1This lecture came at the start of a retrospective devoted to Jim Jarmusch at the British Film Institute Southbank cinematheque in London. As then, I shall be looking at certain recurrent themes in Jarmusch’s work, and the way he uses film to deal with those themes. In other words, I’ll be looking at both form and content, which in Jarmusch’s case, as in the work of most artists of note, are inextricably bound together.

2So this won’t be a historical account of Jarmusch’s life and work. Many of you will already know that he was born and grew up in Akron, Ohio in the 1950s, went to study in New York and Paris, was a member of a New York No Wave garage band called the Del-Byzanteeens, studied for a while under Nicholas Ray, was given some film by both Wim Wenders and Jean-Marie Straub when he was trying to complete Stranger than Paradise, and so on.

3Too often, those who’ve written or spoken about Jarmusch seem to have felt it was enough simply to describe him as the King of Cool or some such, presumably because of his appearance – the shock of prematurely white hair, the Lee Marvin looks – and because of his friendship and collaborations with musicians like Tom Waits, Iggy Pop, Joe Strummer, Neil Young, John Lurie and others. But that’s far from the whole story. Jarmusch couldn’t care less whether he’s perceived as cool or not; he has more interesting things on his mind as the following clips will demonstrate.

Only Lovers Left Alive (2013)2

4Start in chapter 3 at 00.25.09 with Tilda Swinton’s face on TV before she says “Hello”.

End at 00.27.29 on Tilda Swinton’s face after she kisses the phone and says “I’ll take that for the journey”.

5I should perhaps advise you now that we are generally going to journey backwards in time, though there will be detours which I hope will prove enjoyable and illuminating. I want to explore how Jarmusch arrived at a point where he was making a film like the one you’ve just seen: a contemporary vampire film set in Tangier and Detroit. A vampire film unlike any other: not a horror film or thriller, but a love story about two people who sometimes live apart, separately caught up in their own concerns and creative practices, but valuing one another so highly that they’re always ready to come together to help and support one another. Personally, I have a suspicion that this might be, among many other things, a celebration of Jarmusch’s own long-standing relationship with the filmmaker Sara Driver – but as I said, our concerns are not really biographical.

6Suffice to say Only Lovers Left Alive is partly about the importance of supportive and trusting relationships. But it’s also a meditation – sometimes serious, sometimes comic – on the state of things. Since Adam and Eve, played by Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton, have been around for a few centuries, they’re able to look at and comment on the world today with reference to a wider timespan than our own. Adam, a reclusive musician, an artist, tells us that he is tired of what the people wielding power – those he calls the zombies

– have been doing to the planet and its inhabitants. Since he is an artist, I think Adam may to some degree be seen as a mouthpiece for Jarmusch himself, and if we can borrow a phrase from Roberto Benigni’s character in Down By Law, Adam’s view is pretty much that that we live in a sad and beautiful world, and that the sadness derives not only from the many injustices of life, but from the fact that the world’s very beauty is itself at risk. It may even be that the beauty and the sadness are inseparable from one another, that you can’t have one without the other. We’ll revisit that idea later.

The Limits of Control (2009)3

7Start at 01.35.15 on Isaach de Bankole’s face as he looks at security guards outside a building.

End at 01.39.16 on Bill Murray’s face in close up after he says “Fuck you”.

8The scene comes towards the end of the film when the taciturn hitman played by Isaach de Bankolé finally, after a series of brief encounters and coded conversations with various bizarre characters, gets to meet the man he’s been contracted to kill. Again, as in Only Lovers Left Alive, the idea is that those in power, who control the world, are getting things horribly wrong – in this case because they are self-serving and cynical, and insufficiently aware of the beauty they are destroying. The film may be seen as Jarmusch’s response to years of neo-conservatism, particularly during the presidency of George W. Bush. But as its title suggests, however powerful one becomes, however much one isolates oneself from the outside world, there’s always a limit to one’s powers – because death can come to anyone at any time. Mortality is inescapable.

