Jim Jarmusch Research Articles

The ‘hero archetype’ in the neo-mythological context of contemporary screen culture

The essay examines the image of the hero in the contemporary neo-mythological field of mass screen culture. The author identifies the main features of the hero archetype and the core cultural meanings forming this concept and analyzes images of the neo-mythological heroes of our time, taking examples of mass cinema and authorial cinema and revealing differences between these two categories. According to the author, mass culture creates the hero model according to the principle of bricolage, remaining within the framework of the Christian eschatological paradigm and synthesizing it with scientific and technical progress or other elements but not reproducing the structure of the archaic myth. When the stereotype of happy ending replaces tragedy, it completely changes the true archetype of the hero more characteristic of art-house or authorial cinema. Examining the films of Jim Jarmusch and Alejandro Gonzlez Irritu, the author analyzes the method of deconstruction in authorial cinema, a cinema which seeks to reveal the meanings of the archaic hero archetype. If mass cinema acts within the simulacrum system without transcending its limits endlessly repeating the same models and often using only superficial formal properties authorial cinema tries to explode the structure in such a way as to widen the boundaries of the senses or to discover them under the layers of simulacra. Thus, screen culture has the characteristics of a neo-mythology, forming the neo-myth and developing its elements and structures, producing a stream of neo-mythological images in the media landscape. The conglomerate of various structural elements borrowed from different traditions fully reflects the postmodern situation that turns symbols and archetypes into a set of simulacra. The era of postmodernism is a stage in the development of culture characterized by the problem of the impossibility of creating anything new. Postmodernism is a creative crisis which leads to excessive visuality and, paradoxically, to visualitys death.

Re-Mystifying the West: Hybridity and Spirituality in Jim Jarmusch’s 'Dead Man'

The paper intends to examine the ways in which the American West has undergone a cinematic transformation with the advent of counter-cultural western movies that criticize and often dismantle American imperialism and expansionism. The paper makes the argument that the American West has arrived at a new stage in its mythology, namely that it has been re-mythologized as a locus of Eastern spiritual awakening. The western of the 1990s’ decade embraces a rebirth of spiritualism through the genre of the “acid western,” typified in this paper by Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995), a film that showcases the return of the West as a cultural frontier that must be re-assimilated instead of rejected. Given its symbolic title, Dead Man is not so much a Western as it is an Eastern romance, a rite of passage framed as a journey towards death. The paper will attempt to make its case by tackling the history of anti-establishment cinema, while also basing its argument on the assertions of director Jim Jarmusch, and various film critics who discuss the issue of the “acid western.” At the same time, the paper will offer a post-colonial perspective informed by Homi Bhabha’s theory of hybridity, with particular emphasis on Native American identity.

“You'll Never Get It If You Don't Slow Down, My Friend”: Towards a Rhythmanalysis of the Everyday in the Cinema of Jim Jarmusch and Gus Van Sant

This essay offers close readings of films by the independent US directors Jim Jarmusch and Gus Van Sant with a particular focus on their slow-paced representation of everyday life. Building on the work of Henri Lefebvre, the author proposes that so-called “slow cinema” can be read not simply as an aesthetic choice, but as an alternative and potentially oppositional rhythm in the era of fast capitalism.

‘I wouldn’t trust no words written down on no piece of paper’: Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, Jacques Derrida and the Critique of Logocentrism

In this article, I propose a reading of Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995) in light of Jacques Derrida’s observations on the axiological binary opposition of speech and writing. I argue that the relationship between the two is artistically explored in the opening scene where the accountant William Blake (Johnny Depp) meets the fireman (Crispin Glover) on the train to the town of Machine. I interpret Depp’s protagonist as the representative of writing and Glover’s fireman as the representative of speech. Demonstrating how the attributes that, through the long history of Western metaphysics, have been ascribed to writing are manifested by the main character of the film, I analyse a subtle personification of the written word on screen. I contend that Dead Man is a deconstructive text not only because it deconstructs the genre of the Western and the narrative of the West but also in the sense that it offers a critique of logocentrism and Western metaphysics.

