Jim Jarmusch Research Articles

Transcending Transcendence in Jim Jarmusch's Paterson

Abstract Building on Paul Schrader's thesis in Transcendental Style in Film that immanence and transcendence clash, this article explores a departure from this binary in Jim Jarmusch's 2016 film, Paterson. Although Paterson follows the formula of transcendental cinema, it lacks Schrader's prerequisite “Decisive Moments” for transcendence. I contend that films can evoke transcendence without distinct release moments, as exemplified by Paterson. To support this, Paterson is contrasted with Yasujiro Ozu's 1953 masterpiece, Tokyo Story, identified by Schrader as quintessentially transcendental and a key influence on Jarmusch. Introducing the concept of “immanent transcendence” to describe Paterson's unique position, I argue that transcendence and immanence can coexist. I challenge traditional notions of transcendental cinema, shedding light on cinematic experiences that bridge immanence and transcendence.

Dzieje mitu w mediach. Analiza fenomenu wampira w kinie na przykładzie Zagadki Nieśmiertelności Tony’ego Scotta i Tylko Kochankowie Przeżyją Jima Jarmuscha

The article is an attempt to prove that cinema, becoming a kind of home of a mythical being – a vampire, clearly influences the change in the perception of its importance in culture. It was decided to explore the form and narrative of The Hunger, directed by Tony Scott and Only Lovers Left Alive, written by Jim Jarmusch, because both of these works are masterpieces of the romance of the vampire myth with the film medium, which are not particularly popular among researchers of the phenomenon. The research works of Roland Barthes, Vladimir Propp, Erich Fromm and Rollo May were used, as well as the concepts of successive processing of a mythical story were demonstrated.

The Dead Don’t Die: Genre, Parody, and the Failure of the American Zombie as an Agent of Social Change

ABSTRACT Jim Jarmusch’s 2019 zombie flick The Dead Don’t Die uses comedy to both critique the zombie genre and confront the many horrors of twenty-first century life. Zombies are symbols for human anxieties, whether those are anxieties about “otherness,” anxieties about nuclear annihilation, anxieties about mindless overconsumption, or anxieties about environmental catastrophe. The Dead Don’t Die explores all of these anxieties, focusing on the fear of environmental catastrophe. The zombies in The Dead Don’t Die rise from their graves because polar fracking has caused the earth’s axis to shift, reanimating the dead. In its critique of the zombie genre, the film asks whether the zombie film’s history of political and social commentary is still (or ever has been) effective in creating social change. Ultimately, The Dead Don’t Die is concerned with the failure of the zombie to produce lasting change and what that means for a world still plagued by greater horrors than the undead.

Poetic Repetition in Paterson

Paterson is a poem and a film about a man and a town, both called Paterson. Jim Jarmusch’s adaptation is a contemporary tribute not only to William Carlos Williams, Paterson’s author and a prominent figure of American modernity, but to the poetry of everyday life. Focusing on the repetition and transformation of scenes and gestures of daily routine as well as of characters, this analysis traces how poetry is adapted to the media of film, slowly revealing the beauty of ordinary existence, an essential theme in the work of Williams. Besides, questions of identity in the context of tradition are also discussed examining twins, a salient example of repetition in Jarmusch’s film.

Double Reversals in Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth

This essay explores the underlying connections, through reversals and doubling, in Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth. The film utilizes more than just similar cinematic techniques across its five episodes, it embeds conceptual connections that result in a strong location-expression conveying to the viewer the unique ‘flavor’ of each of the five cities. The essay explores the concepts of reversal, doubling, location-expression, and spectatorship. It elucidates the filmic expressions of place by gesturing toward expression theory and rasa theory. Ultimately, the film’s unity, like that of a rock band’s LP, holds together enough to suggest the peculiar awareness of the filmgoer’s tourist spectatorship.