9Jarmusch reminds us of that fact in various ways. For one thing he litters his film with allusions to death as it’s been depicted in other art forms – painting, literature, and music, from Schubert’s Death and the Maiden to Andalusian flamenco. For another, there’s the characterisation of the hitman – a man with no name in a blue suit which is intentionally reminiscent of the one worn by Walker, the Lee Marvin character in John Boorman’s Point Blank (1967). Now Walker – there’s an interesting name for you! – was left for dead at the beginning of that film, and his own quest for justice is that of an angel of death – as he tracks down the men who betrayed him, all of them end up dead. Now, the hitman in The Limits of Control might be seen as a son of Lee Marvin – to borrow the name of a small, none-too-secret secret society of which Jarmusch is a founding member – or at least as a son of Walker: like Walker, he isn’t limited by the constraints normal humans face. Like Walker who just keeps turning up wherever he needs to be as if by magic, Jarmusch’s hitman can bypass security simply by force of will; or rather, as he himself says, by using his imagination. We don’t see him enter his target’s lair; he just imagines himself there and that’s it. It’s almost as if he’s a shaman, who inhabits a realm different from our own – not so unlike the vampire lovers in Only Lovers Left Alive. While Jarmusch may mistrust those in power, he greatly values the power of the imagination. For him, it’s a creative force, and a very important tool in ensuring one’s life is well spent. Imagination, in other words, is one of the things that makes this sad world beautiful.

Le Samouraï (1967)4, Jean-Pierre Melville

10Start in chapter 1 at 00.03.15 on shot of finch in cage, continue as Alain Delon leaves and steals car.

End at 00.05.38 as Alain Delon lights cigarette.

11Like The Limits of Control, Le Samouraï is a hitman movie, and like the unnamed Isaac de Bankolé character, and indeed like Walker in Point Blank, Jef Costello, played by Alain Delon, speaks very little. He seldom smiles, either. Indeed, he might as well be dead, as may be seen from the way he lives. Hidden away in the grim grey of his tiny room, his only companion a caged finch, he emerges into the daylight only to carry out his murderous contracts – contracts that eventually, and inevitably, result in him making his own appointment with death. For Melville, the film was not so much about Costello’s crimes, or about his managing to stay alive – indeed, Costello never shows any great interest in doing that – as it was about the need to find the right way to die. Since death is inevitable, it’s best if one can make sure it comes at the right place and the right time; that is to say, as one chooses.

12We’ll return to the theme of death, but I want to mention here the stylization of Melville’s film. Not just the laconicism, but the costumes and set design, and especially the near-monochrome set used for Costello’s room. Melville was a cinephile and an Americanophile, with an encyclopaedic knowledge of Hollywood films. The beginning of Le Samouraï is an homage to – and borrows from – the opening of This Gun for Hire, an adaptation of Graham Greene’s story directed by Frank Tuttle in 1942, and starring Alan Ladd as a taciturn contract killer. That film was an early film noir, and thus somewhat stylized. But Melville’s stylization is different: it’s artier, more self-conscious; the brazen artifice reminds us from the start that the film may be read, indeed, probably should be read metaphorically. It goes far beyond realism; the caged bird and grey walls aren’t just an accidental, atmospheric part of the décor; they are clearly there for a reason.

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1990)5

13Start in chapter 1 at 00.03.23 on shot of statuette, immediately before shot changes to a printed page and we hear “And every day without fail, one should consider himself as dead”.

End at 00.07.00 after Forest Whitaker has driven off in stolen car and a cop car has exited left of screen.

14In this scene from the opening of Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, you’ll have noted the caged birds – here, homing pigeons – the reclusive hitman’s unglamorous hideaway, his methodical, painstakingly professional approach to car theft: all these are lifted from the opening of Melville’s film, which as I said was itself lifted from an earlier film. But Jarmusch changes things a little, because his story takes place not in 1960s Paris but in late 1990s New York. That said, as with Le Samouraï, for all its contemporary trappings Ghost Dog has an aura of timelessness which is the product, I think, of two things Jarmusch does with his film. Firstly, whereas Melville restricts his musings about the right way to die to a single written quotation that appears on screen before the film proper starts, Jarmusch is more explicit, more transparent, in the way he brings such extra-narrative ideas into his film. By this, I mean that he is readier to introduce into the narrative ideas which aren’t fully plot-related. Jarmusch has never been big on plot. He often assembles his narratives from fairly uneventful moments which most other filmmakers might consider “dead” or insufficiently dramatic. He’s less interested in plot than in people, place, time and ideas – ideas, especially. Jarmusch has always been very interested in poetry, and it’s fair to say his films are closer to poetry than to the novel. He feels free to ignore questions of plot-logic – for instance, how, exactly, Isaach de Bankolé found his way into Bill Murray’s bunker – and to include allusions to other art forms which are relevant not to the storyline but to his film’s themes. So here we have Forest Whitaker’s Ghost Dog – there’s another interesting name for you! – not only living in isolation with his pigeons, but reading Hagakure, the classic book about bushido, the traditional code of the Japanese samurai. (How often do we see people reading books for pleasure in Hollywood films? Almost never, I’d say. One notable exception is one of the gold prospectors in the Western Johnny Guitar (1954), directed, as it happens, by Jarmusch’s mentor Nicholas Ray.)

