Jim Jarmusch Research Articles

On the frontier of politics: Ideology and the western in Jerzy Skolimowski's Essential Killing and Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man

ABSTRACTThe article analyses two recent films that re-use motives and themes from the western genre in order to criticize its ideological heroization of violence and ties to the history of US imperialism. Jerzy Skolimowski's Essential Killing (2010) does so through discreet, critical references to classic westerns in a movie about an ‘illegal combatant’ in the War on Terror, while Jim Jarmusch's revisionist western Dead Man (1995) seeks to break with traditional depictions of Native Americans. The article argues that Skolimowski's film discovers a material world of primitive instincts and violence beneath the layers of political and cinematographic ideology. Essential Killing thereby illustrates a pessimistic tendency in current European cinema, which is countered by the comical lesson on political emancipation given by the Indian protagonist of Jarmusch's film. The two films thus embody two opposing possibilities in today's critical cinema: to reveal the destruction of the political subject or to find ways of re-constructing it.

Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man

Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man is a modern myth. Like many ancient myths it seems to have the structure of a rite of passage analysed by van Gennep into three stages: separation, marginal existence and reintegration. Separation is precipitated by a traumatic event and the marginal state is characterized by extraordinary experiences and feats. However, Jarmusch's tale does not quite fit the ancient initiation pattern since the last stage, reintegration, is at least prima facie missing. This already undermines the social function of initiation and warps the significance of the myth. The modern town of “Machine”, where the marginal existence of Blake is sealed, looms in the background of the story of his final journey to the world of spirits whence he had come. But Blake cannot quite embrace the story in which he plays the protagonist. The story is cobbled together by the Native American called “Nobody.” Blake sceptically resigns himself to his fate. Why does Blake do this? Jarmusch manipulates the generic structure of the initiation tale in order to say something culturally significant about the possibility of living a meaningful life in a world dominated by the machine. In other words, he tells a modern myth. What does his tale say?

"On Being Idolized" : construction d’une identité américaine à travers quelques poèmes de Robert Frost

This article explores America’s literary canon through the major New England figure of farmer-poet Robert Frost (1874-1963), who offered a complex vision of American identity in his volumes, from that of the highly-acclaimed national artist to the uneasily translated and understood poet. Frost’s poetry, whose geographical limits are often blurred and which seems to constantly question and broaden its own Americanness, will also be analyzed here through its modern illustration in Jim Jarmusch’s movie Down by Law (1986).

Making nothing happen

This article draws from Gilles Deleuze’s interpretation of the Nietzschean concept of “the eternal return” in order to read Jim Jarmusch’s film Broken Flowers as being not merely a study in duration, apathy and reactive nihilism, but also a film which, through its formal repetitive structure, also offers pathways to transformation and affirmation. As such, I argue that the central protagonist, Don Johnston undergoes a subtle yet crucial change in the course of the film from a state of ressentiment to affirmation and becoming. I also characterise the film as an absurdist quest or road movie.

Re-enacting cinema at the crossroads: Nicky Coutts's Passing Place

Nicky Coutts’s film Passing Place (2009) consists of six re-enactments of the moments in which crossroads appear in the following films: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex (1967), Jim Jarmusch’s Down By Law (1986), Robert Zemeckis’s Castaway (2000), Maya Deren’s Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (1985), Stuart Rosenberg’s Cool Hand Luke (1967) and Luis Bunuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972). The crossroads in Passing Place is located in rural Northumberland and the ‘re-enactors’ are local people who live or work nearby. Th e original films were chosen by both Coutts and the participants, Passing Place being made during Coutts’s residency at VARC (Visual Arts in Rural Communities) at Highgreen Tarset. While artists have been ‘remaking cinema’ for over a decade, Coutts’s film should be seen against the backdrop of the more recent phenomenon of re-enactment in artists’ practices, which focuses on the event of performance rather than on the medium of film per se. In this focus, the interrelationships between temporality and memory, acting and authenticity, become paramount. Rather than writing solely about Coutts’s film, I shall use it to think through these interrelationships, ultimately focusing on those aspects that allow me to unravel my encounter with Passing Place. The work was shown at Danielle Arnaud Contemporary Art in 2010 along with two other films by Coutts, Eastern (2010) and Reminsizenzen der Erinnerung (2010), both of which also engage with cinematic re-enactment, but which are beyond the scope of this article.