Immortality, the Good Life and Romantic Love in Groundhog Day and Only Lovers Left Alive

Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993) and Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch, 2013) are fantasy films that use the device of practical immortality in order to raise important philosophical questions about what constitutes a good life and to explore the nature of romantic love. Groundhog Day provides fairly conventional answers about how to live a good life by focusing on issues of spiritual redemption, selflessness, and developing one’s human potential. In contrast, Lovers provides a dark portrayal of a civilization on the brink of extinction but offers a glimmer of hope for the future. The lifestyle and values of married vampires Adam and Eve represent an alternative vision of the core values needed to sustain a better world: greater reliance on human imagination, maintaining a sense of wonder and curiosity about the world, creating and appreciating works of art and living in harmony with the natural world. Both films also offer a perspective on the importance of romantic love in living a good life. Although these perspectives often diverge from one another, they do overlap in some interesting ways. The style of film criticism used in this paper is inspired by the film philosophy of Stanley Cavell.

The Availability of Jim Jarmusch’s Film-Philosophy: Wittgenstein, Derrida and Private Language in Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

To date, film scholars have found the films of Jim Jarmusch to be tantamount to works of postmodern philosophy. For as intriguing and productive as such interpretations of Jarmusch’s films have been, I submit that the postmodern framework occludes a crucial aspect of Jarmusch’s film-philosophy, namely, his investment in the ordinary. From this perspective, I intend to show the availability of Jarmusch’s films to Wittgensteinian interpretation. More specifically, I plan to situate Jarmusch’s arthouse action film Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999) between Ludwig Wittgenstein and Jacques Derrida in order to demonstrate the profound affinities between Jarmusch’s film-philosophy and Wittgenstein’s conception of ordinary language. Through a consideration of character dialogue, I will demonstrate the extent to which Jarmusch rejects the private language argument – which, by extension, amounts to a rejection of linguistic relativism as an instance, or species, of skepticism – in favor of ordinary conceptions of language, expressiveness, knowledge, and responsibility.

Review: Post-Horror: Art, Genre and Cultural Elevation, by David Church

Review: <i>Post-Horror: Art, Genre and Cultural Elevation</i>, by David Church

«EVERYDAY LIFE» IN THE WORKS BY W. C. WILLIAMS AND J. JARMUSCH: FROM POETRY TO POETICS. INTERMEDIALITY

The article examines William Carlos Williams’ works that focus on the everyday, mundanity, and poetize daily life which was common in modernist literature. In our time, Williams’ poetry inspired director Jim Jarmusch to make a poetic film «Paterson» about everyday life and the poetic potential of ordinary routine life. The director reinterprets Williams’ ideas and makes a complex, postmodern film about everyday life in the small town Paterson, where he depicts the routine life of his main character, a bus driver. This life, despite its external simplicity and triviality, encourages the hero named Paterson to read modernist literature and write his own poems whose themes and images are intertwined with the work of the well-known Paterson resident, William Carlos Williams himself. In particular, we examine the intermedial interaction of Williams’ works («Paterson» and «This Is Just To Say») with the film and the indirect transition of one sign system into another. In addition to the more or less direct and explicit influence of literature on film through allusions or quotations from the work of the American modernist poet, Williams’ poetry becomes a precedent for the stylized poems of the film’s main character, written by a contemporary American poet Ron Padgett («Another One», «The Run», «Love Poem») and Jarmusch himself («Water Falls»). In this article, we also compare Padgett’s and Jarmusch’s poetry with some of Williams’ poems («Blizzard», «To A Poor Old Woman»), to demonstrate the similarity of motifs and imagery. Thedirector’s work can be interpreted as a manifestation of the idea of looking for poetry in the everyday, or that everyday life is already poetry. Jarmusch’s film about everyday life provides a possible answer to the question of literary anthropology «why is literature as a medium important in people’s lives» – creativity is the very meaning of life. This penetration of one art form (poetry) into another (cinema) gives grounds for speaking about the relevance of the themes of modernist poetry in the context of modernity and about the meaning and value of simplicity for creativity in general.