15To return to Ghost Dog, there are extracts from the aforementioned Japanese book scattered throughout the film – we even see the words on screen as we hear the protagonist reading them. Then too there are references to movies like Seijun Suzuki’s Branded to Kill (1967), cartoons and TV programmes, musical allusions, and so on. Indeed, even though this film may have more “plot” – for want of a better word – than most Jarmusch films, it’s so rich in allusions, asides, digressions, musings and gags that one almost forgets that it’s about a hitman trying to kill his treacherous employers before they can kill him.

16So yes, the film harks back to Le Samouraï in that it’s about finding a way to live and a way to die. This brings us to another slightly strange aspect of a film which in other hands might have been a fairly straightforward thriller. Ghost Dog is no ordinary hitman, and that’s not only because he lives with pigeons and reads old Japanese books. You may have noticed that when he passed several people coming out of a bar, they didn’t seem aware of him at all. You may also have noticed that when he walked past a cemetery – and rest assured Jarmusch didn’t shoot there by accident – the hitman nodded towards the gravestones as if greeting old friends. So is Ghost Dog really a ghost, one of the living dead, another walker? A distant relative of the vampires Adam and Eve, and the shamanistic hitman with no name? Or is Ghost Dog as alive as you and I? Does the answer to those questions matter, given that Ghost Dog abides by a code that insists: “Every day without fail, one should consider himself as dead”. Is this another way of saying Media vita in morte sumus – in the midst of life we are in death? That could be another reason why our beautiful world is inevitably tinged with sadness.

Young Mr Lincoln (1939)6, John Ford

17Start in chapter 3 at 00.10.15 as Henry Fonda tidies grave, before he says “Pretty, aren’t they?”

End at 00.12.13 after Henry Fonda says “Here goes Ann”, and lets the twig fall.

18For those of you familiar with Jarmusch through his films and interviews, this might be a slightly surprising choice of clip. John Ford, a real genre man who made numerous Westerns, is not someone usually mentioned in connection with Jarmusch, who tends to treat traditional genres, when he uses them at all, in a fairly cavalier fashion. Still, they’re both American filmmakers, and each has had his work described as “poetic”. Now, that much over-used word can be terribly vague. With regard to Ford, I think what people usually mean by “poetic” is “lyrical”, in that he had an eye for a striking landscape shot and a rather pleasing way with sunsets; or they might even mean “elegiac”, given the nostalgic sense of the years passing that colours so many Ford films. But that’s not what I have in mind if I apply the term “poetic” to Jarmusch, notwithstanding the undertow of melancholy that can be found in much of his work. If I say Jarmusch’s work is closer to poetry than the novel, I’m thinking of his wariness of the kind of dramatic plot favoured by Hollywood and most mainstream filmmakers – of his preference for nuance, allusion, the small gesture or quick glance, the quietly telling moment. I’m thinking of the idea that you don’t have to spell everything out for the audience – that they can take the various, often disparate elements of the narrative, think about how they relate to one another, and work out what the director’s getting at for themselves.

Broken Flowers (2005)7

19Start at beginning of chapter 17 at 01.19.00 on overhead shot of flowers, before off-screen voice says “They’re all pink, right?”.

End at 00.21.48 as image fades on Bill Murray sitting in cemetery.

20It’s interesting to compare this clip with the one from Young Mr Lincoln. I love Ford’s film, but it’s revealing how he and his writer Lamar Trotti made the young Lincoln – traditionally presented as a man prone to pensiveness, not logorrhoea – so talkative at Ann Rutledge’s grave. They did that not to suggest the depth of his feelings for her, but to let us know what’s on Abe’s mind as he considers his destiny. Jarmusch, on the other hand, plays out his graveside scene very quietly. As you heard Bill Murray’s character is called Don Johnston – another interesting name, not because it calls to mind an actor from Miami Vice, but because it echoes Don Juan. The film is a kind of road movie constructed around Johnston’s visits to various former lovers, one of whom he suspects might be the mother of a now grown son he never even knew he had until he received an anonymous letter a few days ago. As written by Jarmusch and played by Murray, Johnston is not a person given to displays of emotion – indeed, at the start of the film his latest girlfriend, played by Julie Delpy, leaves him because she finds him unable or reluctant to commit. But in the scene we’ve just seen, Johnston does allow himself to show, albeit in private, some real depth of feeling for a dead girlfriend we the audience have never even seen. In some respects Broken Flowers is Jarmusch’s most conventional movie, but as the clip shows, he never really does things the conventional way. Contrary to Hollywood tradition, which we saw exemplified by Ford, Jarmusch not only allows the images to speak for themselves, but he even precedes the graveside scene with some comedy. That’s very characteristic of Jarmusch’s aesthetic; he’s very fond of a line he used in Ghost Dog which the hitman discovers in his book about the code of the samurai:

Matters of great concern should be treated lightly. And matters of small concern should be treated seriously.

