A Gun Up Your Ass: An Interview with Jim Jarmusch
A Gun Up Your Ass: An Interview with Jim Jarmusch. (Cineaste 1996 )
By Jonathan Rosenbaum
A dozen years ago, when his second feature, "Stranger Than Paradise", catapulted him to worldwide fame, Jim Jarmusch seemed at the height of arthouse fashion. Having already known him a little before then, I could tell that the extent to which he suddenly became a figurehead for the American independent cinema bemused him in certain ways. Given the aura of hip, glamorous downtown Manhattan culture that seemed to follow him everywhere, how could it not? I can still recall a New York Times profile a few years back that was so entranced by his image that it suggested that, simply because Jarmusch chose to live in the Bowery, that neighborhood automatically took on magical, transcendent properties.
When "Dead Man", his sixth feature, premiered at Cannes last year, it suddenly became apparent that Jarmusch's honeymoon with the American press was over—although his international reputation to all appearances survives intact. There are multiple reasons for this, including "Dead Man" itself, and before getting around to this visionary, disturbing black-and-white Western—which I regard as his most impressive achievement to date—it's worth considering what's happened to the American independent cinema over the past decade, which has a lot to do with Jarmusch's changed position in the media.
When thinking about today's ambitious American filmmakers, one of the easiest ways to distinguish between Hollywood employees (current or prospective) and those with more creative freedom is to look for logical and consistent developments from one film to the next—a clear line of concerns that runs beyond fads and market developments. Though it's possible to see a director such as Alfred Hitchcock developing certain formal and thematic ideas in his Fifties movies, there's little likelihood of such an evolution being possible in a studio director today, what with agent packages, script bids,
By Jonathan Rosenbaum
A dozen years ago, when his second feature, "Stranger Than Paradise", catapulted him to worldwide fame, Jim Jarmusch seemed at the height of arthouse fashion. Having already known him a little before then, I could tell that the extent to which he suddenly became a figurehead for the American independent cinema bemused him in certain ways. Given the aura of hip, glamorous downtown Manhattan culture that seemed to follow him everywhere, how could it not? I can still recall a New York Times profile a few years back that was so entranced by his image that it suggested that, simply because Jarmusch chose to live in the Bowery, that neighborhood automatically took on magical, transcendent properties.
When "Dead Man", his sixth feature, premiered at Cannes last year, it suddenly became apparent that Jarmusch's honeymoon with the American press was over—although his international reputation to all appearances survives intact. There are multiple reasons for this, including "Dead Man" itself, and before getting around to this visionary, disturbing black-and-white Western—which I regard as his most impressive achievement to date—it's worth considering what's happened to the American independent cinema over the past decade, which has a lot to do with Jarmusch's changed position in the media.
When thinking about today's ambitious American filmmakers, one of the easiest ways to distinguish between Hollywood employees (current or prospective) and those with more creative freedom is to look for logical and consistent developments from one film to the next—a clear line of concerns that runs beyond fads and market developments. Though it's possible to see a director such as Alfred Hitchcock developing certain formal and thematic ideas in his Fifties movies, there's little likelihood of such an evolution being possible in a studio director today, what with agent packages, script bids,