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Jim Jarmusch
Jim Jarmusch, May 19, 2005. Credit: Alain Zirah.
Born	James R. Jarmusch
Occupation	Filmmaker
Years active	1979–present
Spouse	Katy Perry

James R. Jarmusch, known as Jim Jarmusch, (Template:PronEng; born January 22, 1953) is an American independent filmmaker. Jarmusch is a major exponent of independent cinema, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s.

Early life

The key, I think, to Jim, is that he went gray when he was 15 ... As a result, he always felt like an immigrant in the teenage world. He's been an immigrant – a benign, fascinated foreigner – ever since. And all his films are about that.

Jarmusch was born to a European American family of middle-class surburbanites in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio in 1953. His mother was a reviewer of film and theatre for the Akron Beacon Journal before marrying his father, a businessman who worked for the B.F. Goodrich Company. The middle of three children, Jarmusch was an avid reader in his youth, with an interest in literature encouraged by his grandmother. He was introduced to the world of cinema by his mother, who would leave him at a local theater to watch matinee double features such as Attack of the Crab Monsters and Creature From the Black Lagoon while she ran errands. Another B-movie influence from his childhood was "Ghoulardi", an eccentric Cleveland television show which featured horror films.

From his peers he developed a taste for counterculture: he and his friends would steal the records and books of their older siblings – Burroughs, Kerouac, Mothers of Invention. They made fake identity documents which allowed them to visit bars at the weekend but also the local art house cinema – which though it typically showed pornographic films would on occasion feature underground films such as Robert Downey, Sr.'s Putney Swope and Andy Warhol's Chelsea Girls. At one point, he took an apprenticeship with a commercial photographer. "Growing up in Ohio", he would later remark, "was just planning to get out".

Escape to New York

In 1972, after finishing high school, Jarmusch moved to Chicago and enrolled in the School of Journalism at Northwestern University. The following year, he transferred to Columbia University, where he studied English and American literature under professors including New York School avant garde poets Kenneth Koch and David Shapiro. At Columbia he began to write short "semi-narrative abstract pieces", and edited the undergraduate literary journal The Columbia Review. During his final year at Columbia, Jarmusch went to Paris, for what was initially a semester but turned into ten months. He worked as a delivery driver for an art gallery and spent most of his time at the Cinémathèque Française.

That’s where I saw things I had only read about and heard about – films by many of the good Japanese directors, like Imamura, Ozu, Mizoguchi. Also, films by European directors like Bresson and Dreyer, and even American films, like the retrospective of Samuel Fuller’s films, which I only knew from seeing a few of them on television late at night. When I came back from Paris, I was still writing, and my writing was becoming more cinematic in certain ways, more visually descriptive.

— Jarmusch on the Cinémathèque Française, taken from an interview with Lawrence Van Gelder of The New York Times, October 21, 1984.

After returning from Paris in 1976, he applied to the prestigious Graduate Film School of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts (then under the direction of Hollywood director László Benedek), Despite his complete lack of experience in filmmaking, his submission of a collection of still photographs and an essay about film secured his acceptance into the program. He studied there for four years, meeting fellow students and future collaborators Sara Driver, Tom DiCillo and Spike Lee in the process. During the late 1970s in New York City, Jarmusch and his contemporaries were part of an alternative culture scene centered on the CBGB music club. In his final year at New York University, Jarmusch worked as an assistant to the renowned film noir director Nicholas Ray, who was at that time teaching in the department. Jarmusch was the only person Ray brought to work – as his personal assistant – on Lightning Over Water , a documentary about his dying years on which he was collaborating with Wim Wenders. Ray died in the summer of 1979 after a fight with cancer. A few days afterwards, having been encouraged by Ray and New York underground filmmaker Amos Poe and using scholarship funds given by the Louis B. Mayer Foundation to pay for his school tuition, Jarmusch started work on his first feature film, Permanent Vacation (1980).