21In other words, what counts is not just what you say, but how you say it. As so often, the truth lies in an apparent paradox or contradiction.

They Caught the Ferry (1948), Carl Dreyer; extra on Master of the House (1925)8

22Start at 00.09.30 on long shot of couple on a motorbike. Continue beyond crash. End at 00.11.13 on shot of water after boat and coffins exit frame.

23Carl Dreyer, the great Danish director, is best known for such classics as The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), Vampyr (1932), Day of Wrath (1943) and Ordet (1955). It must be said that They Caught the Ferry is not a major title in Dreyer’s body of work – it only lasts around ten minutes and was an official commission, made to promote road safety. Hence the depiction of the deadly risks involved in driving too fast or overtaking on winding country roads. I chose this clip for several reasons. First, it was Jim himself who recommended the film to me many years ago – an avid cinephile, he’s long been an admirer of Dreyer’s work. Moreover, since he once told me that, had he not become a filmmaker, he’d have liked to be a motorcycle mechanic, you can see why he might be attracted to this particular oddity by the great Dane.

24But there’s more to it than that, of course. Dreyer is best known for rather spare, austere studies of spiritual and physical suffering, and here he’s using images and ideas that might almost have come from Vampyr: not just the Ferryman transporting the coffins, a latter-day Charon, but Death himself as a grim figure actually walking, or rather driving, among us. So Dreyer is not only using images and ideas that have come down to us from antiquity; he’s doing so in a context which is as modern and banal as it gets – a road safety short. He’s mixing high and low culture. That’s something Jarmusch likes to do, too. His respect and admiration for artists like Dreyer or stylists like Melville is complemented by a love of pulp fare: low-budget 1950s sci-fi, creaky horror films, noir thrillers made on Poverty Row. So Dreyer’s blending of everyday realism and Gothic imagery is not so unlike some of the things Jarmusch has done – most notably in Only Lovers Left Alive. He’s not afraid of symbols and metaphors, and seems to like the surreal, even hallucinatory results of juxtaposing elements that might at first appear to be incongruous.

Dead Man (1995)9

25Start at beginning of chapter 16 at 01.48.36 as it fades up on the back of a Native American leaning over a canoe at river’s edge. End at 01.51.45 on shot of clouds.

26The scene is from the closing scene of Dead Man. It’s a Western of sorts, now considered by some to be one of the finest American films of the 1990s, though it received a rough ride when it first appeared, probably because Jarmusch isn’t very interested in genre. This is not the kind of Western John Ford would have made. As it chronicles the experiences of the Johnny Depp character – a somewhat naïve accountant from Ohio called William Blake who decides to take up the challenge to “go west, young man”, only to find himself seriously wounded and wanted for murder with a price on his head – the film breaks all sorts of rules. Characters who seem central to the plot suddenly die or disappear from the film. It becomes clear halfway through the film that even the protagonist isn’t going to get out of it alive. His newfound Native American friend – a Plains Indian by the name of Nobody – refuses to believe that Blake is a clerk from Cleveland, insisting that he’s really the English poet whose work he lovingly quotes. Iggy Pop appears in drag as a deranged character called Sally Jenko. The first thing most people do upon encountering Blake in this remote, rugged landscape is to ask if he has any tobacco. The two marshals pursuing the fugitive Blake are called Lee and Marvin. Such things don’t usually happen in westerns.

27It’s not only Jarmusch’s lack of interest in playing the genre game that is distinctive. Again, we have the unexpected juxtaposition of serious drama – Depp’s progress towards death, the rough (in) justice of the American way – with moments of absurdist humour: Nobody and the villain shooting each other simultaneously, and dying with the kind of exaggerated gestures one sometimes finds in early B-westerns. Again, too, there are allusions to the other arts, notably through the references to the visionary poet and artist Blake – Dead Man itself might be called a Song of Innocence and Experience. It becomes more hallucinatory, more concerned with what might be called the spiritual realm as it proceeds, reflecting both the delirious state of the dying clerk’s consciousness, and the cycle of life and death in which his friend Nobody believes. Jarmusch has a seemingly boundless curiosity about other people’s beliefs, whether to do with science, religion, art or whatever, and in Dead Man he treats the Native Americans’ faith in shamanism – just as he treats their language and culture as a whole – with absolute respect, so that Blake’s last voyage across the water is not just another western death but the continuation of a journey to “the other side” upon which he embarked a long time previously. In other words, the clerk from Cleveland has discovered what Ghost Dog discovered: “Every day without fail, one should consider himself as dead”.