Dźwięk i znaczenie w Truposzu Jima Jarmuscha

The aim of the article is to prove that the Dead Man soundtrack written by Neil Young plays an essential part in understanding and interpreting Jim Jarmusch’s film. The author of the article highlights the meaningful role of Dead Man in the director’s oeuvre, analyses the film’s structure, examines the process of recording the soundtrack as well as characterizes the selected scenes. He singles out the music motifs, their functions, and outlines the musical and dramatic effect of the film.

A arte impura da citação: Jarmusch-Paterson-Derrida

The relation between cinema and literature, in the way it defies artistic thought and boundaries, allows for quotations which belong to or very nearly define the creative process itself. To quote is to relocate, to read, to recite – to repeat transforming, in fatally impure experience. Departing from Paterson, by Jim Jarmusch, from William Carlos Williams poetic rhythm, and based on Jacques Derrida’s Deconstruction, this paper reclaims the relationship between cinema and literature focusing on the quotation as “impure art”.

Captives on the Frontier: Perla Suez and the Cultural Genealogies of the Argentinian Western

Captives on the FrontierPerla Suez and the Cultural Genealogies of the Argentinian Western Christopher Conway (bio) I wanted to build a Western based in our Patagonia. I love the movies of Tarantino and the Coen Brothers. There's a similar geography, it's the same continent, but our culture is different. Perla Suez1 Must a non-US Western always be a pastiche of a US Western to be classified as a Western? Can a non-US Western be set outside of North America and still be called a Western? These are the challenging questions that come to mind when thinking about Argentina's well-developed frontier mythology. Perla Suez's acclaimed novel El país del diablo (The Devil's Country, 2015), which won the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz prize for best novel at the Feria Internacional del Libro in Guadalajara, Mexico, illustrates how Argentinian frontier fictions can echo both a national tradition as well as a US mythology. Suez, one of the most respected Argentinian novelists, has insisted on this duality in print and television interviews, citing her country's frontier history as an inspiration alongside US Westerns (Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained and Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man) and Herman Melville's Moby Dick. Indeed, in several headlines and pull quotes Suez and journalists have referred to The Devil's Country as a "Patagonian Western," making the word "Western" the preferred shorthand to sum up the novel.2 But is it really a Western? Gustavo Pérez Firmat wrote a brief introduction to Do the Americas Have a Common Literature? (1990) that provides us with a framework for answering this question. Pérez Firmat argues that inter-American studies can knit separate national literatures in four [End Page 123] different ways: generic, genetic, appositional, and mediative (3–4). The generic refers to a concept of broad historical applicability, such as indigeneity, slavery, or mestizaje. Genetic approaches relate to demonstrable, causal links between different literatures or authors from different nations, as in the case of Latin American poetry and criticism about Walt Whitman or García Márquez's indebtedness to William Faulkner. Appositional links are not causal or explicitly generic. Pérez Firmat describes them as focusing on "formal or thematic continuities" or a "confluence" of perspective (4). Conventional comparativist approaches would fall under this rubric. The last category, mediative, relates to topics and cultural artifacts that carry embedded within them an explicitly inter-American theme or reality, as illustrated in the work of authors such as José Martí or María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, whose life experiences and cultural production straddles national or hemispheric borders. Perla Suez's The Devil's Country invites us to relate its plot and themes to US culture through genetic and generic lines. Suez's repeated mention of Quentin Tarantino and the Western as influences indicates the relevance of these frames for understanding her novel. On a deeper level, however, The Devil's Country demonstrates a generic link to the mythologies of the Wild West through various motifs that link her nation's cultural history to that of the United States. If Pérez Firmat provides us with a structuralist and genealogical framework for exploring Suez's relationship to US popular culture and literature, Neil Campbell's enlightening explorations of how to define the Western beyond the classical, exceptionalist myths of Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis and the general parameters of Hollywood formula Westerns provides us with more flexible and inclusive ways of thinking about genre. In The Rhizomatic West (2008), Campbell takes a poststructuralist approach to genre classification, arguing for a dynamic, decentered, and heterogeneous vision of the West as transnational, "a traveling concept whose meanings move between cultures, crossing, bridging, and intruding simultaneously" (4). Drawing from various poststructuralist and postcolonial works, such as Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic (1993), Joseph Roach's Cities of the Dead (1996), and most importantly the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, Campbell [End Page 124] casts the West and the Western away from binaristic reductionism and essentialist rootedness. Instead, he moves toward the "rhizome," a metaphor for decenteredness, motion, and instability. To exclusively frame the Western within...

