I love Jim Jarmusch. His films helped me enormously in a dark period of my life. I needed to believe in art (read LIFE) again. And here he was. Here were his films and his white mane and beautiful visions. The films of Jarmusch are films of love, of cine-love. A director like him is something unusual and beautiful in the contemporary US cinema. His work is an example of integrity and coherence. His film are characterised by a narrative that is elliptical, fragmented and incessantly repeated. He surely internalised sculptural musical elements that reflect the studied rhythm of his films. The director's abiding interest in musical form is reflected in narrative style of his work and he openly admitted:
Movies are very musical... To me, music is the most pure form of art in that it communicates something immediately and it doesn't necessarily have to be restricted by your understanding of language. And film is a lot like music in that a film has a rhythm like a piece of music. You start a film and that rhythm take you through the story that's being told or the length of time the film lasts. The same way with a piece of music. They're closely related with rhythm: the cutting of the film, the way a camera moves, and the way a story is put together.1
Thank to the fragmentation and repetition of this rhythm, Jarmusch's narrative is simultaneously laid bare as a fictional construct, opened up to a multiplicity of perspectives and formed into a kind of puzzle which the audience must reassemble in order to make sense of it.2 That means that, firstly, the fiction behind the work of art is openly shown. There is not the pretension of copying reality but a proud claim for the fiction created. The director is an artist and a craftsman; he creates a story, writing it down with camera, soundtrack and actors. Secondly, the many perspectives offered try to open up peoples' minds on the immensity of cultures, tradition and histories existing in this world and ask them to be aware of and accept those diversities. Every opinion is just personal and limited, thus no solution can be given. Finally, the audience is engaged actively by the film. The narrative is laid bare but it needs to be reconstructed and, since no solution is given, the thoughts raised by the movie will stay in the spectators' mind after they leave the theatre. American mainstream cinema has a very different attitude to narrative, audience and the role of the director. The attention on the narrative is too often set aside in order to focus on the pretended 'realism' of the feature. The passive role of the audience is that of enjoying the movie for its mere entertainment value. Moreover, an unequivocal ending is given and that also prevents the filmgoers from further thoughts about what they have seen. Thus the role of the director is mutilated by the will of the Hollywood studios and his/her freedom as an artist is threatened. Jarmusch's choice of financial and artistic independence freed him from those strings. Certainly, this rejection of the Hollywood studios' ideas is only one cause of his choices, since influences of non-US cultures are central in his work. If we take apart the numerous allusions to movies, directors and cultural references, that influence is evident primarily on his narrative. Jarmusch himself claimed that he has been inspired by other cultures in which, like in China and India, there is a different sense of using the narrative form as a form of expression, as an art form versus purely a product of the market.3 His point of view is always from a pretty marginal perspective and the people he works with (that are usually in his group of friends) are roughly outside the mainstream. This position is then reflected in the clash between primitive/foreign cultures and 'advanced'/familiar ones offer an interesting social portrait of the limits of the contemporary Western society. That comparison contributes to the disorienting fragmentation and repetition of Jarmusch's style. The poverty of many works of art is related to the lack of ability in looking back and forward and his elliptical narrative is a challenge if considered under this point of view. Space and time are wisely orchestrated in an unusual complex ensemble and he attentively choses every single move. Eventually, the honesty and coherence of his work derives from this total control and precision.
Jarmusch's changing of the narrative in his films reflects the changing of the emphasis on the story he narrates. It is rare to have such a balanced co-operation of form and content. The loyalty of his characters to their code is the mirror image of the extraordinary degree of integrity in his work. Surely, the most emblematic are Ghost Dog (Forrest Whitaker in Ghost Dog) and the Lone Man (Isaach De Bankolé in The Limits of Control) but every and each one of Jarmusch's characters is coherent to their principles in their own very personal way. Like many other artists, Jarmusch gives clues about his creative process and what or who influenced it. Those references are so many in his case and sometimes so subtle that it would be impossible to list them all for anybody but him. Two of them, though, can be seen as particularly significant in relation with the director's narrative. The first is one of the maxims from the guidebook for warriors Hagakure Kikigaki that filled one of the blackouts between shots at about 1/3 through Ghost Dog - The way of the Samurai. The voice of Ghost Dog (Forest Whittaker) simultaneously reads the words on the screen:
Among the maxims on Lord Naoshige's wall there was this one: “Matters of great concern should be treated lightly”. Master Ittei commented: “Matters of small concern should be treated seriously”.