L’Eclisse (1962)10, Michelangelo Antonioni

28Start in chapter 18 at 01.58.31 on shot of lawn sprinkler. End on shot of zebra crossing at 02.00.06.

29This is part of the extended, wordless closing sequence of L’Eclisse, or The Eclipse. The film is about – and given that this is an Antonioni film, I use the word “about” rather warily – it’s about the start of a relationship which seems to be going nowhere. Towards the end of the film the couple played by Alain Delon and Monica Vitti arrange to meet up later that day, but this famous closing montage showing locations we’ve not even seen before in the film implies that neither of them bothers to turn up. Presumably, the relationship has come to an end – or will do so soon.

30The sequence is relevant to our purposes partly because Antonioni, like Dreyer, had a rather pared-back, understated style which Jarmusch clearly admires. Though we’ve seen how the American goes beyond realism, adding into his narratives ingredients which are not strictly plot-related in order to enhance and enrich thematic texture, at the same time he tends to opt for understated performances and simple compositions. There’s usually something very precise about his framing, and when he does move the camera it’s either because he wants to capture a particular movement – someone walking along a street, for example – or because he wants to create a particular rhythm or rhyming effect. There’s nothing flashy, gratuitous or virtuoso about his camerawork, and in this regard he may even be regarded as something of a classicist. Since he creates strange, partly metaphorical narratives which are unusually free of the generic clichés of the American mainstream and which include sequences of formal eccentricity or innovation, one might be tempted to describe him as an experimental filmmaker. But in avoiding flamboyant stylistic flourishes, he may also be regarded as an artist profoundly aware of a certain tradition of visual expression. Is this another contradiction? Not really. I won’t quote Walt Whitman here – I’ll leave that to the Roberto Benigni character in Down by Law – but let’s not forget that we all contain multitudes. Just as an artist’s work may combine high and low culture, so it can combine innovation and experimentation with traditional elements. That may not be very common in cinema, but we are certainly used to that in other art forms: think of Turner’s paintings of classical subjects, or Picasso doing countless variations on Velazquez’s Las Meninas, or Stravinsky’s neo-classicism, or John Adams drawing upon all kinds of earlier composers and musicians. It’s common in other fields, so why not in cinema? There are others who have combined classicism and innovation, of course; it’s just that Jarmusch seems to do it a little more openly than most.

Night on Earth (1991)11

31Start in chapter 7 at 01.33.27 on map showing Helsinki before dissolve to shots of the city at night.

End at 01.37.13 as one of three drunks falls to the snowy ground.

32This is the beginning of the last of the five stories that make up Night on Earth. I selected the clip partly because it shows how alert to the atmospheric attributes of architecture and place Jarmusch can be – like Antonioni before him. Each of the five episodes begins with a beautifully evocative brief montage of the city it’s set in – Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Rome, Helsinki – before proceeding to relate its story, which in all five instances concerns an encounter between a taxi driver and his/her passenger or passengers. This is characteristic of Jarmusch’s interest both in a film’s formal and structural qualities and in setting himself certain challenges – if all the episodes take place primarily inside a car, and last the same amount of time, and take place simultaneously but in different time zones, that means Jarmusch is setting himself unusually strict constraints in terms of camera angle and position, shot duration, lighting and so on, not to mention possibilities of character interaction. That the finished film never feels undernourished or overly repetitive is surely a measure of his ability to transcend those restrictions – those self-imposed limits of control – by using the full range of his imagination.

33That’s because Jarmusch, for all his interest in a film’s formal qualities, is not primarily a formalist as such; he’s no more interested in form for form’s sake than he is in style for style’s sake. (In this respect he might be likened to filmmakers as diverse as Terence Davies, Jacques Demy, Abbas Kiarostami and Max Ophüls – all deeply concerned with a film’s form, but only in sofar as it enables them to get to the heart of whatever it is they want to say or show.) Characteristically, in dealing with the formal, structural and technical challenges he set himself in Night on Earth, he took a fundamentally human approach. Rather than trying to come up with sharp, snappy stories – what most filmmakers would probably aim for – he thinks about the kinds of lives people might live in those cities, and centres his stories on actors he already knows from personal experience. Moreover, he bears in mind films made in those cities by local directors, so that his own story might take on some of the same local colour. Hence the Helsinki episode to some degree recalls the films of Jarmusch’s friend Aki Kaurismäki – he cast some of the Finn’s regular actors, including the late, great, marvellously morose Matti Pellonpää as Mika the driver, and came up with a not very dramatic but suitably vodka-sodden vignette in the vein of Kaurismäki’s gently comic miserabilism. The three men Mika picks up have been on a drinking binge partly because that’s what many Finns like to do, partly because one of them has lost both his job and his partner on that very same day. What could be worse than that, they ask. Well, Mika has an answer, a heartbreaking story of love and loss. Then, as he drops off the trio of suitably chastened drunks, at the film’s end, the sky begins to glimmer a little more brightly, and another grey day begins. It is indeed a sad an’ beautiful world.

