Desktop versionMobile version

Les Variations Jarmusch

 | 
Esther Heboyan

Partie V. Cadences jarmuschiennes sur l’échiquier de l’espace-temps / Jarmuschian cadences on the chessboard of time and space

Vagabondage from Budapest to Florida – Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger than Paradise

Sylvie Blum-Reid

The HTML, PDF, ePub formats of this book are available to the users of libraries and institutions subscribing to the OpenEdition Freemium program for Books. The book can also be purchased on the sites of partner bookstores, in PDF and ePub formats, if the publisher has opted for commercial distribution. If a print edition of the book is available, links to bookstores will be displayed on this page.

Excerpt

“America is made up of foreigners, and there are
indigenous people that lived here for thousands
of years, but then white Europeans tried
to commit genocide against them all.
I’m a mongrel, I have Irish blood, Bohemian blood,
some German blood, and all of America is a cultural
mixture, and although America is very much in denial
of this, that’s really what America is.”
Jim Jarmusch, Some Notes on Stranger than Paradise, 1984

Jarmusch shot Stranger than Paradise as if he was an Eastern European filmmaker. Once trying to explain Stranger than Paradise he claimed that he could only do so stylistically and came up with the following line:

A semi neo-realist black comedy in the style of an imaginary Eastern European film director obsessed with Ozu and familiar with the 1950s American TV show The Honeymooners.

It is widely understood that Stranger than Paradise is “A story about America as seen through the eyes of ‘strangers’.” Looking at the United States through a foreigner’s eyes, Jarmusch’s ambi...

Author

University of Florida

The text and other elements (illustrations, imported files) may be used under OpenEdition Books License, unless otherwise stated.

Search OpenEdition Search

You will be redirected to OpenEdition Search