars at the weekend but also the local art house cinema – which though it typically showed pornographic films would on occasion feature underground films such as Robert Downey, Sr.'s Putney Swope and Andy Warhol's Chelsea Girls.[4][12] At one point, he took an apprenticeship with a commercial photographer.[4] "Growing up in Ohio", he would later remark, "was just planning to get out".[12]
After graduating from high school in 1971,[13] Jarmusch moved to Chicago and enrolled in the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.[7][14] After being asked to leave due to neglecting to take any journalism courses–Jarmusch favored literature and art history–he transferred to Columbia University the following year, with the intention of becoming a poet.[11][14] At Columbia, he studied English and American literature under professors including New York School avant garde poets Kenneth Koch and David Shapiro.[1] At Columbia he began to write short "semi-narrative abstract pieces",[1] and edited the undergraduate literary journal The Columbia Review.[7][15]
During his final year at Columbia, Jarmusch moved to Paris, for what was initially a summer semester on an exchange program but turned into ten months.[4][13] There, he worked as a delivery driver for an art gallery, and spent most of his time at the Cinémathèque Française.[4][7]
That’s where I saw things I had only read about and heard about – films by many of the good Japanese directors, like Imamura, Ozu, Mizoguchi. Also, films by European directors like Bresson and Dreyer, and even American films, like the retrospective of Samuel Fuller’s films, which I only knew from seeing a few of them on television late at night. When I came back from Paris, I was still writing, and my writing was becoming more cinematic in certain ways, more visually descriptive.
—Jarmusch on the Cinémathèque Française, taken from an interview with Lawrence Van Gelder of The New York Times, October 21, 1984.[1]
Jarmusch graduated from Columbia University in 1975.[7]
Broke and working as a musician in New York City after returning from Paris in 1976, Jarmusch applied on a whim to the prestigious Graduate Film School of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts (then under the direction of Hollywood director László Benedek).[1][4][14] Despite his complete lack of experience in filmmaking, his submission of a collection of still photographs and an essay about film secured his acceptance into the program.[1] He studied there for four years, meeting fellow students and future collaborators Sara Driver, Tom DiCillo and Spike Lee in the process.[7] During the late 1970s in New York City, Jarmusch and his contemporaries were part of an alternative culture scene centered on the CBGB music club.[16]
In his final year at New York University, Jarmusch worked as an assistant to the renowned film noir director Nicholas Ray, who was at that time teaching in the department.[7] In an anecdote Jarmusch has recounted of the formative experience of showing his mentor his first script, Ray disapproved of its lack of action, to which Jarmusch responded after meditating on the critique by reworking the script to be even less eventful. On Jarmusch's return with the revised script, Ray reacted favourably to his student's dissent, citing approvingly the young student's obstinate independence.[17] Jarmusch was the only person Ray brought to work – as his personal assistant – on Lightning Over Water, a documentary about his dying years on which he was collaborating with Wim Wenders.[4] Nicholas Ray died in the summer of 1979 after a long fight with cancer.[7] A few days afterwards, having been encouraged by Ray and New York underground filmmaker Amos Poe and using scholarship funds given by the Louis B. Mayer Foundation to pay for his school tuition,[1][18] Jarmusch started work on a film for his final project.[3][7] The university, unimpressed with Jarmusch's use of his funding as well as the project itself, promptly refused to award him a degree.[13]
Jarmusch's final year university project was completed in 1980 as Permanent Vacation, his first feature film.[13] It was made on a shoestring budget of around $12,000 in misdirected scholarship funds and shot by cinematographer Tom DiCillo on 16 mm film.[19] The 75 minute quasi-autobiographical feature follows an adolescent drifter (Chris Parker) as he wanders around downtown Manhattan.[20][21] The film was not released theatrically, and did not attract the sort of adulation from critics that greeted his later work. The Washington Post staff writer Hal Hinson would disparagingly comment in an aside during a review of Jarmusch's Mystery Train (1989) that in the director's debut, "the only talent he demonstrated was for collecting egregiously untalented actors".[22] The bleak and unrefined Permanent Vacation is nevertheless one of the director's most personal films, and established many of the hallmarks he would exhibit in his later work, including derelict urban settings, chance encounters, and a wry sensibility.[21][23]
