From one wandering to another, from Allie’s vagrancy in the streets of a New York in ruins, to the initiatory journey of an accountant from Cleveland, in a West populated by mystical visions, the first half of the work from Jim Jarmusch, from Permanent Vacation (1980), his graduation film, to Dead Man (1995), his “psychedelic western” in his words, unfolds its mysterious geography on Arte.tv. Might as well warn right away, Stranger Than Paradise, his second feature film, the first to be distributed in France, which earned the author the Camera d’Or at Cannes in 1984, is missing.
We’ll do without, because the five films available draw an instantly recognizable yet almost elusive cinematic landscape: how to draw a line from the bayous of Louisiana (Down by Law) to the snowy streets of Helsinki (Night on Earth). Emotions, sensations, obey the same fluidity. It would be a mistake to reduce Jim Jarmusch’s mood to idiosyncratic humor, tinged with melancholy. She is there, she is only one of the characteristics of the cinema of the author of Broken Flowers (2005), which embraces both the instinct of death and the passion of love, friendship and loneliness.
From Permanent Vacation, Allie, the young man who wanders aimlessly through the streets of lower Manhattan, remembers his Jewish origins and the mystery that caused his people to find themselves on the right side of the Atlantic. First DIY film, shot in a city that everyone believed was destined for disaster at the time, with its disused warehouses and wastelands where nature was taking over, Permanent Vacation brings out a Vietnam veteran, a woman interned in a psychiatric hospital, which influence the course of the indecipherable central character.
Improvisation around a theme
Jim Jarmusch is not the most prolific of filmmakers. In forty-three years, he has directed thirteen feature films (including three sketch films) and a documentary (Gimme Danger, in 2016, which tells the story of Iggy Pop and The Stooges). However, if there is a common trait in each of his films, it is this impression of spontaneity, of improvisation around a very strong theme, which often makes them resemble a jazz standard interpreted by a musician from exception.
Moreover, his sketch films are like small concerts, with their variations and recurring motifs. On Arte.tv, you can see Mystery Train (1989) and Night on Earth (1991). The first brings to Memphis, Tennessee, a couple of Japanese tourists, an Italian widow and a penniless British loser, played by Joe Strummer. The second travels the planet by taxi, from Los Angeles to Helsinki, via New York, Rome and Paris. The taxis are driven by Winona Ryder, Armin Mueller-Stahl and Giancarlo Esposito, Isaach de Bankolé, Roberto Benigni (who had already filmed under Jarmusch’s direction in Down by Law) and Matti Pellonpää, Aki Kaurismäki’s chosen actor.
Lighter than Mystery Train, this compilation is similar to the fantasy of Down by Law (1986), which precipitates a trio made up of musician John Lurie ? a major figure on the New York scene ?, Tom Waits and Roberto Benigni ( towards which Jarmusch shows inexplicable indulgence) in the footsteps of the heroes of the prison films of the golden age of the studios, I am an escapee (Mervyn LeRoy, 1932) or Sullivan’s Travels (Preston Sturges , 1941).
an epic poem
Rest Dead Man, which opens with an epigraph by Henri Michaux – “It’s always better not to travel with a dead man” – begins with a hellish train journey by a young accountant from Cleveland (Ohio), named William Blake, as the English mystical poet, through a West littered with the bones left behind by pioneers. Johnny Depp lends this involuntary pilgrim character his then angelic physiognomy. Soon the accountant turns into a fugitive, then a formidable outlaw, accompanied at every step by a formidable character whose name is Nobody, an Amerindian intellectual played by Gary Farmer.
In these landscapes where the history of the United States and its mythology, the extermination of the First Nations and the western were shaped, Jarmusch unfolds an epic poem accompanied by the formidable electric and funereal score that Neil Young improvised on the guitar.
The filmmaker maintains an intimate relationship that is unique to him. He is not the king of the needle drop, those moments that we sublimate thanks to the irruption of a monument of the pop or classical repertoire, of which Martin Scorsese is the undisputed master. Jarmusch creates a dialectic between dramaturgy and music, whether original (Tom Waits’ soundtrack for Night on Earth) or borrowed (Mulatu Astatke’s Ethiopian jazz in Broken Flowers), playing on the contrasts between tonalities or ages. He does it, like all the rest of his cinema, with a modesty, a deliberate absence of virtuosity, which sometimes masks his true stature.