The semiotic construction of worldview in film: Multimodal variations in Le Samourai, The Killer, and Ghost Dog

Using a narrative-semiotic approach, this paper explores some devices used by film to create a worldview and a philosophical approach to identity and action. To achieve this, the paper explores how certain film noir hybrids, which are based on the same prototypical story, modify narrative and stylistic elements to produce different text-worlds. It analyzes a highly influential cinematic text, Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai (1967), and discusses some prominent stylistic and thematic elements that have been re-constructed and re-positioned differently in various films that trace their artistic origins to Melville's text. This paper considers two of these films, John Woo's The Killer (1989) and Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog (1999). It examines their commonalities and differences through an analysis of how they: a) dramatize the tension between language (saying) and action (doing); b) encode action through a stylization of physical movement; c) employ camera angle and distance to frame action sequences; d) employ modalities of light and color to qualify the represented action.

Otherness in Hollywood Cinema by Michael Richardson (review)

Reviewed by: Otherness in Hollywood Cinema by Michael Richardson Emily Godbey Otherness in Hollywood Cinema. By Michael Richardson. New York and London: Continuum. 2010. Richardson, who has published quite widely on the writings of Georges Bataille and surrealism, presents an overview and analysis of the “other” as depicted in American cinema from Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) to the present. As such, the book is ambitious in scope, both in addressing a wide time span and in the varied typologies of “others” examined. For example, Richardson takes on “nature as other,” Native Americans, Asians (Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese), ethnographic spectacles, zombies, and the femme fatale in noir—as well as numerous additional examples of “others” which have merited monographs of their own. The book opens with a meditation on the status of the Hollywood system, founded with a sense of exile by its largely Jewish founders. The author also addresses the problem of defining the abstraction of the “other” against the self. Although there might be said to be a rough overarching chronological timeline, with emphasis on films from the 1920’s and 1930’s in the first part of the book, the 1940’s and 1950’s in the middle, and in the last, contemporary cinema, most chapters are also organized thematically. However, there are anomalies to this system of organization; Apocalypse Now is given its own chapter, while Steven Spielberg and Jim Jarmusch have auteur-based chapters (although their films are also incorporated elsewhere). The final chapter is devoted to King Kong, as Richardson considers it a summation of the nature/culture and primitive/modern themes in American film, at least in the 1933 version, if not in the poor 1976 or 2005 remakes. Since the book has covered such a large array of others in the previous pages, perhaps not all readers will agree that Kong is the “epitome of otherness” (224), however. The book was strongest in the analysis of Asian cultures in American film, perhaps because that theme is interwoven throughout so many chapters, whereas some other motifs are not picked up again as often or directly. However, I was at [End Page 188] times unsure about who “we viewers” were in the book, as the preface describes how American cinema presents itself to the outside world; however, it seemed that the implied viewer of “we” was often a generic American viewer. In contrast, I particularly appreciated the portions of the book that covered reception at the time of the original release (Fu Manchu films), among groups outside the United States (the Chinese government’s opposition to Kundun), or with a specific American sub-group (an Asian-American watchdog groups’ opinions), for example. The author’s working definition of “Hollywood” in the title remains a bit ambiguous. The Hollywood studio system of the early years is clear, but that definition becomes more muddled with contemporary cinema—especially with the inclusion of the chapter on Jarmusch who is described as being an “other” to Hollywood in terms of sensibility, control, and distribution (192). Nonetheless, with twelve distinct chapters with some clear screening options, I could see this book working quite well for a film class on the same topic. Emily Godbey Iowa State University Copyright © 2012 Mid-America American Studies Association

Postmodern Philosophy and the Impact of the Other in Jim Jarmusch's Films

[sic] – a Journal of Literature, Culture and Literary Translation focuses on theoretical, empirical and artistic research in the fields of culture, literature and literary translation. [sic] thus welcomes the submission of works that focus on various theoretical or empirical problems within the fields listed above, as well as original translations. By publishing research papers, video essays, reviews, literary criticism, interviews and literature in translation, [sic] wishes to offer a wide, interdisciplinary approach to dominant, but also marginal and/or currently unrecognized as well as emerging literary and cultural trends and practices and in this way open a dialogue between proponents of different approaches to the said areas. As such, [sic] is seen as an international platform for scholars, practitioners and artists dealing with culture, literature and literary translation.