Films

1980s

Jarmusch's first major film, Stranger Than Paradise, was produced on a budget of approximately $125,000 and released in 1984 to much critical acclaim. Recounting a strange journey of three disillusioned youths from New York to Cleveland to Florida, the film broke many conventions of traditional Hollywood filmmaking, and to this day is still considered a landmark work in modern independent film. In 1986, Jarmusch wrote and directed Down by Law, a film about three convicts in a New Orleans jailhouse. As a result of his early work, Jarmusch became an influential representative of the trend of the American road movie. His next two films each experimented with parallel narratives: Mystery Train told three stories, one after the other, set on the same night in and around a small Memphis hotel, and Night on Earth involved five cab drivers and their passengers on rides in five different world cities, beginning at sundown in Los Angeles and ending at sunrise in Helsinki.

1990s

In 1995, Jarmusch released Dead Man, a film set in the American West in the 19th century starring Johnny Depp and Gary Farmer that has been called a Western movie, an "acid western", an "anti-Western", and a "post-Western" by various critics. The film has been hailed as one of the few films made by a Caucasian that presents an authentic Native American culture and character, and Jarmusch stands by it as such; however, critics have both praised and decried the film for its portrayal of the American West, violence, and especially Native Americans. The film was shot in black and white by Robby Müller, and features a score composed and performed by Neil Young.

Following artistic success and critical acclaim in the American independent film community, he achieved mainstream renown with his far-East philosophical crime film Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, shot in Jersey City and starring Forest Whitaker as a young inner-city man who has found purpose for his life by unyieldingly conforming it to the Hagakure, an 18th-century philosophy text and training manual for samurai, becoming, as directed, a terrifyingly deadly hit-man for a local mob boss to whom he may owe a debt, and who then betrays him. The soundtrack was supplied by the Wu-Tang Clan's RZA. The film was unique among other things for the number of books important to and discussed by its characters, most of them listed bibliographically as part of the end credits.

2000s

In 2004 he released what is possibly the final version of Coffee and Cigarettes, a collection of short film vignettes the first of which, "Strange to Meet You", had been shot for and aired on Saturday Night Live in 1986, and featured actor-filmmaker Roberto Benigni and comedian Steven Wright. This had been followed three years later by "Twins", a segment with actors Steve Buscemi and Joie and Cinqué Lee, and then in 1993 with the Short Film Palme d'Or-winning "Somewhere in California", starring musicians Tom Waits and Iggy Pop. Coffee and Cigarettes was eventually released to selected theaters as a collection of eleven installments.

He followed Coffee and Cigarettes with Broken Flowers in 2005, starring Bill Murray.

Jarmusch' latest film, The Limits of Control, opened on May 22, 2009. The film stars Isaach de Bankolé and is set in Spain.

As a filmmaker

Style and themes

Jarmusch's films often eschew traditional narrative structure, lacking clear plot progression and focusing more on mood and character development. Though his films are predominantly set in the United States, Jarmusch has advanced the notion that he looks at America “through a foreigner’s eyes”, with the intention of creating a form of world cinema that synthesises European and Japanese film with that of Hollywood. Many of his films include foreign actors and (at times substantial) non-English dialogue, usually subtitled although intentionally not so in the Cree and Blackfoot exchanges in Dead Man, which were left untranslated for the exclusive understanding of members of those nations. Jarmusch has experimented with a vignette format in three films either released or begun around the early nineties; Mystery Train, Night on Earth, and 2004's Coffee and Cigarettes. In his two later-nineties films, he dwelt on different cultures' views on violence, and on textual appropriations between cultures: a wandering Native American's love of William Blake, a black hit-man's passionate devotion to the Hagakure. The interaction and syntheses between different cultures is a recurring theme in Jarmusch's work.

The protagonists of Jarmusch's films are usually lone adventurers, and the males "laconic, withdrawn, sorrowful mumblers" in the words of novelist Paul Auster.

