 James R. "Jim" Jarmusch is an American independent filmmaker. Jarmusch is a major exponent of independent cinema, particularly that of the 1980s and 1990s.
Jarmusch was born to a European American family of middle-class suburbanites in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio in 1953. His mother introduced the future director, the middle of three children, to the world of cinema by leaving him at a local theater to watch matinee double features such as Attack of the Crab Monsters and Creature From the Black Lagoon while she ran errands.
In 1976, Jarmusch applied on a whim to the prestigious Graduate Film School of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. Despite his complete lack of experience in filmmaking, his submission of a collection of still photographs and an essay about film secured his acceptance into the program. He studied there for four years.
Jarmusch's final year university project was completed in 1980 as Permanent Vacation, his first feature film. It was made on a shoestring budget of around $12,000 in misdirected scholarship funds and shot by cinematographer Tom DiCillo on 16 mm film. The 75 minute quasi-autobiographical feature follows an adolescent drifter) as he wanders around downtown Manhattan. The film was not released theatrically, and did not attract the sort of adulation from critics that greeted his later work.
The bleak and unrefined Permanent Vacation is nevertheless one of the director's most personal films, and established many of the hallmarks he would exhibit in his later work, including derelict urban settings, chance encounters, and a wry sensibility.
Jarmusch has been characterized as minimalist filmmaker, and his idiosyncratic films unhurried. His films often eschew traditional narrative structure, lacking clear plot progression and focusing more on mood and character development. Jarmusch's early work is marked by a brooding, contemplative tone, featuring extended silent scenes and prolonged still shots. He has experimented with a vignette format in three films either released or begun around the early nineties: Mystery Train, Night on Earth, and Coffee and Cigarettes.
In 1995, Jarmusch released Dead Man, a period film set in the 19th century American West starring Johnny Depp and Gary Farmer. Produced at a cost of almost $9 million with a high-profile cast including John Hurt, Gabriel Byrne and, in his final role, Robert Mitchum, the film marked a significant departure for the director from his previous features. Earnest in tone in comparison to its self-consciously hip and ironic predecessors, Dead Man was thematically expansive and of an often violent and progressively more surreal character. The film was shot in black and white.
The most outstanding works by Jarmusch are Dead Man and Coffee and Cigarettes.
Deadman is full allusions to American and European poetry. It is not an easy movie to categorize. Is it an allegory, a tone poem, a vision quest? Undeniably, it's an original. I won't pretend that Jarmusch's austere poetry will speak to everyone. His vision of the West's culture of death doesn't pander to the thrill-seeking audience: the violence is awkward, deglamorized; the pace unhurried.
Coffee and Cigarettes, the director's ninth picture, returns to a portmanteau structure and sheds the pretensions of those recent films. Eleven monochrome segments divided among four cinematographers show performers shooting the breeze while enjoying the pleasures of the title. Several sections predate Dead Man and Ghost Dog, and there is the suspicion in the most recently filmed parts that Jarmusch is trying to reach back to his old style. It doesn't gel. His progress over more than 20 years may have been infinitesimal, but in the realm of minimalism every movement counts.
This year Jarmusch remade his Limits of Control. One can watch it in Moscow theaters since October, 22.
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