Understanding Sound Tracks Through Film Theory by Elsie Walker, and: Sound: Dialogue, Music, and Effects ed. by Kathryn Kalinak

Understanding Sound Tracks Through Film Theory by Elsie Walker, and: Sound: Dialogue, Music, and Effects ed. by Kathryn Kalinak Nick Poulakis Elsie Walker Understanding Sound Tracks Through Film Theory. Oxford University Press, 2015. 448 pages; $37.55 paperback; $99.00 hardcover; $33.20 kindle. Kathryn Kalinak, editor Sound: Dialogue, Music, and Effects Rutgers University Press, 2015. 224 pages; $26.95 paperback; $80.00 hardcover; $26.95 epub/pdf. Cinema has always been considered a modern spectacle of vision. But, although film substance consists of both sound and images, it is a fact that the aural dimensions of this audiovisual medium have been regularly disregarded in academic and journalistic reviews. On the other side, there have also been certain works that deal with the so-called “film musicology,” which tend to employ extremely specialized music-centred examples, comparisons and terminology that are mainly accessible only to a small number of musicology experts. Today, scholars wonder if there is an alternative: to put it simply, how can we apply cultural theories to film music and sound in order to better appreciate and explain films? Elsie Walker’s brand-new book Understanding Sound Tracks Through Film Theory tries to answer these fundamental questions in a methodical way. It applies to film music and sound analysis five of the most common critical theories used in film studies, in particular genre studies, postcolonialism, feminism, psychoanalysis, and queer theory. This monograph draws attention by means of a rigorous examination of films to the [End Page 30] capacity of both music and sound to reveal diverse filmic meanings, uncovering not only the “unheard melodies” (as earlier scholars of this field would put it) but also the “unseen images” of cinema. Currently serving as an Associate Professor of Film Studies at Salisbury University (Maryland), Elsie Walker has considerable experience in theoretical and educational approaches to film in three different countries: New Zealand, England and the USA. Through her published work, she has also contributed greatly to recent film and sound scholarship. Understanding Sound Tracks Through Film Theory is the outcome of five years of research on how to attentively bringing together film and music/sound studies with critical conceptions of literature and culture. Practically, this multifaceted perspective yields a book that is adequately accessible to a great range of students, tutors and other audiences, whether expert or non-expert in this domain. The book has an instantly identifiable structure. It is divided into five general parts, each of which is motivated by one of the main theories mentioned above. These parts consist of three individual chapters apiece: the first contains a transparent theoretical preview of the subject matter, whereas the others focus, respectively, on two case studies of film and music/sound analyses. There is also a comprehensive introduction in which the film Brokeback Mountain (2005), directed by Ang Lee, music by Gustavo Santaolalla, operates as an opening case study, and a coda that sums up and, what is more, reassigns the book’s major outlines to a very recent production: Gravity (2013), directed by Alfonso Cuarón with music by Steven Price. The book also includes a glossary of terms, an index, as well as a list of films quoted and analyzed. The bibliography cited in the text is placed at the end of each part, thus framing almost autonomous sections of this engaging book. The first part of Understanding Sound Tracks Through Film Theory starts with Rick Altman’s input concerning joint sound and genre theories of film. After that, Walker continues with the analysis of two westerns, The Searchers (1956), directed by John Ford, music by Max Steiner and Dead Man (1995), directed by Jim Jarmusch, music by Neil Young, from the perspective of the semantic and the syntactic components of this particular genre. The first one is a mainstream film of an earlier period, the second a present-day independent creation. While these offer two totally different kinds of soundtracks, they make the author’s scholar analyses more productive. The second part of the book is titled “Postcolonialism” and it begins with a brief prelude by Robert Stam and Louise Spence on colonialism, racism and representation. Based on the above mentioned theoretical perspective and...