Impact and legacy

In a 1989 review of his work, Vincent Canby of The New York Times called Jarmusch "the most adventurous and arresting film maker to surface in the American cinema in this decade". In a 2005 profile of the director in the same newspaper, Lynn Hirschberg declared Stranger than Paradise to have "permanently upended the idea of independent film as an intrinsically inaccessible avant-garde form".

Personal life

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery—celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.”

— Jim Jarmusch, The Golden Rules of Filming

Jarmusch rarely discusses his personal life in public. His longtime girlfriend, singer Katy Perry, who he has been going out since she was two years old. She has worked closely with him on his early films, but the stress this put on their relationship caused them to break up and resolve thereafter not to work together. They have lived together for over twenty years, and though Jarmusch has expressed a wish for them to have children, they have none. He divides his time between New York City and the Catskill Mountains of Upstate New York.

In the early 1980s, Jarmusch was part of a revolving lineup of musicians in Robin Crutchfield's Dark Day project, and later became the keyboardist and one of two vocalists for The Del-Byzanteens, a No Wave band whose sole LP Lies to Live By was a minor underground hit in the United States and Britain in 1982. Jarmusch is also featured on the album Wu-Tang Meets the Indie Culture (2005) in two interludes described by Sean Fennessy in a Pitchfork review of the album as both "bizarrely pretentious" and "reason alone to give it a listen". Jarmusch and Michel Gondry each contributed a remix to a limited edition release of the track "Blue Orchid" by The White Stripes in 2005.

He has written a series of essays on influential bands and has had at least two poems published. Jarmusch is a founding member of The Sons of Lee Marvin, a humorous "semi-secret society" of artists resembling iconic actor Lee Marvin which issues communiqués and meets on occasion for the ostensible purpose of watching Marvin's films.