Stranger Than Paradise: (Jim Jarmusch, 1984)

Stranger Than Paradise(Jim Jarmusch, 1984) A. Van Jordan (bio) Upon entering The New World, my first discovery is how when you land someplace new, everything feels the same. I have been in touch with my American family through letters written in Hungarian. Meeting them, speaking English, holds home at arm’s length: My cousin’s one-room apartment shows me all I need to know of Manhattan, so I seek the shaded skyline of Cleveland as a gift to myself. My cousin. He offers me a dress as a token of acceptance, but it’s ugly, and I let him know I appreciate his ugly offering, but, once out of sight, I pitch it in the trash around the corner, which is my last act of love in the city. Why do they call these meals TV dinners, when we eat them at the kitchen table? Where did this meat come from anyway? The road ahead will offer more questions as answers. I welcome the Midwest smog as clarity of where I am, for once. Snow makes Lake Erie look like a painting. What I mean to say is how it looks matters less than how I feel standing before it. My Aunt Lotte worries about my hanging with bad boys, meaning her son and his friend. Why not worry about them hanging with me and my man, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, who’s a real bad dude, not to be messed with? I can handle myself any place from Cleveland to Cape Canaveral, from Budapest to the Lower [End Page 103] East Side, so back off and let me work a spell on you. I’ve been headed toward paradise my whole life. I’ve been on this journey meeting strangers who mistake me for someone they owe, and I accept their offerings with wit and suspicion. In the world, what else does a traveler need to survive? Whatever comes my way, I share with those around me, those people calling themselves friends, cousins. I see they need a guide on their journey, someone to push them out of their homes onto a plane, a beach, a road leading nowhere holding promise—but promising, nonetheless— a place they always said was nice, and promised me I’d love, though they’ve never been there themselves. [End Page 104] A. Van Jordan A. Van Jordan is the author of Rise (Tia Chucha Press, 2001), M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A (W. W. Norton, 2004), and Quantum Lyrics (W. W. Norton, 2007). He teaches at the University of Michigan. Copyright © 2012 Middlebury College Publications

Hollywood Hybrids: Mixing Genres in Contemporary Films (review)