Jarmusch's first major film, Stranger Than Paradise, was produced on a budget of approximately $125,000 and released in 1984 to much critical acclaim.[24][25] A deadpan comedy recounting a strange journey of three disillusioned youths from New York through Cleveland to Florida, the film broke many conventions of traditional Hollywood filmmaking.[26] It was awarded the Camera d'Or at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival as well as the 1985 National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Film,[27][28] and became a landmark work in modern independent film.[29]
In 1986, Jarmusch wrote and directed Down by Law, starring musicians John Lurie and Tom Waits, and Italian comic actor Roberto Benigni (his introduction to American audiences) as three convicts who escape from a New Orleans jailhouse.[30] Shot like the director's previous efforts in black and white, this constructivist neo-noir was Jarmusch's first collaboration with renowned Dutch cinematographer Robby Müller, who had been known for his work with Wenders.[31]
His next two films each experimented with parallel narratives: Mystery Train (1989) told three successive stories set on the same night in and around a small Memphis hotel, and Night on Earth (1991)[32] involved five cab drivers and their passengers on rides in five different world cities, beginning at sundown in Los Angeles and ending at sunrise in Helsinki.[17] Less bleak and somber than Jarmusch's earlier work, Mystery Train nevertheless retained the director's askance conception of America.[33] He wrote Night on Earth in about a week, out of frustration at the collapse of the production of another film he had written and the desire to visit and collaborate with friends such as Benigni, Gena Rowlands, and Isaach de Bankolé.[34]
As a result of his early work, Jarmusch became an influential representative of the trend of the American road movie.[35] Not intended to appeal to mainstream filmgoers, these early Jarmusch films were embraced by art house audiences,[36] gaining a small but dedicated American following and cult status in Europe and Japan.[37] Each of the four films had their premiere at the eminent and discerning New York Film Festival, while Mystery Train was in competition at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival.[27] Jarmusch's distinctive aesthetic and auteur status fomented a critical backlash at the close of this early period, however; though reviewers praised the charm and adroitness of Mystery Train and Night On Earth, the director was increasingly charged with repetitiveness and risk-aversion.[13][27]
In 1991 Jim Jarmusch appeared as himself in Episode One of John Lurie's cult television series Fishing With John.
In 1995, Jarmusch released Dead Man, a period film set in the 19th century American West starring Johnny Depp and Gary Farmer. Produced at a cost of almost $9 million with a high-profile cast including John Hurt, Gabriel Byrne and, in his final role, Robert Mitchum,[38] the film marked a significant departure for the director from his previous features.[39] Earnest in tone in comparison to its self-consciously hip and ironic predecessors, Dead Man was thematically expansive and of an often violent and progressively more surreal character.[13][39] The film was shot in black and white by Robby Müller, and features a score composed and performed by Neil Young, for whom Jarmusch subsequently filmed the tour documentary Year of the Horse, released to tepid reviews in 1997.
Though ill-received by mainstream American reviewers, Dead Man found much favor internationally and among critics, many of whom lauded it as a visionary masterpiece.[13] It has been hailed as one of the few films made by a Caucasian that presents an authentic Native American culture and character, and Jarmusch stands by it as such, though it has attracted both praise and castigation for its portrayal of the American West, violence, and especially Native Americans.[40]
Following artistic success and critical acclaim in the American independent film community, he achieved mainstream renown with his far-East philosophical crime film Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, shot in Jersey City and starring Forest Whitaker as a young inner-city man who has found purpose for his life by unyieldingly conforming it to the Hagakure, an 18th-century philosophy text and training manual for samurai, becoming, as directed, a terrifyingly deadly hit-man for a local mob boss to whom he may owe a debt, and who then betrays him. The soundtrack was supplied by RZA of the Wu-Tang Clan. The film was unique among other things for the number of books important to and discussed by its characters, most of them listed bibliographically as part of the end credits. The film is also considered to be an homage to Le Samourai, a 1967 French New Wave film by auteur Jean-Pierre Melville, which starred renowned French actor Alain Delon in a strikingly similar role and narrative.
