Jim Jarmusch's hip, urban, comic jags arose from the same East Village-New York University explosion that nurtured the relentlessly contemporary films of Susan Seidelman and Spike Lee. His recurring motif is one of narrative as an inevitable byproduct of cultural collision. Jarmusch offers lowlife reflections of post-modernist communication and miscommunication between characters sealed off from one another, their only connection the many-tentacled pop trash culture of America.
In 1971, Jarmusch enrolled at Columbia University in the English literature program. A few months before graduation, on a visit to Paris, he discovered the rich treasures of the Cinematheque Francaise and wound up staying in France for a year. Upon returning to New York City, he enrolled in the graduate film program at New York University, where he became a teaching assistant to director Nicholas Ray. Through Ray's efforts, Jarmusch became a production assistant on Wim Wenders' tribute to Ray, "Lighting Over Water" (1980). After using his NYU tuition money to complete his first feature, "Permanent Vacation" (1980), he began work on a short film, shot over one weekend, that eventually became "Stranger Than Paradise" four years later.
"Stranger Than Paradise" startled audiences with its gritty cool and fresh comic tone, winning the Camera d'Or at Cannes and the Best Film award from the National Society of Film Critics. Jarmusch has referred to his first three feature films as a trilogy. "Stranger Than Paradise," along with "Down By Law" (1986) and "Mystery Train" (1989), take place in a blighted American cultural landscape--from the bleak, wintry moonscape of Ohio and the cracked seaminess of an over-ripe Florida in "Stranger Than Paradise" to the diffuse, cinema-reflected New Orleans in "Down By Law" and the tawdry, clapboard decay of Memphis' "Mystery Train." In this world, characters make connections by sharing TV dinners, chanting ice cream jingles and revering Elvis Presley.
A Jarmusch film begins with characters who live a robot-like existence, unable to relate or communicate; a typical Jarmusch shot features a character staring off-screen until the screen fades to black or there is a cut to darkness. Into this stultifying atmosphere, another character with a different viewpoint and perspective enters, exposing the shallowness of the enmeshed character's existence. This foreign presence may be a Hungarian visitor ("Stranger Than Paradise"), an Italian tourist ("Down By Law") or Japanese teenagers on a pilgrimage to Graceland ("Mystery Train"). As Jarmusch has explained, "America's a kind of throwaway culture that's a mixture of different cultures. To make a film about America, it seems to me logical to have at least one perspective that's transplanted because ours is a collection of transplanted influences." In this clash lies the basis of Jarmusch's invigorating originality.
Through the course of these three films, Jarmusch's comic vision became more despairing. At the end of "Stranger Than Paradise", two characters still have a hopeful chance of happiness. In "Down By Law", however, two leads are still on the run as another plans for a promising future while in "Mystery Train", the three sets of characters spend the film barely missing each other and, as dawn comes up in Memphis, all race off in different directions. In a world of declining values and lovelessness, the population in Jarmusch's films are all racing off in different directions, seeking their own personal shelters of comfort and familiarity, blanketed by the shrilly blaring music of Screamin' Jay Hawkins and Irma Thomas—recorded voices shouting into a void.
After completing his feature-length trilogy, Jarmusch returned, in a sense, to the short-film format with "Night on Earth" (1991). He had never entirely left that zone of filmmaking, given the segmented quality of his narrative style. (He also continued to shoot short films, like the three completed segments of his ongoing "Coffee and Cigarettes" series.) "Night on Earth" told five separate stories, each centering on the relationship that unfolds between a taxi driver and her or his customer, with episodes set in Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Rome and Helsinki. Critics tended to feel that, as with most anthology films, quality varied from segment to segment, yet the overall effect was quite powerful. Some customary Jarmusch faces peopled his deliberately confined landscapes, and the tone typically veered from side-splittingly funny to quietly poignant, ending on a note of despondency.
Part of the cult fascination with Jarmusch stems not only from his admittedly fascinating films but also from a persona remarkably visible for an independent filmmaker. He has kept quite busy as an actor in independent cinema in parts ranging from cameos to fairly substantial roles. He has appeared in Alex Cox's "Straight to Hell" (1987), Robert Frank and Rudy Wurlitzer's "Candy Mountain" (1987), Mika Kaurismaki's "Helsinki Napoli All Night Long" (1988), Aki Kaurismaki's "Leningrad Cowboys Go America" (1989), Raul Ruiz's "The Golden Boat" (1990), Tom DeCillo's "Johnny Suede" (1992), Alexandre Rockwell's "In the Soup" (1992) and Wayne Wang and Paul Auster's "Blue in the Face" (1995). The presence of the strikingly handsome if odd-looking Jarmusch, with his trademark white pompadour, bee-stung lips and lanky muscular physique clad in black has lent these films an air of downtown bohemian authenticity.
Jarmusch has, of course, continued to meander along with his own distinctive projects, eschewing the Hollywood establishment for European financing and the attending hands-off policy that allows him to bring his vision uncorrupted to the screen. "Dead Man" (1995), his black-and-white revisionist Western, featured a mix of offbeat younger actors (Johnny Depp, Crispin Glover) and legendarily idiosyncratic faces (John Hurt, Iggy Pop, Robert Mitchum) in its saga of the cultural collision between a Cleveland accountant (Depp) and the West of 1875. Pursued as a murderer by bounty hunters, he befriends a Native American (Gary Farmer) who believes he is the reincarnation of the poet William Blake. Though panned by critics at the time of its release, it has undergone a startling re-evaluation, receiving praise from such quarters as Film Comment which cited "Dead Man" as one of the representative films of the 90s.
Jarmusch's collaboration with Neil Young on "Dead Man" and the subsequent music video "Big Time" (1996) led to "Year of the Horse" (1997), a documentary about Young and his band Crazy Horse. Filmed in Super 8 during the group's 1996 tour (and incorporating some 70s and 80s footage), this ultimate home movie was both a concert film and a revealing look at the daily life of a working band. Jarmusch then returned to features with "Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai" (1999), described by the writer-director as a "gangster samurai hip-hop Eastern Western". Starring Forest Whitaker as a Mafia hitman who follows the precepts of the "Hagakure", an early-18th-century Japanese warrior code book of the samurai, "Ghost Dog" possessed Jarmusch's signature zany humor picturing America as a place of crossed cultural wires. It ran afoul of some mainstream critics, however, who abhorred its length and what they felt were incomprehensible plot twists. Its intriguing thematic content underscored by the high-voltage, hip-hop soundtrack composed by The RZA seemed destined to find an audience, perhaps adding new fans to the legion of Jarmusch aficionados.
For his next feature, “Coffee and Cigarettes” (2004), perhaps his most minimalist to date, Jarmusch filmed a wide array of actors and celebrities—including Iggy Pop, Bill Murray, Cate Blanchett and The RZA—talking about diverse topics—such as 1920’s Paris, caffeine popsicles and using nicotine as insecticide—while, naturally, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. The series of seemingly inane vignettes was a convenient excuse for Jarmusch to put interesting people on camera while using variation on a theme as a formal structure for the film. His next project, “Broken Flowers” (2005), Jarmusch went back to a more formal narrative structure while keeping with his traditionally low key approach. Bill Murray starred as an aged Don Juan who receives a an unsigned letter with a blurry postmark from a woman claiming to have his 19-year-old son. The man lists all the women he slept with twenty years prior and goes on a cross-country trek to find his son. While much of the attention focused on Murray’s endearing performance, critics hailed Jarmusch for his integrity in continuing to make thoughtful independent films.