Reviewed by: Hollywood Hybrids: Mixing Genres in Contemporary Films Michael Green Hollywood Hybrids: Mixing Genres in Contemporary Films Ira Jaffe. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008, 160 pp. In Hollywood Hybrids: Mixing Genres in Contemporary Films, Ira Jaffe takes on the subject of genre mixing in films, or what he calls "hybrid cinema," and attempts to draw a comparison between classical Hollywood and contemporary Hollywood, saying that the former has "not yielded hybrid generic forms … as radical as those in other [artistic] traditions that have responded to modern life's distinct complexity and indeterminacy" (24). Some contemporary Hollywood films, on the other hand, according to Jaffe, "faithfully reflect as well as influence contemporary life" (6). Overall, he writes, "Diverse stylistic and generic currents intersect in more glaring and anarchic ways than in the past" (26). If this seems vague, it is at least consistent with the rest of the book, which examines this "phenomenon" (26), as the author calls it, in a rather disorganized manner. The book is arranged into an introduction and five chapters titled "Fact and Fiction," "Gangster and Warrior," "Melodrama and Teen Romance," "Tragicomic Accidents," and "Global Parallels." The chapter titles give some idea of Jaffe's wide scope, a scope that accounts for much of the vagueness of the book. Jaffe starts out with a comparison that one might reasonably tackle in 160 pages—classical Hollywood genre mixing versus contemporary Hollywood genre mixing—and then immediately departs from it by looking at documentaries in chapter 1. Despite the many thoughtful points, overall, there are too many eras represented here, too many kinds of films: not only classical Hollywood and documentary, but also international, independent, and avant-garde films, among others. By taking a tour across film history, Jaffe actually makes the opposite point: that the way in which contemporary films handle genre is not so different from films of the past. And this is without even stating the obvious, which is that some of the most famous films from the classical era, from Citizen Kane to It's a Wonderful Life, are unclassifiable hybrids that mix a number of genres. Better-defined categories would have helped. Many of the films that Jaffe lumps under "Hollywood" are made by directors such as David Lynch, Richard Linklater, Quentin Tarantino, Jim Jarmusch, and Todd Haynes, directors whom most film scholars and even casual fans would link to independent filmmaking. Though most of them have worked in Hollywood (and Jaffe is careful to name films distributed if not produced by major studios as Hollywood), they nonetheless made their names in the independent golden age of the late 1980s and early 1990s, a time when these films were clearly trying to set themselves apart from Hollywood's aesthetic. Genre mixing in the independents was not only common but even a selling point. To really make his case that contemporary Hollywood films mix genres differently than their predecessors and are more "sensitive to modern circumstances," Jaffe needs to have used more mainstream examples. Alas, beyond Fargo and Three Kings (again, by directors who have their roots in independent filmmaking), there are not many such examples here. Jaffe is better at summarizing histories and analyzing styles than he is at making arguments. Individual strands of sharp description and analysis jump out all over the place. His breakdown of the films of Stan Brakhage, for example, is an excellent summary of both the form and purpose of the filmmaker's work; his writing on Pulp Fiction in terms of genre, identification, and pop cultural allusion is among [End Page 58] the best in the book; and he brings a generous knowledge in comparing Todd Hayne's Far from Heaven with Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows. Too often, though, these isolated strands of analysis, however incisive, fail to connect to a larger point or flow from an explicit purpose. Jaffe is obviously a film lover, and he has clearly watched these films carefully, but he often provides too much blow-by-blow description of the films without the careful, consistent analysis that would contextualize them and bring the author back around to an argument. Sections and chapters end without summing up or even...

Transatlantic Refractions: Ambivalence and Cultural Hybridity in the Euro-American Road Movie

This article analyses a variety of ways in which the “road movie” has been reinterpreted by modern European directors (German Wim Wenders, Finn Aki Kaurismäki) or American director Jim Jarmusch with his pronounced European sensibilities. Despite the ubiquity of American popular culture in many of these movies, the films themselves are far from representing a simple “colonization” on the part of American culture. The ambivalent view of the United States adopted by these men has helped transform a typically “American” genre into a new demonstration of transatlantic cultural hybridity.

80. Word & Image in colonial and postcolonial literatures and cultures.

Acknowledgements Illustrations and Permissions Introduction Michael Meyer: Word & Image - Gaze & Spectacle Colonial Representations Daniel Jaczminski: Liberating the Strange Fish. Visual Representations of Caliban and Their Successive Emancipation from Shakespeare's Original Text Peter Wagner: Hogarth and the Other Patricia Plummer: free treatment of topics usually taboo'd. Glimpses of the Harem in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Literature and the Fine Arts Cordula Lemke: Tourist Places, Other Gazes. Robert Louis Stevenson's Edinburgh Postcolonial Representations Gisela Feurle: Picture is a Silent Talker (Apagya). African Studio Photography in the English Classroom Sonja Altnoder: A Black and White Nation? The 'New' South Africa in Zapiro's Cartoons Marita Wenzel: Zakes Mda's Representation of South African Reality in Ways of Dying, The Madonna of Excelsior and The Whale Caller Heilna du Plooy: Looking Out and Looking In. The Dynamic Use of Words and Images in the Oeuvre of Breyten Breytenbach Susan Arndt: Whiteness as a Category of Literary Analysis. Racializing Markers and Race-Evasiveness in J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace Ann Spangenberg: Just for show. Visuality in Timothy Mo's The Monkey King Laurence Petit: On Pickles, Pictures, and Words: Pick-torial Preservation and Verbal Self-Regeneration in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children Lucia Kramer: Neither united nor separated. Negotiating Difference in Ashutosh Gowariker's Lagaan and Ketan Mehta's Mangal Pandey Christine Vogt-William: Transcultural Gender Interrogations in Bride and Prejudice. Intertextual Encounters of the South Asian Diasporic Kind Rainer Emig: Missing in Act(i)on. Asian-British Pop Music Between Resistance and Commercialization Renate Brosch: Vernacular Landscape. Narrative Space in Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang Michaela Moura-Kocoglu: Regaining the Past and Shaping the Present. Indigenous Children's Fiction from Aotearoa New Zealand, Canada, and the USA Nicole Schroder: Between Words and Images. Negotiating the Meaning of Home in Ken Lum's There Is No Place Like Home Jens Martin Gurr: The Mass-Slaughter of Native Americans in Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man. A Complex Interplay of Word and Image Notes on Contributors