Critical Spirits: New Animism As Historical Materialism

This essay reads the so-called 'new animism' alongside the historical materialism of Benjamin, Horkheimer and Adorno. The aim is to draw out the political dimensions of the former and the ecological dimensions of the latter. New animism shares with historical materialism a critique of modernity and the alienation produced by the separation of the human sphere of culture from the nonhuman field of nature. Both theories are interested in animism as exemplary refusals of this separation and both seek a mimetic, non-objectifying, relation to the world. New animism operates to correct historical materialism's Eurocentric tendency to think of such 'naturecultures' as premodern and thus superceded, showing what can still be learnt from the example of specific indigenous peoples and their animistic engagement with the more than human world. But historical materialism's dialectical approach to history also helps to guard against the romanticisation of animism and dehistoricised models of animistic relations to 'nature'. Capitalist modernity is not simply the extirpation of animism, the turning of souls into things, but also itself a modified form of animism, the turning of things into magical commodities. Once we understand the mythic nature of capitalism, the critical task becomes not to reanimate the world but to counter-animate it. Both new animism and historical materialism are utopian in their investment in a spirited, more than human world, but the latter also seeks to promote what I call a critical spiritedness, an ironised, melancholic identification with our fellow beings, both human and nonhuman, as subject to history and thus, in Adorno's phrasing, 'damaged life'. In the final part of my essay, I consider the way in which art can channel this critical spirit through an exploration of Jim Jarmusch's 1995 film Dead Man, and its counter-animation of the cinematic tradition of the Western. The film is at once a melancholic critique of the deanimating, ecocidal and genocidal consequences of Western expansion and an attempt to respiritualise the cinematic gaze through a creaturely identification with damaged life.

Critical Spirits: New Animism As Historical Materialism

This essay reads the so-called 'new animism' alongside the historical materialism of Benjamin, Horkheimer and Adorno. The aim is to draw out the political dimensions of the former and the ecological dimensions of the latter. New animism shares with historical materialism a critique of modernity and the alienation produced by the separation of the human sphere of culture from the nonhuman field of nature. Both theories are interested in animism as exemplary refusals of this separation and both seek a mimetic, non-objectifying, relation to the world. New animism operates to correct historical materialism's Eurocentric tendency to think of such 'naturecultures' as premodern and thus superceded, showing what can still be learnt from the example of specific indigenous peoples and their animistic engagement with the more than human world. But historical materialism's dialectical approach to history also helps to guard against the romanticisation of animism and dehistoricised models of animistic relations to 'nature'. Capitalist modernity is not simply the extirpation of animism, the turning of souls into things, but also itself a modified form of animism, the turning of things into magical commodities. Once we understand the mythic nature of capitalism, the critical task becomes not to reanimate the world but to counter-animate it. Both new animism and historical materialism are utopian in their investment in a spirited, more than human world, but the latter also seeks to promote what I call a critical spiritedness, an ironised, melancholic identification with our fellow beings, both human and nonhuman, as subject to history and thus, in Adorno's phrasing, 'damaged life'. In the final part of my essay, I consider the way in which art can channel this critical spirit through an exploration of Jim Jarmusch's 1995 film Dead Man, and its counter-animation of the cinematic tradition of the Western. The film is at once a melancholic critique of the deanimating, ecocidal and genocidal consequences of Western expansion and an attempt to respiritualise the cinematic gaze through a creaturely identification with damaged life.

Trendy Monsters: The Nazis, the Perpetrator Turn, and Popular Culture

Trendy Monsters: The Nazis, the Perpetrator Turn, and Popular Culture

Note from the Editors

Note from the Editors

Discovering the Beauty of the Quotidian: The Contemporary Flâneur in Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson

Discovering the Beauty of the Quotidian: The Contemporary Flâneur in Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson

Translation as a Gap and as a Site of Creativity in the Films of Jim Jarmusch

One of the episodes in Jim Jarmusch’s portmanteau film Night on Earth (1991) is about an immigrant from the then recently dissolved state of East Germany who works as a taxi driver in New York. The...