Tokyo Story (1953)12, Yasujiro Ozu

34Start at beginning of chapter 21 at 02.02.30 on shot of river and lamps. End at 02.05.42 on girl’s downturned face after other woman says “Yes it is, a lot of disappointments”.

35This clip from Tokyo Story takes place towards the end of the film, shortly after the funeral of one of its major characters – the mother of the younger woman and the mother-in-law of the older one, who was herself widowed during the war. I selected it partly because the daughter-in-law’s smiling admission that life is disappointing is pretty close to the notion that we live in a sad and beautiful world. How could life not be disappointing and sad when the death of those we love is as inevitable as our own? But it can also be beautiful; if we’re lucky there is, sometimes, something to smile about.

36But that’s not the only reason I selected the clip. Ozu is one of Jarmusch’s favourite filmmakers, and like Antonioni, he preferred understatement and extremely precise compositions. But I feel Jarmusch’s work is probably closer to Ozu’s than to Antonioni’s. When Antonioni includes “dead moments” in his films, they can feel loaded with significance – a walk down a street or a brief glance or gesture often feels as if it’s intended as an expression of universal ennui or alienation – a symptom of the human condition, in other words. Ozu and Jarmusch don’t quite do that, though each seems to have a worldview of sorts. Rather, they appear to appreciate “dead moments” for what they are: moments where very little appears to be happening but where people reveal something about themselves as individuals. I get the impression that Ozu and Jarmusch like people more than Antonioni – the films feel warmer, and that’s reflected partly in their affection for banal, even trivial conversations, partly in the deft balancing of seriousness and humour in their films. We are back to that saying from The Way of the Samurai about how we should deal with small and serious matters. Or another one Jarmusch likes to quote, by Oscar Wilde: “Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about”.

37There’s another resemblance between Ozu’s work and Jarmusch’s. Ozu’s films are often quite playful in their approach to form – he’s well known for his use of a static, low-level camera, of course, but it’s also fascinating to see how he places or moves objects or people within the frame; how he shows them from different angles, or has characters appearing and disappearing in corridors or through doorways; and how he punctuates scenes with what Noel Burch called “pillow shots” – montages of ships or trains passing, of smoking chimneys or lines of washing billowing in the wind – shots or montages which have no real relation to the narrative proper except to evoke time’s passing. It’s as if Ozu enjoyed creating patterns which have a life of their own outside or parallel to the narrative. I suspect Jarmusch likes doing something quite similar. In addition to conveying narrative information about his characters, many of his films function structurally almost like a musical theme and variations.

Mystery Train (1989)13

38Start in chapter 7 at 01.22.07 on black film before quick fade up to shot of a car turning away from camera to drive under bridge.

End at 01.27.45 after Steve Buscemi pulls light string and it crashes to floor.

39I selected this particular clip partly because of its opening shot, which shows the car carrying Steve Buscemi, Joe Strummer and Rick Aviles going under a bridge which has a train crossing it. I’ve always felt that that shot is not unlike one of Ozu’s aforementioned “pillow shots”. That may not have been too obvious seeing the clip out of context, but watch the entire film, with the same bridge turning up at regular intervals, shown from different angles, and you’ll see what I mean. And the whole film is like that. It comprises three separate stories set in Memphis, all of which take place partly in a seedy hotel where Screaming Jay Hawkins and Cinque Lee work as the night manager and bellboy. For the most part, none of them is especially dramatic – some of the time we’re seeing people walking around or having desultory conversations without knowing quite why. The first episode centres on two young Japanese tourists on a pilgrimage to the home of Sun Studios and Elvis Presley; the second on an Italian widow about to fly back to Europe with the coffin of her recently deceased husband; and the third on the Joe Strummer character, who goes reluctantly by the nickname of Elvis and who’s on a drinking binge following the loss of both his job and his girlfriend on the very same day. Another night on earth, you might say.