A five-year gap followed the release of Ghost Dog, which the director has attributed to a creative crisis he experienced in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks in New York City.[9] 2004 saw the eventual release of Coffee and Cigarettes, a collection of eleven short films of characters sitting around drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes that had been filmed by Jarmusch over the course of the previous two decades. The first vignette, "Strange to Meet You", had been shot for and aired on Saturday Night Live in 1986, and paired Roberto Benigni with comedian Steven Wright. This had been followed three years later by "Twins", a segment featuring actors Steve Buscemi and Joie and Cinqué Lee, and then in 1993 with the Short Film Palme d'Or-winning "Somewhere in California", starring musicians Tom Waits and Iggy Pop.[41]
He followed Coffee and Cigarettes in 2005 with Broken Flowers, which starred Bill Murray as an early retiree who goes in search of the mother of his unknown son in attempt to overcome a midlife crisis. Following the release of Broken Flowers, Jarmusch signed a deal with Fortissimo Films, whereby the distributor would fund and have "first-look" rights to the director's future films, and cover some of the overhead costs of his production company, Exoskeleton.[42]
Jarmusch's latest film, The Limits of Control, opened in the United States on May 22, 2009. A sparse, meditative crime film set in Spain, it starred Isaach de Bankolé as a lone assassin with a secretive mission.[43] A behind-the-scenes documentary, Behind Jim Jarmusch, was filmed over three days on the set of the film in Seville by director Léa Rinaldi.[44]
In October 2009, Jarmusch appeared as himself in an episode of the HBO series Bored to Death.
In September 2010, Jarmusch helped to curate the All Tomorrow's Parties music festival in Monticello, New York. He is also working on a documentary about the rock band The Stooges and co-writing a non-traditional opera about the inventor Nikola Tesla.[45] He is planning a new film with Tilda Swinton, Michael Fassbender, Mia Wasikowska, and John Hurt,[46] which is scheduled to begin production in early 2012.[47]
| “ | Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery — celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from — it’s where you take them to.” | ” |
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—Jim Jarmusch, The Golden Rules of Filming[48] |
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Jarmusch has been characterized as a minimalist filmmaker, and his idiosyncratic films unhurried.[24][49] His films often eschew traditional narrative structure, lacking clear plot progression and focusing more on mood and character development.[9][49][50] In an interview early in his career, he stated that his goal was "to approximate real time for the audience."[51] Jarmusch's early work is marked by a brooding, contemplative tone, featuring extended silent scenes and prolonged still shots.[39] He has experimented with a vignette format in three films either released or begun around the early nineties: Mystery Train, Night on Earth, and Coffee and Cigarettes. Jarmusch's approach to filmmaking—in the words of The Salt Lake Tribune critic Sean P. Means—involves "blending film styles and genres with sharp wit and dark humor",[52] and is pervaded by a signature deadpan comedic tone.[43]
The protagonists of Jarmusch's films are usually lone adventurers.[3] The director's male characters have been described by critic Jennie Yabroff as "three time losers, petty thiefs and inept con men, all [...] eminently likeable, if not down right charming",[39] and by novelist Paul Auster as "laconic, withdrawn, sorrowful mumblers".[15]
Though his films are predominantly set in the United States, Jarmusch has advanced the notion that he looks at America "through a foreigner's eyes", with the intention of creating a form of world cinema that synthesizes European and Japanese film with that of Hollywood.[1] His films have often included foreign actors and characters, and (at times substantial) non-English dialogue. In his two later-nineties films, he dwelt on different cultures' experiences of violence, and on textual appropriations between cultures: a wandering Native American's love of William Blake, a black hit-man's passionate devotion to the Hagakure. The interaction and syntheses between different cultures, the arbitrariness of national identity, and irreverence towards ethnocentric, patriotic or nationalistic sentiment are recurring themes in Jarmusch's work.[39][53]
Jarmusch's fascination for music is another characteristic that is readily apparent in his work.[13][33] Musicians appear frequently in key roles – John Lurie, Tom Waits, Gary Farmer, Youki Kudoh, RZA and Iggy Pop have featured in multiple Jarmusch films, while Joe Strummer and Screamin' Jay Hawkins appear in Mystery Train and GZA, Jack and Meg White feature in Coffee and Cigarettes. Hawkins' song "I Put a Spell on You" was central to the plot of Stranger than Paradise, while Mystery Train is inspired by and named after a song popularized by Elvis Presley, who is also the subject of a vignette in Coffee and Cigarettes.[13] In the words of critic Vincent Canby, "Jarmusch's movies have the tempo and rhythm of blues and jazz, even in their use – or omission – of language. His films work on the senses much the way that some music does, unheard until it's too late to get it out of one's head."[33]