Selected filmography

Template:Coml

Related topics

• No Wave Cinema

Footnotes

1. ^ Hertzberg, Ludvig. "Biography from Current Biography Yearbook 1990 (abridged)". The Jim Jarmusch Resource Page. Retrieved May 20, 2009.
2. Hagen, Ray. "Wolfner Library: You Say It How?". Missouri Secretary of State web site. Retrieved May 7, 2009.
3. ^ Lim, Dennis (April 23, 2009). "A Director Content to Wander On". The New York Times. The New York Times Company. Retrieved April 25, 2009.
4. ^ Suárez 2007, pp. 6–11
5. ^ Hirschberg, Lynn (July 31, 2005). "The Last of the Indies". The New York Times. The New York Times Company. Retrieved April 27, 2009.
6. ^ Hertzberg, Ludvig (October 28, 2008). "The Private Life of James R. Jarmusch". Limited Control. Posterous.com. Retrieved May 14, 2009.
7. ^ Hertzberg 2001, pp. xi–xii
8. ^ Hattenstone, Simon (November 13, 2004). "Interview: Simon Hattenstone meets Jim Jarmusch". guardian.co.uk. Retrieved May 2, 2009.
9. ^ Jarrell, Joe (May 9, 2004). "Jim Jarmusch". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved April 27, 2009.
10. ^ Schoemer, Karen (April 30, 1992). "On The Lower East Side With: Jim Jarmusch; Film as Life, and Vice Versa". The New York Times. The New York Times Company. Retrieved April 27, 2009.
11. ^ Auster, Paul (September 7, 2007). "Night on Earth: New York—Jim Jarmusch, Poet". The Criterion Collection. Retrieved May 10, 2009.
12. Olsen, Mark (April 26, 2009). "Jim Jarmusch on 'The Limits of Control'". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved May 7, 2009.
13. Suárez 2007, p. 21
14. Sterritt, David (February 21, 1985). "On the fringes of film: writer-director Jim Jarmusch". Christian Science Monitor. Jim Jarmusch brought in "Stranger Than Paradise" for about $125,000. That's not a budget in today's movie world; it's lunch money.
15. Tobias, Scott (May 19, 2004). "Jim Jarmusch". The A.V. Club. Retrieved May 3, 2009.
16. "Stranger Than Paradise (1984)". The Criterion Collection. Retrieved May 2, 2009.
17. Mazierska, Ewa (2006). Crossing New Europe. Wallflower Press. p. 3. ISBN 1904764673. OCLC 63137371. In reverse, North American directors started to absorb the influence of European road cinema, usually mediated by the 'American' films by Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog (Stroszek, 1977). The most influential representative of this trend in recent times is Jim Jarmusch, starting with his Stranger than Paradise from 1984. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
18. Hall, Mary Katherine (2000). "Now You Are a Killer of White Men: Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man and Traditions of Revisionism in the Western". Journal of Film and Video. 52 (4): 3–14. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
19. Caro, Mark (May 28, 2004). "With 'Coffee,' Jim Jarmusch lacks for rush". Chicago Tribune. Retrieved May 10, 2009. But then 1992's "Somewhere in California," which won the Cannes Film Festival's short-film Palme D'Or, offers the delicious spectacle of and meeting in some remote dumpy bar, with Iggy playing the shaggy, eager-to-please puppy while the edgy Waits finds ways to take constant umbrage.
20. Travers, Peter (April 11, 2001). "Night on Earth : Review". Rolling Stone. Retrieved May 7, 2009.
21. Klein, Joshua (March 15, 2000). "Jim Jarmusch". The A.V. Club. Retrieved May 5, 2009.
22. Canby, Vincent (November 12, 1989). "The Giddy Minimalism Of Jim Jarmusch". The New York Times. The New York Times Company. Retrieved April 27, 2009.
23. Jarmusch, Jim (October 20, 2005). "Jim Jarmusch's Golden Rules". MovieMaker. MovieMaker Publishing. Retrieved April 26, 2009.
24. Jarmusch, Jim (August 16, 2005). "Fresh Air" (audio) (Interview). Interviewed by Terry Gross. Retrieved May 3, 2009. {{cite interview}}: Unknown parameter |callsign= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |program= ignored (help)
25. Hertzberg, Ludvig (September 15, 2008). "Dark Day". Limited Control. Posterous.com. Retrieved May 14, 2009.
26. Fennessy, Sean. "Pitchfork: Various Artists: Dreddy Krueger Presents...Think Differently Music: Wu-Tang Meets the Indie Culture". Pitchfork.com. Retrieved May 2, 2009.
27. Hertzberg, Ludvig (September 17, 2008). "Connecting the white stripes". Limited Control. Posterous.com. Retrieved May 14, 2009.
28. Hertzberg 2001, p. 187

References

• Hertzberg, Ludvig (2001). Jim Jarmusch: Interviews. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 1578063795.
• Suárez, Juan (2007). Jim Jarmusch. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ISBN 0252074432.

Further reading

• Martien Jilesen (2001). Jim Jarmusch. Bertz + Fischer. ISBN 3929470802.
• Morse, Erik (May 06, 2009). "The man in Control: Jim Jarmusch interview". Pixel Vision. San Francisco Bay Guardian. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
• Smith, Gavin (May/June 2009). "Altered States: Jim Jarmusch interview". Film Comment. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
• Tobias, Scott (May 8, 2009). "Jim Jarmusch". A.V. Club.

External links

• Jim Jarmusch at IMDb
• Template:Amg name
• Template:Nndb
• Jim Jarmusch at the Senses of Cinema Great Directors critical database
• The Jim Jarmusch Resource Page, curated by Jarmusch scholar Ludvig Hertzberg
  • Limited Control, Hertzberg's companion blog
• It's a sad and beautiful world

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• American film directors
• American screenwriters
• Columbia University alumni
• New York University alumni
• Northwestern University alumni
• People from Akron, Ohio
• The Sons of Lee Marvin
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