40What makes the film especially interesting is that it’s only towards the end of the second of the three stories, when the Italian woman hears a couple making love in the next room, that we realise the stories are taking place at the same time. We realise that because the couple she hears are the Japanese tourists, whom we saw briefly making love at one point in their story. And because we are now aware that the stories are contemporaneous, when the Italian woman next hears a gunshot in a nearby room – a gunshot which, as it happens, the Japanese couple also heard towards the end of their episode – we feel that an element of mystery, even of danger, has been introduced into the film. And it’s only at the very end of the third story, featuring the three drunks and a gun, that that mystery is solved.

41In fact it’s not the mystery of the gunshot or the solution of that mystery that is most important or interesting about the film. What Jarmusch does, besides telling the three separate stories, is to include in each of them certain images and sounds, most of them rather less dramatic than the gunshot – shots like the bridge with the train, sounds like the lovemaking – and many more such as the voice of Tom Waits as a radio DJ, or numerous allusions, verbal, musical and pictorial, to Elvis Presley. Crucially, the precise significance of these images and sounds shifts and changes as the film proceeds, as we come across them in different contexts. In other words, by introducing a strong element of intertextuality, in addition to providing us with three individual stories Jarmusch is telling us a still bigger, overarching story involving other characters, relationships and events which exist, as it were, off-screen during the three individual stories.

42At the same time as giving us on one level three stories which are separate but related, consecutive but contemporaneous, and giving us on a second level a larger overarching story, the film also functions on yet another third level: put simply, it is partly about the nature of cinematic storytelling. In addition to telling us those various stories, Jarmusch is actually showing us how stories are constructed and interpreted. He is putting people, places, objects, actions, words, images and sounds on the screen, and inviting us to consider how they might relate to each other, how they might interact to form some sort of narrative. But since the people, places, objects, etc., keep on recurring in different contexts and different stories, we’re repeatedly required to reassesses what we thought or felt about them, because the relationships between them have changed. In other words, among other things Jarmusch is making us conscious of how we have to actively engage with a film by using our imaginations, if we’re to successfully assemble its many diverse elements into a single coherent narrative.

43Formally, Mystery Train is Jarmusch’s most complex film. (I should also mention that its combination of chronological and structural sophistication and resonant allusions – particularly to pop culture – anticipated and perhaps influenced a number of other American indie films including Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994), Hal Hartley’s Flirt (1995) and Steven Soderbergh’s Schizopolis (1996).) But for all its formal audacity and inventiveness, Mystery Train never feels like a dry or contrived exercise in form for form’s sake. It’s a lot of fun. As with Ozu, Jarmusch’s interest in patterns – mainly narrative in this instance, rather than visual – is essentially playful and subservient to a very real interest in his characters, their relationships, and their predicament. The narrative format, the structure, is what contains the substance of his films; but for any given film, it’s shaped the way it is precisely because that’s the shape which best conveys and reveals what’s inside. In short, the form fits the content, and vice versa.

Pickpocket (1959)14, Robert Bresson

44Start at beginning of chapter 17 (Behind Bars) at 01.10.23, fade up to man sitting on bed.

End at 01.12.27 after he says “My mind wasn’t made up”, while sitting on bed.

45Robert Bresson is another filmmaker Jarmusch admires for his understatement, formal rigour and simplicity. We see those qualities in Jarmusch’s work, too, notwithstanding its occasional complexity in terms of narrative structure, as in Mystery Train, or in terms of elements introduced into the narrative not for plot development but for their relevance to a film’s theme. As we noted this last strategy allows Jarmusch to make films which are at least partly metaphorical. And I chose this last clip because it clearly functions on both a literal and a metaphorical level, in that the protagonist’s imprisonment is physical and spiritual. The clip clearly shows the protagonist’s predicament – his soul, if we’re to use a religious term, or his personality, if we are to use a non-religious one, is a kind of prison from which he needs to escape; he needs to come out of himself, to make proper contact with the girl who visits him. Otherwise – and I think we see he realises this – he might as well be dead.

Down by Law (1986)15

46Start at beginning of chapter 19 at 00.54.04 as Benigni walks to join Lurie and Waits at the bars of the cell.

End at 00.58.19 after he says “We are good heggs, my friends” and Lurie and Waits return to their beds leaving Benigni alone at the bars.

