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Les Variations Jarmusch

 | 
Esther Heboyan

Partie IV. Philosophie et spiritualisme : la vie, la mort selon Jim Jarmusch / Philosophy and spiritualism : life and death according to Jim Jarmusch

High angles, souls, spirits and bodies: a filmic hike in Jim Jarmusch’s cinema

Céline Murillo

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Excerpt

Jim Jarmusch’s films challenge the rules of the classical Hollywood style1, they remove the importance of storytelling2, and they reject the primary role of causality. Then how are his films bound together, how do they acquire a measure of consistency? They do so by a system of repetition that affects all the levels of the filmic text for one individual film, but that also occurs between films. Repetition pushes away narration, while it creates a semiotic system that allows the viewer to find his or her way in Jarmusch’s films.

Incidentally, repetitions of a technique such as the tracking shot point to Jarmusch’s presence as an auteur3. In the space of this paper we have chosen one filming technique, the extreme high-angle shot, and we will try to show how it creates meaning. We will try to assess the meaning of the technique at the scale of the sequence, the film, and eventually of Jarmusch’s complete filmography since the cinephiliac filmgoers reinvest previous interpretations in s...

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