Bach and Cigarettes: Imagining the Everyday in Jarmusch'sInt. Trailer. Night

AbstractIn Jim Jarmusch'sInt. Trailer. Night(2002) a young American actress, alone in her trailer for a ten-minute break, lights up a cigarette and puts on a CD of theGoldberg Variations. In this short, almost plotless experimental film Bach sounds outside the frameworks that typically motivate the diegetic presence of so-called ‘classical music’ in cinema, detached from the places and signifiers of high art and from high-level meanings and pointed occurrences. This unusual representation of listening opens up two complementary lines of enquiry: first, into the way in which Jarmusch draws on Bach to invent a reality that is strange and irreducible, marked by unexpected cultural affiliations and by an elusive affective realm; second, into the way in which, by thus channelling Bach into his poetics of the everyday, the director reinvents the music's own identity, putting forward a de-essentialized image of its cultural placement and aesthetic status.

The Phantom of Communication: Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog and the Opacity of the Message

In this article, Jim Jarmusch’s film Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999) is examined in order to question contemporary media. Jarmusch’s film is interesting for its treatment of communication and the ways it is being shaped by modern media technology. The film is about a contract hit man for the Mafia who lives according to the Way of the Samurai, through which he has established a lifestyle fundamentally at odds with the contemporary mediatised world. Jarmusch appears to view communication as more than transmission of and interaction with information. His film suggests that it occurs in subtleties of gesture and allusion and in what is left unspoken as much, if not more than, in what is fully articulated. From this starting point, the extent to which the contemporary media really comprise means of communication or in fact serve to obscure true communication between people is explored.

Stranger on a Train: William Blake and Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man – Media and Violence, Poetry and Politics

In his Illuminated Books, William Blake developed a distinct artistic media practice. This practice is inseparable from Blake’s media theoretical reflections which anticipate those of Marshall McLuhan in their insistence that ‘the medium is the message.’ Jim Jarmusch’s film Dead Man (1995), a reworking of the Western genre and perhaps the most original of the many contemporary works of popular culture which reference Blake, takes up Blake’s and McLuhan’s thoughts by focusing on the violence trains, guns, watches, and factories wrought upon 1870s North America. This aspect of the film ties in with Blake’s trenchant critique of industrial capitalism and its effects on human beings. Blake’s status as a ‘Prophet against Empire’ is then taken up and related to Jarmusch’s Blake becoming a ‘Killer of white men,’ which raises urgent questions about the relationship between art and politics. Finally, the character of Thel Russell, who sells paper flowers in the film, is shown to incarnate Blake’s views on the power of the imagination and to resonate with his experience as an artist

ORAL HISTORY AS POLITICAL RESISTANCE: Posse and Once Upon a Time in Mexico

In the introduction to his The Western Reader Jim Kitses observes that the Western film, a genre long-heralded as the “cornerstone of American identity,” (16) is itself not exempt from an undertaking of racial and cultural revisionism. He points to a resurgence of films from the 1990’s that, in an era of multi-culturalism, hybridity, and counter-strategies, have functioned to redefine the codes of the traditional Western, bringing to life the postmodern Western. The subversive politics of Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995), and Maggie Greenwald’s The Ballad of Little Jo (1993), are two such examples.