47Now, on one level this is simply a very funny comedy about Jack and Zack, two shady, self-regarding New Orleans hipsters played by John Lurie and Tom Waits, who meet, while they’re in prison, a somewhat eccentric and eternally optimistic Italian with a delightfully loose grasp of English, played by Roberto Benigni. But for all its humour, the film bears a surprisingly strong resemblance in some regards to Bresson’s film. Though it has no evident religious resonance, Down by Law undoubtedly operates partly on a metaphorical level. Jack and Zack are both imprisoned and immobilised by their profoundly and absurdly competitive masculine pride and arrogance; when they first meet in the cell they’re forced to share, Jack tells Zack that for him he doesn’t even exist – echoing the way Bresson’s Michel (Martin La Salle) says the prison bars don’t exist for him. But however highly they may rate themselves, Jack and Zack’s pride is deadening: it’s no accident that the very first shot of the film is of a hearse at a cemetery. They’re so turned in on themselves, they have no understanding of the world, no imagination which allows them to see what others might be thinking or feeling. They’re unable to empathise: they don’t understand their lovers, and they’re so blinded by their vain faith in themselves that they don’t even notice – as we do – when their enemies set them up as fall guys.

48Then they’re given a chance to escape both themselves and the prison: they’re joined by Roberto, who chalks a window on the wall of their cell, and tells them he has a plan. Ever cynical, Zack and Jack don’t understand or believe him, but all it takes is a jump cut and suddenly the three of them are running through the sewers to freedom. How did the poetry-quoting Roberto get them out of the cell? The same way the hitman got himself into the bunker in The Limits of Control – he used his imagination. A fan of Robert Frost, he is aware that there are different roads one can take. So Down by Law is a film about people who might as well be dead being given another chance – this is not Bresson, so we’re not really talking about redemption, but regeneration.

Stranger than Paradise (1984)16

49Start in chapter 7 ( “Aunt Lottie’s house”) at 00.41.46 on black film before fade up to elderly woman coming to talk in Hungarian to Lurie and Edson sitting on sofa.

End at 00.45.52 on black film after Lurie and Edson leave diner, the latter saying “I told you she’d remember me”.

50That clip features two brief scenes from Stranger than Paradise, made in 1984. It wasn’t Jarmusch’s first feature – that was Permanent Vacation, made for a pittance when he was a student – but in some respects it might as well have been. By the time of this second feature, which was also his first hit, Jarmusch had already matured as a filmmaker with a distinctive vision and style of his own. There is already the mix of formal experimentation, rigour and simplicity: each of the 67 scenes consists of a single, meticulously composed shot filmed with a fixed camera, and is separated from the scenes that precede and follow it by several seconds of black film. There is already the relatively plot-free narrative: New York gambler Willie reluctantly agrees to play host to his cousin Eva when she visits from Hungary, but after she leaves for Cleveland to stay with their aunt Lottie, he misses her so much, he finds an excuse for his friend Eddie and himself to go visit her. There is the use of many “dead moments” which are bereft of drama but offer illuminating insights into the characters. There is a hint that the film might be viewed metaphorically: it’s divided into three chapters – The New World, One Year Later and Paradise. And while many of the images are wholly realistic in their depiction of ordinary, everyday, contemporary America, others – as when Willie, Eddie and Eva go to visit a snow-covered Lake Erie – feel a little unreal, abstract, almost placeless and timeless.

51When Stranger than Paradise first appeared, there were some who felt that Willie, as played by John Lurie, was a pretentious poser, unworthy of our full attention or sympathy. They misunderstood, I think, Jarmusch’s gentle ironic humour. Yes, Willie is inward-turned, self-regarding, trying not to reveal his emotions, his weaknesses, his needs; but with the arrival of Eva and a little help from the more outgoing Eddie, he’s given a chance to get in touch with himself, to stop living a lie – as Eddie learns from Aunt Lottie in the clip, Willie’s real name is actually Béla. So he’s given a chance to look outwards rather than inwards. Like many Jarmusch characters, he must learn to face up to this sad and beautiful world. Life can be disappointing. It’s full of mysteries and difficulties; in a sense we’re all strangers in a strange land. But to erect a protective wall around oneself, as Willie has done, is to live a half-life. Better to accept the mysteries and difficulties, the loss and the mortality: the sadness. Better to acknowledge those realities while using your imagination to look outwards, join forces, allow love and friendship into your life. Better to remember that matters of great concern should be treated lightly, and matters of small concern treated seriously.

52We end as we began, with a reunion. In Only Lovers Left Alive, Eve leaves Tangier for Detroit to be reunited with Adam after decades, maybe centuries apart, and it helps them both. In Stranger Than Paradise, just a year after Eva left New York for Cleveland, Willie and Eddie pay her a surprise visit; she’s delighted, and Eddie’s thrilled because she remembers him. And Willie? Maybe he’ll learn to loosen up a little, open his eyes, his mind, his heart, and notice the beauty as well as the sadness.

53I hope you enjoyed our journey. Though there were, of course, other roads not taken.