Similarly, Jarmusch's films do not rely on their plot or their revisited genre. In fact, although his narrative might seem scattered at certain points, Jarmusch claims that the plot has only a secondary role in his movies:
The plot has never been of first importance to me. […] I start with actors whose work I know, or whom I know personally, and create characters from who they are. Then everything else becomes kind of like making connect-the-dots drawing. I'm a real detail freak. I know every ashtray, every article of clothing, what kind of cigarette they smoke, what kind of car they drive, the shoes they wear. All those things end up creating the atmosphere of the film. I keep on collecting things that may seem disparate but I just keep on collecting if they have some vague connection to the kind of world I'm thinking the story will eventually take place in.4
In fact, the effectiveness of Jarmusch's films is delivered by the tone created by subtle and clever repetitions. Those minutiae of human gesture and movement, small details, vignettes, funny coincidences, object and references say at least as much about the characters' emotions and states of mind as would any dramatic plot-twist.5 Such variations are beautiful structures that Jarmusch declared to love in many interviews along his career.6 Another emblematic element of Jarmusch direction is locked up in a line said by Roberto (interpreted by Roberto Benigni) in Down By Law: 'It's a sad and beautiful world'. The importance of this quote is double. Firstly, it resumes the sublime (in the Romantic meaning of the term) tone of Jarmusch films in which beauty is researched in the ugly, the weird, the marginal, the unusual, sometimes in the death itself which is accepted as a stage of the cycle of life. Secondly, the line was made up by the actor who was supposed to say: 'It's a sad and beautiful song'.7 The emblematic role of foreigners and different languages will mark Jarmusch's whole filmography8 but, in this case, the focus is on the coincidences of life, the happy misunderstandings. This lucky mistake was well accepted by Jarmusch and will appear again, metaphorically or as a sort of knowing wink to his audience.
What I particularly love about his work is that the director's aesthetic seems to have stayed pretty much intact over the years, except for a subtle exception. From the early 1990s, he seems to be more flexible in his zeal for minimal structures and in the skepticism about camera movement and non-diegetic music. Now everything is changing quickly (in my point of view, too quickly) and the use of similar forms is usually consider a sign of weakness. That not the case of Jim Jarmusch. The ability to deal gracefully with any kind of constraints is typical of his work and he can always find a refined balance between limitations and his artistic choices. What seems to be a lucky series of coincidences and unusual devices, is in reality a thoughtful mix of imagination and thorough technical compromises. The revision of familiar genres and the complex system of homages and references challenges the viewers. That is one of the reasons why it is unlikely that Jarmusch could never find a place in the mainstream US cinema. The adamant assertion of his financial and artistic independence from Hollywood studios shows that he regards this 'exclusion' as a positive implicit differentiation in US contemporary cinema. Nonetheless that allows him to deal with social and political denunciation which is often directed to his own country, the Unites States. Jarmusch's depiction of Western society is extremely effective thanks to the implicit and sophisticated voice of his reporting, usually delivered through metaphors and symbols. His filmography is reminiscent of the art of the mosaic. Firstly, because of the sapient construction of each movie out of an infinite series of anecdotes, sequences, objects, allusions and motifs that seemingly aimless, eventually, find their place in the movie. Secondly, those elements are technically and metaphorically repeated in all his movies and become variations of the same themes and ideas, offering a sense of coherence in his filmography and a beautiful unexpected order out of the chaos of life.
1Tasker Yvonne (ed.), Fifty Contemporary Filmmakers, London : Routledge, 2002, p. 183.
2Geoff Andrew, Stranger Than Paradise – Maverick Film-makers in Recent American Cinema, London : Prion Books, 1998, p. 365.
3Roman Shari, Digital Babylon – Hollywood, Indiewood & Dogme 95, Hollywood : Lone Eagle Publishing Company, 2001, p. 162.
4Roman, Digital Babylon, 2001, p. 161.
5Geoff, Stranger Than Paradise, 1998, pp. 140-141.
6Mottram James, Theme and Variations in Sight and Sound, January 2010, Volume 20, Issue I, p. 16.
7Hertzberg Ludvig, Jim Jarmusch Interviews, Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, 2001, pp. 21-47.
8Hertzberg, Jim Jarmusch Interviews, 2001, p. 144.