DVD Reviews

The French Old Wave: Claude Sautet's Classe tous risques Classe tous risques (1960) France Director Claude Sautet Screenplay Claude Sautet, Jos Giovanni and Pascal Jardin Original Novel Jos Giovanni Producer Jean Darvey Director of Photography Ghislain Cloquet Music Georges Delerue With Lino Ventura (Abel Davos), Sandra Milo (Liliane), Jean-Paul Belmondo (Eric Stark), Marcel Dalio (Arthur Gibelin), Michel Ardan (Henri Vintran), Claude Cerval (Raoul Fargier), Jacques Dacqmine (Blot), Simone France (Thrse Davos) Runtime 108 minutes DVD, 2008, USA Produced and Distributed by The Criterion Collection (region 1) Aspect Ratio 1.66:1 Sound Mix Mono 1.0 Extras New restored high-definition transfer. Excerpts from Claude Sautet ou la magie invisible, a 2003 documentary on the director. Interview with Classe tous risques novelist and screenwriter Jos Giovanni. Archival footage interview with actor Lino Ventura. Original French and US trailers. New and improved English subtitle translation. Booklet with new essays by director Bertrand Tavernier and N. T. Binh, a reprinted interview with Claude Sautet, and a 1962 tribute by Jean-Pierre Melville. Shadows (1959) USA Director John Cassavetes Producer Maurice McEndree Cinematography Erich Kollmar Editing John Cassavetes and Maurice McEndree Associate Producer Seymour Cassel Saxophone solos Shafi Hadi Additional music Charles Mingus Lighting David Simon With Ben Carruthers (Ben), Lelia Goldoni (Leila), Hugh Hurd (Hugh), Anthony Ray (Tony), Dennis Sallas (Dennis), Tom Allen (Tom), David Pokitillow (David), Rupert Crosse (Rupert) Runtime 81 minutes DVD, 2009, USA Produced and Distributed by The Criterion Collection (region 1) Aspect Ratio 1.33:1 Extras Restored high-definition digital transfer. Video interviews with actress Lelia Goldoni and associate producer Seymour Cassel. Rare silent 16mm footage of John Cassavetes and Burt Lane's acting workshop. Restoration demonstration. Stills gallery featuring rare behind-the-scenes production photos. Theatrical trailer. English subtitles for the deaf and hearing impaired. A booklet featuring an essay by critic Gary Giddins and a 1961 article by Cassavetes. Faces (1968) USA Director John Cassavetes Screenplay John Cassavetes Producer Maurice McEndree Cinematography Al Ruban Editing Maurice McEndree and Al Ruban Art direction Phedon Papamichael With John Marley (Richard Forst), Gena Rowlands (Jeannie Rapp), Lynn Carlin (Maria Forst), Seymour Cassel (Chet), Val Avery (Jim McCarthy), Fred Draper (Freddie) Runtime 130 minutes DVD, 2009, USA Produced and Distributed by The Criterion Collection (region 1) Aspect Ratio 1.66:1 Extras Restored high-definition digital transfer. 17-minute alternative opening sequence, from an early edit of the film. Episode of the French television series Cinastes de notre temps, from 1968, dedicated to Cassavetes, featuring rare interviews and behind-the-scenes footage. Making Faces, a 2004 documentary including interviews with actors Lynn Carlin, Seymour Cassel and Gena Rowlands and director of photography Al Ruban. Lighting & Shooting the Film, a short documentary from 2004 in which Ruban explains how he and the crew achieved the distinct look of Faces. English subtitles for the deaf and hearing impaired. A booklet featuring an essay by Stuart Klawans. Bigger Than Life (1956) USA Director Nicholas Ray Story and Screenplay Cyril Hume, Richard Maibaum Based on an article in The New Yorker by Berton Rouech Producer James Mason Director of Photography Joe MacDonald Art Director Lyle R Wheeler, Jack Martin Smith Set Decorations Walter M. Scott, Stuart A. Reiss Editor Louis Loeffler Music David Raksin With James Mason (Ed Avery), Barbara Rush (Lou Avery), Walter Matthau (Wally Gibbs), Christopher Olsen (Richie Avery), Robert Simon (Dr Norton), Roland Winters (Dr Rune), Rusty Lane (Bob La Porte), Rachel Stephens (Nurse), Kipp Hamilton (Pat Wade), Betty Caulfield (Mrs La Porte), Gus Schilling (Pharmacist), Richard Collier (Milkman) Runtime 91 minutes DVD, 2007 United Kingdom Produced and Distributed by BFI (region 2) Aspect Ratio 2.35:1 (16x9) anamorphic Extras Full feature commentary by Edward Buscombe. New filmed conversation between Jim Jarmusch and Jonathan Rosenbaum. Extracts from 1969 interview with Nicholas Ray. Original theatrical trailer. Fully illustrated booklets with essays by Geoff Andrew, Jeanine Basinger, Susan Ray and biographies. Hopes in the past Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) Germany Director/Screenplay Rainer Werner Fassbinder Original Novel Alfred Doblin Producer Peter Marthesheimer Director of Photography Xaver Schwarzenberger Art Director/Costumes Barbara Baum With Gunter Lamprecht (Franz Biberkopf), Gottfried John (Reinhold Hoffman), Barbara Sukowa (Emilie Mieze Karsunke), Hannah Schygulla (Eva), Karin Baal (Minna), Annemarie Duringer (Cilly), Elisabeth Trissenaar (Lina), Franz Buchrieser (Gottfried Meck) Runtime 940 minutes DVD USA, 2007 Distributed by The Criterion Collection (region 1) Aspect Ratio 1.33:1 Sound Mix Mono 1.0 Extras: New high-definition digital transfer. Documentaries include Hans-Dieter Hartl's Notes on the Making of Berlin Alexanderplatz (45 minutes); Julian Lorenz's Berlin Alexanderplatz Remastered: Notes on the Restoration (35 minutes) and Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz: A Mega Movie and its Story (60 minutes). Phil Jutzi's 1931 film of Berlin Alexanderplatz (90 minutes). 72-page book with essays by Tom Tykwer, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Thomas Stenfeld.