On his narrative focus, Jarmusch remarked in a 1989 interview, "I'd rather make a movie about a guy walking his dog than about the emperor of China."[54]
Jarmusch is ascribed as having instigated the American independent film movement with Stranger Than Paradise.[30] Critic Lynn Hirschberg declared Stranger than Paradise in a 2005 profile of the director for The New York Times to have "permanently upended the idea of independent film as an intrinsically inaccessible avant-garde form".[5] The success of the film accorded the director a certain iconic status within arthouse cinema, as an idiosyncratic and uncompromising auteur exuding the aura of urban cool embodied by downtown Manhattan.[55][56] Such perceptions were compounded with the release of his subsequent features in the late 1980s, establishing him as one of the generation's most prominent and influential independent filmmakers.[57][58] In a 1989 review of his work, Vincent Canby of The New York Times called Jarmusch "the most adventurous and arresting film maker to surface in the American cinema in this decade".[33]
Jarmusch was recognized with the Filmmaker on the Edge award at the 2004 Provincetown International Film Festival.[59] A retrospective of the director's films was hosted at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during February 1994, and another, "The Sad and Beautiful World of Jim Jarmusch", by the American Film Institute in August 2005.[60][61]
Jarmusch rarely discusses his personal life in public.[6][9] His longtime girlfriend, filmmaker Sara Driver, worked closely with him on his early films, but the stress this put on their relationship caused them to break up and resolve thereafter not to work together and have since lived together for many years.[9] He divides his time between New York City and the Catskill Mountains of Upstate New York.[6][62] Jarmusch stopped drinking coffee in 1986, the year of the first installment of Coffee and Cigarettes, though he remained a smoker.[63]
In the early 1980s, Jarmusch was part of a revolving lineup of musicians in Robin Crutchfield's Dark Day project,[64] and later became the keyboardist and one of two vocalists for The Del-Byzanteens,[7] a No Wave band whose sole LP Lies to Live By was a minor underground hit in the United States and Britain in 1982. Jarmusch is also featured on the album Wu-Tang Meets the Indie Culture (2005) in two interludes described by Sean Fennessy in a Pitchfork Media review of the album as both "bizarrely pretentious" and "reason alone to give it a listen".[65] Jarmusch and Michel Gondry each contributed a remix to a limited edition release of the track "Blue Orchid" by The White Stripes in 2005.[66]
The author of a series of essays on influential bands, Jarmusch has also had at least two poems published. He is a founding member of The Sons of Lee Marvin, a humorous "semi-secret society" of artists resembling the iconic actor, which issues communiqués and meets on occasion for the ostensible purpose of watching Marvin's films.[5][67]
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Jim Jarmusch, the art-house filmmaker who helped spark a renaissance in independent film, refuses to actually sit through some of the classics of American cinema.
"I pledge I will go to my grave having never seen Gone with the Wind or any Star Wars film," Jarmusch says. "Just to be obstinate. No other good reason."
It's a typical stance from a moviemaker who stubbornly creates films that critics often complain are too long, too meandering, and too often in black and white."
He's been content to appeal to the devoted if limited audience that responds to film as art. And that audience has embraced his Stranger Than Paradise, Down By Law, Mystery Train and Night on Earth."
In the eight years since Stranger than Paradise became an arthouse hit, Jarmusch has garnered a loyal but limited American audience. Yet abroad, particularly in Japan and Europe, both Jarmusch and his films have achieved cult status. For foreigners, perhaps even more so than for Americans, Jarmusch's films are the sine qua non of post-modern American hipdom. They articulate a distinctly funky, low-tech, outcast vision of American society that in both ethos and esthetics draws upon and amusingly blends the past five decades of postwar culture. While in content his films quietly defy Hollywood's myths of American progress and prosperity, in form (due to their stylistic simplicity and small budgets) they are a retort to the movie industry's bloated excess.
Recently, at the Yugoslavian film festival, 6,000 people turned out to fill a 4,000-seat theater for a midnight showing of Jarmusch's latest film, Night on Earth in wartorn Belgrade. In the past several months a traveling "Jim Jarmusch Film Festival" was held in major cities throughout Poland. Czechoslavakia will soon hold such a festival. And in Japan, where the director is a national celebrity, he is offered huge sums to appear in and direct commercials. To date he has turned down all offers."
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