Aestheticizing the Downfall of Industrial Capitalism: Jim Jarmusch’s Tale of Intellectual Vampires in Zombies’ World

This study aims to read Jim Jarmusch’s movie Only Lovers Left Alive from the perspective of downfall of industrial capitalism and ecosocialist approach. The movie mainly takes place in Detroit Michigan, which is a symbol of the collapse of Fordism and industrialization. Ecosocialist critique of industrial capitalism has common notions with Jarmusch’s tale. Thus, theoretical framework of this study has been established on ecosocialist paradigm. In the movie, Jarmusch represents vampires as intellectuals with a wide accumulation of culture and knowledge and places his critique of industrialization from their point of view. Multimodal Discourse Analysis was applied to the movie to find out how the movie did use visual and literal signifiers to establish its narrative.

The World Is Not Enough

This paper considers the line drawn between art and the everyday; and some attempts to erase it by artists and art theorists. We look at the sensibility of artists who notice and make work from everyday experience. In modernity the conscription of everyday materials and objects to collage and assemblage develops this sensibility within an aesthetic conception of visual art. Looking at Duchamp’s readymades, we consider his claim that these objects are chosen with indifference to their aesthetic properties. We then consider the aesthetic requirements of a medium that directs response to works of art. Briefly, with our conception of a medium in mind, we deliberate upon Modernism, Minimalism, and Conceptualism; and the border between the poetic and poetry. We conclude with a lesson to be drawn from Jim Jarmusch’s 2016 film, Paterson. Along the way, we cling to some of Kant’s insights concerning the fine arts.

Kino tworzące poezję. Przenikanie się literatury i filmu na przykładzie Truposza Jima Jarmuscha i cyklu poetyckiego Krzysztofa Kuczkowskiego

Article depicts the relation between the film Dead Man made by an American director Jim Jarmusch, and the poetic cycle written by Polish poet Krzysztof Kuczkowski, which is inspired by Jarmusch’s film. Author indicates the unique, in Polish literature, example of intersemiotic connections between literary work and film work, he depicts the communion of motives connecting both pieces and shows, how poetry completes and enriches film work. Article also depicts the relations between Jarmusch’s film, Kuczkowski’s poems, and the poetry of William Blake. Presented reflections concerning the influence of various arts, intertextuality and semiotics lead to the conclusion about an innovatory artistic project, that constitutes a new quality in literature in film. The authors of this project are Jarmusch and Kuczkowski.

Deceptive Detection and an Inverted Quest: Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers

Deceptive Detection and an Inverted Quest: Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers

Access Nollywood

Access Nollywood

“Your Wilderness:” The White Possession of Detroit in Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive

ABSTRACTAfter a decade of accelerated disinvestment and depopulation, Detroit (re)appeared in the national imaginary as an “urban frontier” open for (re)settlement by (mostly white) creative entrepreneurs. Recently, scholars have addressed the ways in which this frontier rhetoric arouses settler colonial desire for land based not just on a notion of black criminality or ineptitude, but also more fundamentally on an assumption of deferred white possession. Though this work has productively described the settler colonial conditions of racialized (re)development in the Motor City, it ignores white possession as a process that mythologizes Indigenous history and delegitimizes Indigenous people. In this paper I read Jim Jarmusch’s 2014 vampire film Only Lovers Left Alive as a “landscape of monstrosity” that inadvertently and momentarily recovers Indigenous and African American presence in moments of erasure and absence, as werewolves and ghosts to the white vampire elite and zombie working class. More broadly, I argue that Only Lovers Left Alive actively participates in an ideological process of (re)settlement that disguises land speculation (and its inherently disruptive cycles of uneven development) in a renewed frontier mythology. I read the film’s central characters, the vampires Adam and Eve, as disaster tourists whose nostalgia for Detroit’s lost civilization heralds in its renewed form.

Transgression of Postindustrial Dissonance and Excess: (Re)valuation of Gothicism in Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive

The paper gives insight into the revaluation of popular Gothic aesthetics in Jim Jarmusch’s 2014 production Only Lovers Left Alive. Drawing on critical theory and the postmodern theoretical framework, the article suggests that the film transgresses contemporary culture immersed in a “culture of death” that has produced a vast amount of cultural texts under the rubric of “Gothicism.” By considering Jean Baudrillard’s concept of transaesthetics and Judith Halberstam’s writings on contemporary monstrosity, the paper shows that a commodified Gothic mode has lost its older deconstructive functions that operated on the margins of the mainstream. Now entirely focused on the duplication of the same aesthetic codes and signs, Gothic productions conform to the rules of postindustrial culture, enriching entertainment imagery with the neutralized concept of “otherness.” Hence, the article engages primarily with Jarmusch’s indie aesthetics that goes beyond easily recognizable patterns and generic conventions and allows the director to emphasize that the arts are rejuvenating forces, the antidote to a commoditized environment. Then, the focus is on the construction of main characters—Adam and Eve, ageless vampires and spouses—who thanks to nostalgic theatricality and performance reconfigure the mainstream monstrosity. Ultimately, the article emphasizes that Jarmusch’s film, to a large extent, becomes a warning against the inevitable results of advanced capitalism practiced on a global scale.

Retro, faux-vintage, and anachronism: When cinema looks back

This article explores the definition of ‘vintage cinema’ and specifically re-evaluates the fetishism for the past and its regurgitation in the present by providing a taxonomy of the phenomenon in recent film production. Our contribution identifies three aesthetic categories: faux-vintage, retro and anachronistic; by illustrating their overlapping and discrepancies it argues that the past remains a powerful negotiator of meaning for the present and the future. Drawing on studies of memory and digital nostalgia, this article focuses on the latter category: anachronism. It furthermore unravels the persistence of and the filmic fascination for obsolete analogue objects through an analysis of Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch, 2013).