The rhizomatic West: representing the American West in a transnational, global, media age

Is the American West in Sergio Leone’s “spaghetti westerns” the same American West we find in Douglas Coupland’s Generation X? In Jim Jarmusch’s movies? In Calexico’s music? Or is the American West, as this book tells us, a constantly moving, mutating idea within a complex global culture? And what, precisely (or better yet, imprecisely) does it mean? Using Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, Neil Campbell shows how the West (or west-ness) continually breaks away from a mainstream notion of American “rootedness” and renews and transforms itself in various cultural forms. A region long traversed by various transient peoples (from tribes and conquerors to immigrants, traders, and trappers), the West reflects a mythic quest for settlement, permanence, and synthesis—even notions of a national or global identity—at odds with its rootless history, culture, and nature. Crossing the concept of “roots” with “routes,” this book shows how notions of the West—in representations ranging from literature and film to photography, music, and architectural theory—give expression to ideas about identity, nationhood, and belonging in a world increasingly defined by movement across time and borders. The Rhizomatic West offers a new vision of the American West as a hybrid, performative space, a staging place for myriad intersecting and constantly changing identities.

Afterimages

In this paper we argue that montage is at the heart of contemporary human geography. We demonstrate the centrality of montage in a wide variety of domains, including the analysis of modernity, the critique of political economy, and the practice of spatial science, before drawing out the implications of this centrality in the wake of so-called ‘nonrepresentational’ theory. While nonrepresentational styles of thought ordinarily veer off into considerations of performance, practice, and enactment, the ontological and epistemological play of montage plunges theoretical practice into what Agamben, Baudrillard, and Benjamin call ‘imagelessness’, ‘obscenity’, and the ‘optical unconscious’. Each of these is addressed in turn, and each is illustrated with stills taken from the films of Jim Jarmusch. The overall aim of the paper is to sensitize human geographers to the duplicitous operation of the discipline's cinematic optical unconscious, and in so doing to open up a space for a more considered engagement with geography's much-vaunted visuality.

Becoming-Samurai

Becoming-Samurai