Artist Profile: Jim Jarmusch

For the past four decades, Jim Jarmusch has established himself as one of the most significant American independent filmmakers of his generation through his defiantly iconoclastic visual and narrative approach to filmmaking. Throughout his filmography, the director has cultivated a recognizable ‘Jarmuschian’ aesthetic via his patented meditative, hazy depictions of America, which he repeatedly uses as backdrops to explore themes of isolation, disillusionment, and human connection. His films are distinctly American, while also being distinctly anti-Hollywood; and it is in this tension between America as it is dreamed and America as it is experienced in actuality that Jarmusch finds his cinematic language.

Despite his creative and narrative inclinations, Jarmusch came to filmmaking relatively late in his life. After leaving his hometown of Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, Jarmusch moved to Chicago to study Journalism at Northwestern University, before being asked to leave by the Dean as a result of not attending his journalism courses in favour of Creative writing and History courses. He then enrolled at Columbia University, and studied English and Comparative Literature, with the intention of pursuing poetry. But it was a 10 month stint in Paris during his enrollment that invigorated his interest in film as a medium. It was at the Cinemateque in the French Capital that Jarmusch was introduced to many international arthouse directors, including Robert Bresson and Carl T. Dreyer, who inspired his writing to lean “more cinematic in certain ways, more visually descriptive.”

After graduating from Columbia, Jarmusch changed course and decided to apply to study film at NYU. Despite not having made any films, his application was accepted on the strength of a collection of photographs and an essay on film. In the final year of the degree he worked as an assistant to famous director Nicholas Ray–a faculty member at NYU at the time–who took on a sort of mentor role in Jarmusch’s life. As said by Jarmusch in reference to Ray, “He was always telling us, “if you want to make films, watch a lot of films, but don't just watch films, go take a walk, look at the sky, read a book about meteorology, look at the design of people's shoes. Because all of them are part of filmmaking." So I thought, perfect! That's a good job for me.”

Despite spending four years at NYU, he never received a degree; a result of spending the $12,000 meant for his tuition on his thesis feature film, Permanent Vacation. The film was not received well by the NYU film department, was never theatrically released, and critics' retrospectives have been largely negative. Despite this, many of the hallmarks of Jarmusch’s oeuvre can be found within the film. The film’s protagonist is a meandering drifter, who wanders through a Dickensian depiction of Manhattan, searching for a kind of ultimate purpose. Along the way he encounters an ensemble cast of characters, who each carry their own idiosyncrasies, and the film’s music is integral to the atmosphere, pacing, and emotional motifs of the film. These are all things that can be said about nearly every Jarmusch film, if not at least in an abstract capacity.

Jarmuch’s debut film was a reflection of the ‘No Wave’ scene in New York that Jarmusch was a contributor to at the time, playing keyboard in a band called ‘The Del-Byzanteens’. The band often played shows at the legendary punk venue CBGB, which is where Jarmusch met musician John Laurie, who would be a frequent and key collaborator in his early films. As the filmmaker later said of the period, “"It was a really interesting time in New York in the late '70s and early '80s, and the music scene was really, really interesting because you didn't have to be a virtuoso to make music, it was more about your desire to express things.”

It was with his first theatrically released film, 1984’s Stranger than Paradise, that proved to be the filmmaker's break. Made on a larger but still miniscule budget of around $125,000, the film was a smash hit with critics, and still exists as a beloved classic of American independent cinema. Akira Kurosawa has even named it one of his favourite films of all time. And it’s easy to see why. It is a triumphant debut; fresh and transgressive for its time, while also ripe with the humanistic and idiosyncratic approach to character Jarmusch has always taken throughout his filmography. The film, similarly to Permanent Vacation, follows a drifter and features a loose, minimal plot. The protagonist Willie is ostensibly aimless and ambitionless, as he and his friend Eddie get by as small time hustlers. He is trepidatious when his cousin Eva comes to stay with him from Budapest, and insists she speaks English to him; pontificating about his strong “American” identity, despite being an immigrant himself.

The title of the film itself underscores its conceit; Willie is a stranger amongst the ‘paradise’ of America–paradise in a somewhat pejorative sense. He is both a stranger in a literal way, as an immigrant in the ‘new world’, and a more existential one. Despite his insistence on his ‘Americaness’, Willie clearly feels like an interloper in his strange new environment. And although he is an advocate for the American dream, he does not aspire to work hard and make an honest living. In spite of America existing as a nation built on immigration, the immigrant experience is often just as isolating and comes with as much culture shock as it would be in the ‘old world’. Willie’s life in America is that of an outsider–both to the idealistic values of America and America itself. Which is essentially what Jarmusch is illuminating with this film; the anti-Hollywood version of the American experience.

Jarmusch has always been inclined to illuminate the bizarre corners of America, and often does so through the eyes of a foreigner. A recurring motif of his filmography is a protagonist that goes on some form of a ‘heroes journey’ though a strange, foreign environment–whether that be cultural foreignness or physical foreignness. His 1989 anthology film Mystery Train begins with a Japanese couple arriving in Memphis, who have travelled there to see the birthplace of Elvis Presley. The influence of the American pop culture icon on the male character is evident in his presentation, as he wears his thick black hair in a heavily jelled pompadour. The character’s obsession with American culture juxtaposed with his reliance on his girlfriend as a translator is a case of Jarmusch illuminating America as somewhat lost in translation as a globalized cultural influence. Mystery Train’s three stories are connected only via a hotel and individual references to Elvis Presley, who possesses a kind of divine role within the film. The iconography of Elvis is used by Jarmusch as a visual metaphor to address perhaps the most prominent overarching question asked through his filmography, being ‘what is the idea of America’. It is a question the Golden Age of Hollywood answered quite emphatically. But for a post-war, dysphoria-riddled generation, the question became muddier.

Stranger than Paradise, 1986’s Down By Law, and 1995’s Dead Man, all illuminate the more derelict, and at times surreal corners of the country. Dead Man is Jarmusch’s off-kilter take on a Western, in which a mild mannered accountant goes on a bizarre journey through late 19th century American wild west. But rather than championing the individuality and heroism of a white cowboy protagonist, the film presents the wild west as a strange, dark place that follows no moral code. The film is also another case of Jarmusch placing characters in foreign environments, as protagonist William Blake(Johnny Depp) clearly does not feel at home in the town of ‘Machine’. The film features a host of eccentric characters, as does his second film Down By Law, which follows three idiosyncratic central characters as they are confined to the same prison cell, before eventually escaping. The three strangers subjected to each other's company are played by Tom Waits, Iggy Pop, and John Lurie–all of whom had or would go on to act in other Jarmusch films. Similarly to other modern auteurs, Jarmusch has made a habit of re-using actors for multiple films.

Throughout his 15 film oeuvre, Jarmusch has established his own directorial world, and cinematic vision of America. Akin to American culture itself, his films often rely on the blending of different elements which are foreign to each other to create something new, or create an instability or tension. As said by Jarmusch, "I think I feel not at home in America, but not necessarily at home outside of America." And that feeling manifests within his films, which blend Hollywood reference points with European arthouse sensibilities–thus achieving the tension between familiarity and unfamiliarity that Jarmusch strives for. This tension between the familiar and unfamiliar is what cinematically conceives the dreamlike quality associated with his films, and also aids the filmmaker in actualizing his ultimate creed. Jarmusch transposes the American ‘Dream’ to the screen in the form of a nightmare. And, like many nightmares, the lingering uneasy feeling is a reflection of waking life.

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