Two-Shots and Group Shots

Like most auteurs, there are certain familiar and cliched phrases used to discuss work of Sang-soo, most common of these being a variation on idea, all his films are same. For instance, critic Mike D'Angelo begins his review of In Another Country (2012) by declaring: Hong tends to make same movie over and over: a multi-part story in which heavily inebriated males--usually academics or filmmakers--awkwardly woo one or more bewildered females. Similarly, in his review of Oki's Movie (2010), Nick Schager states, features so many elements that have calcified into director's trademarks (solipsistic student and/or director protagonists, boozy escapades, clumsy romantic entanglements, divergent points of view, and segmented narratives) that it feels trifling at best. These statements are at once understandable and even accurate on a certain level, given large number of repetitions of narrative and character that occur in Hong's films, while also being demonstrably false, especially in terms of visual style. While Hong's visual style is both recognizable and seemingly familiar from film to film, it is constantly evolving and rather difficult to define. As a result, more attention is often given to Hong's narrative experimentation and/or thematic concerns and less to his work as a cinematic stylist (for example, Deutelbaum, Deceptive Design, Structure of Hang Sang-soo's, Pragmatic Poetics, and A Closer Look at Structure; Diffrient, South Korean Film Genres; Chung and Diffident; Kim, The Remasculinazation, Virtual Hallyu; Quandt). This essay aims at systematically quantifying and explaining how has constructed his mise-en-scene over course of his career and analyzes meanings of Hong's visual approach. While term mise-en-scene has a long and varied history of multiple definitions and meanings, this essay will focus on mise-en-scene as art of cinematic staging, further defined by Adrian Martin as the art of arranging, choreographing and displaying (Mise-en-Scene and Film Style 15). The concentration will be on two variations of Hongian shots, two-shot and group shot, and how each respectively provides examples of mannerist and classical approaches to mise-en-scene. There have been various attempts to label recent contemporary international art film style and how these films differ from classical art cinema of past. For example, Ira Jaffe's Slow Movies: Countering Cinema of Action (2014) outlines an international trend toward long takes, long shots, austere mise-en-scene, and lack of emotion and affect, a cinema where nothing happens, which includes such diverse filmmakers as Jim Jarmusch (United States), Alexander Sokurov (Russia), Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Turkey), Cristian Mungiu (Romania), Lisandro Alonso (Argentina), Pedro Costa (Portugal), Abbas Kiarostami (Iran), Jia Zhang-ke (China), and Bela Tarr (Hungary) (among others) (Jaffe 1-3). Matthew Flanagan, in his PhD thesis on cinema, lists many of same filmmakers, along with art cinema veterans such as Chantal Akerman and Theo Angelopoulos and experimental directors like James Benning and Straub/Huillet (Flanagan 8-9). Flanagan also quotes Tiago Magalhaes de Luca in stressing the hyperbolic application of long take as key formal component of field of slow cinema (Magalhaes de Luca 21; quoted in Flanagan 9). However, is not included within this classification, despite sharing many of stylistic traits, particularly use of long take. I would argue that this is result of extreme amount of dialogue in Hong's films, combined with generally comic tone majority of his films employ (see Diffrient, Unbearable Lightness for an extended analysis of Hong's use of comedy). As a result, comparison made is usually to Eric Rohmer, a similarly dialogue-centric director of comedies of manners who, despite being part of French New Wave, is often seen as something of a cinematic outlier (this tendency to compare and Rohmer can be seen directly in Grosoli and is also discussed and critiqued by Deutelbaum, Approaching Sang-soo 2-3). …

Crossing a Man-Altered Landscape: Driving and the Vehicle in the Road Movies of Jim Jarmusch

Abstract

Through A Glass, Darkly? Antonin Artaud Through an Existentialist Prism

Taking as its guide Jean Baudrillard's assertion that one's connection with (or to) Antonin Artaud is necessarily a personal one, this paper asserts that Artaud's ontological crisis can be processed through a secular application of Saint John of the Cross's “dark night of the soul.” In turn, the article posits that Artaud, together with Antoine Roquentin and William Blake, the protagonists in Jean-Paul Sartre's “Nausea,” and Jim Jarmusch's “Dead Man,” respectively, form three sides of an existential prism, refracting light into their constituent parts and providing some clarity into the dilemma faced by each.

Ma, mu and the interstice

This article focuses on the centrality of the interstice to the underlying form of three of Jim Jarmusch’s films, namely, Stranger Than Paradise (1984), Dead Man (1995) and The Limits of Control (2009). It posits that the specificity of this form can be better understood by underlining its relation to aspects of Far Eastern form. The analysis focuses on the aforementioned films as they represent the most fully-fledged examples of this overriding aesthetic and its focus on interstitial space. The article asserts that a consistent aesthetic sensibility pervades the work of Jarmusch and that, by exploring the significance of the Japanese concepts of mu and ma, the atmospheric and formal qualities of this filmmaker’s work can be elucidated. Particular emphasis is paid to the specific articulation of time and space and it is argued that the films achieve a meditative form due to the manner in which they foreground the interstice, transience, temporality and subjectivity.