Literature and Other White-Man Tricks: Borges and Jarmusch Imagine the Frontier

AbstractIn this article, I analyze the representation of the Frontier in the short story ‘El Sur’ by the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges and the movie Dead Man by American director Jim Jarmusch. Going beyond explicit plot similarities, I argue that Jarmusch’s movie carries out an implicit form of adaptation of Borges’s literary text. Both works not only narrate the violent encounter of urban subjects with an unknown and threatening space, but also underscore how the ‘civilized’ subjectivity experiences a crisis that challenges foundational cultural assumptions. Due to its relevance in the process of nation formation, the Frontier served as a source for symbolic discourses, literary representations, and cultural imaginaries. In the case of Argentina and the United States, specific artistic genres fictionalized the life on the Frontier. Stylistically, both Borges and Jarmusch use tropes and narrative devices from these seemingly outdated genres—gauchesca literature and Western movies—but the use of these devices is highly experimental and installs a much more complex depiction of the symbolic space of the Frontier, thus challenging hegemonic accounts of processes of territorial expansion and racial superiority.

Droga, podróż, wędrówka w Tylko kochankowie przeżyją Jima Jarmuscha

Two first decades of the 21st century have revealed an increasing popularity of the horror genre. In particular, we have been witnessing the renaissance of Gothic cinema, especially the vampire sub-genre. It is conspicuous that the original vampire story formula has lately undergone numerous significant alterations. Vampires have evolved from cold and soulless monsters to humanised romantic heroes. In the new millennium, a static Gothic diegesis gets frequently replaced by a dynamic reality, in which movement is a predominant feature. This article is devoted to the motifs of the road, journey and travels in Jim Jarmusch’ film Only Lovers Left Alive.

ТЕАТРАЛЬНОСТЬ КАК НАИВЫСШАЯ ФОРМА ЖИЗНИ: ФИЛЬМ «МЕРТВЕЦ» ДЖИМА ДЖАРМУША В КОНТЕКСТЕ ЖИЗНИ АНТОНЕНА АРТО

The article is a kind of aesthetic experiment that reveals patterns between two stories from the life of the fictional character William Blake from the film "dead Man" by American Director Jim Jarmusch and French theater theorist and philosopher Antonin Artaud. The complexity of the work lies in the fact that the comparison takes place between a fictional hero and a real person who made identical metaphysical trips to the bosom of an ancient civilization. The path is presented as an experience of reincarnation with the possibility of gaining new knowledge, liberation from the burden of pain and illness, fears and anxiety. The author is interested, among other things, in the stages of transformation of the personality and its transition from a reasonable state to a mad state with the exit to purification and liberation of the hero in death. The metamorphosis of the transition to the territory of the transcendent (mad) develops into a holistic individual performance-a challenge to society. Theatricality as the highest form of life itself and its completion determine the initiation process of Artaud and Blake. Artezianka theatricality and tragedy are the tears of all life and the creative forces. Blake's theatricality is realized in a gradual alienation from the everyday world and immersion in the ritual world, which requires him to perform a number of mandatory rites, for example, applying the blood of a slaughtered animal to the face. Comparative analysis takes into account the concept of disease and morbidity, which is considered not from a medical point of view, but in philosophical and aesthetic discourses. For both characters, the fact of theatricalization of life, the Monstration of its aesthetic and moral categories through the optics of ritual and ritual practice of the Indians is postulated.

Defending Irony in the Face of the Inevitable: Jim Jarmusch and Friends

Defending Irony in the Face of the Inevitable: Jim Jarmusch and Friends

Endangered Vampires of the Anthropocene: Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive and the Ecology of Romance

Among the recent spate of independent vampire films, Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive uniquely depicts vampires whose immortality is under threat in a world tainted by environmental toxins. Facing their mortality as we humans face our own extinction, Adam and Eve are vampires of the Anthropocene. Only Lovers was often dismissed by critics as easy on substantial ideas and heavy on seductive sheen, and yet the film deftly deploys the vampire trope to explore enduring attachments, as well as endangered and endangering ways of life. Set in Detroit and Tangier, Jarmusch’s film tracks the roaming romance of his vampires, Adam and Eve, who are both cultured cosmopolitans and endangered species seeking refuge in an increasingly uninhabitable world. Adam and Eve keep alive forms of intimacy and aesthetic appreciation on the verge of extinction even as they adapt to ecological crises by adopting twenty-first-century modes of global consumption. Jarmusch strikes a careful balance between his characters’ complicity with and critique of the world they feed on. In the end the film is about survival and a white Euro-American hegemony that refuses to die.