3Sep07
As the opening credits for Night on Earth begin to roll, we are informed that the film is a Locus Solus Production. A curious name, no doubt unfamiliar to most people, but one that reveals a great deal about Jim Jarmusch’s sensibility—what might be called the “Jarmusch touch”: that inimitable blend of deadpan humor, off-the-wall shenanigans, and exquisitely crafted images. It turns out that Locus Solus is the title of a novel by the eccentric, early twentieth-century French writer Raymond Roussel, a book admired by the surrealists and, a generation later, by the American poet John Ashbery—to such an extent that Ashbery and fellow writer Harry Mathews founded a magazine in the late fifties called . . . Locus Solus.
Few people know that Jim Jarmusch started out as a poet and that as a student at Columbia he served as one of the editors of the undergraduate literary magazine, The Columbia Review. The primary influences on his early work were Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, Ron Padgett, and other poets of the New York School. Against the prevailing formalism and academic dryness of American poetry in the 1950s, various insurrections were taking place around the country: the Beats, the Black Mountain poets, and, most subversively of all, the gang in New York. A new aesthetic was born. Poetry was no longer perceived as a dull and ponderous quest for universal truth or literary perfection. It stopped taking itself seriously and learned to relax, to poke fun at itself, to delight in the ordinary pleasures of the world. The notion of high art was abandoned in favor of an approach marked by frequent shifts in tone, a penchant for wit and nonsense, discontinuity, and an embrace of popular culture in all its myriad forms. Suddenly, poems were filled with references to comic-strip characters and movie stars. It was a homegrown American phenomenon, yet paradoxically the sources of this transformation largely came from Europe, in particular France.
3Sep07
A conversation, a misunderstanding. The basic pattern in many of Jim Jarmusch’s films is two characters, sometimes three, bound together by chance and wandering along toward an ill-defined goal, each trying all the while to get to know the other or to make himself understood through the use of words—an attempt that is generally bound to fail. Supposing they speak the same language, they don’t have the same idea of it. In Down by Law already, Roberto Benigni was defined as speaking “good restaurant English.” And: “In English, we say ‘It’s good to go,’” Giancarlo Esposito patronizingly explains to Armin Mueller-Stahl, the New York cabbie in Night on Earth.
I first heard of Night on Earth when someone from Jarmusch’s office called to ask if I could translate a pun in the French dialogue. The film was still in production, and Jim was already thinking of his subtitles, but I certainly wasn’t about to suggest a wordplay in English; inventing a—necessarily approximate—equivalent would have caused more damage than using a circumlocution (which is what was done). Although I wrote, in collaboration or not, the French subtitles for most of Jarmusch’s films, I didn’t do Night on Earth. But this pun—which I wouldn’t have had to translate into French anyway—stuck with me as an image for the film. It’s a joke that every schoolboy in France has made or laughed at: a native from Côte d’Ivoire—Ivory Coast—is an Ivoirien, so il voit rien, “he can’t see a thing.” In the taxi of the Paris episode, two outrageously coarse African wheeler-dealers throw this line at the Ivoirien driver, out of a feeling of class superiority rather than racism, but making him even angrier than he already was at the end of a rotten night. Words can hurt and often do.
3Sep07
Jim Jarmusch is a difficult director because he works from the frontiers. What does it mean to be a “frontier” director in the film world today?
It means a clear refusal, for ethical and aesthetic reasons, to be part of the mass of none-too-wild (indeed extremely housebroken) Hollywood filmmakers—the special-effects directors and television types. (They have killed all other kinds of film in two ways: with violent police shows and disgusting comedies about robotic emotions.)
It means to work “on your own,” with all the difficulty and the consequences implied, on each film. It means to find the financing, international support, distribution, and opportunities that will somehow win some respect for your own project. But it also means an exhausting obligation to bring the project in line with varied and risky circumstances.
In addition to these needs, however—and this is really the central point—what interests us the most is why Jarmusch’s work took on a life of its own, and why we are so passionate about his films, inspired from the “frontier.”
Jarmusch is a frontier artist because he does not conform to aesthetic trends. He escapes them and reinvents himself, and succeeds each time in winning praise for his coherent depth, while innovating and taking great risks. He comes from the borderlands because he favors individuals who have been socially marginalized, people who are constrained to live in a society and in a period in which they feel very repressed. With great difficulty, they look for a way to survive, guarding even the smallest possibility of choosing their own destiny—or following their own path, in the event they have already figured it out.
3Sep07
A taxi, without a client in the car or anywhere else in sight, goes around Helsinki’s Senate Square, a place that resonates with history, having seen more patriotism, class struggle, and celebration than any other place in faraway Finland. It stood in for Saint Petersburg many times in American productions, notably during the revolution in Reds and in the cold war cynicisms of The Kremlin Letter—ironic reminders of Finland’s unacknowledged position between West (where we pretend to belong) and East, and of the Slavic melancholy that we possess whether we admit it or not. This quality is caught instinctively by Jim Jarmusch already in the spellbinding establishing shots: snow, smoke signals from an undefined source, images of a place no less a ghost town than was the Memphis of Mystery Train. Diffuse lights are glimpsed from nowhere. Jarmusch has captured admirably the aroma of Chekhovian silences, the Finnish kind—the absolute miserableness of a milieu and its individual stories.
It’s the middle of the night. The dead-tired taxi driver’s face belongs to Matti Pellonpää, the great Kaurismäki brothers actor. Eventually, he gets clients—three of them, in a condition that tests his professional obligation to accept anybody—and two more Kaurismäki regulars are now in the picture: Kari Väänänen (who played with Pellonpää in Aki’s La vie de bohème, and who performed all the voices of Winnie the Pooh with Pellonpää on the radio) and Sakari Kuosmanen, a singer in his private life and the lead actor in Aki’s Juha, the “last silent film of the twentieth century.” Yet what follows is by no means a replica of the Kaurismäki world. Jarmusch’s experience of Helsinki is a small miracle to me. He shows us things that no Finnish film has ever thought of, and yet, by a strange intuition, he almost provides a synthesis of the sense of Finnish film and its history. Which, by the way, is not at all as negligible as its lack of international reputation would indicate.
3Sep07
I’m on a flight back from the Telluride Film Festival and two and a half great days in the mountains. Telluride has been an important festival for Criterion and Janus for years. It’s a great opportunity to mingle with filmmakers and others who work with us to release our discs, and a great chance to see a lot of films. For our editorial group, headed by Peter, Kim, and Fumiko, it’s truly a nonstop working weekend. Their days are filled with screenings—mostly of films that have not yet been picked up for distribution—to find films and talent that will soon become part of the upcoming schedule. This year, Kim created the festival’s twenty-minute documentary tribute introducing the Medallion-awarded composer Michel Legrand. We were instrumental in obtaining a print of Dillinger to show at the urging of this year’s guest curator Edith Kramer. I’m sure Peter will post his thoughts on Telluride shortly, but for me the experience of Telluride is very much not what I generally do, and I really enjoy the chance to immerse myself in the movies every once a while. So here goes . . .
Friday dinner is the “feed,” and it’s just as advertised. The major street in town is closed, and everyone gathers with plates and cups in hand, sharing a dinner. Many who come to Telluride do so year after year (this was my third festival), and it becomes home very quickly. My festival was pretty much made right then, when I saw Sean Penn and Robin Wright Penn on the corner. He was there for his film Into the Wild, and I’ve been a big fan of hers from Princess Buttercup days. At Telluride, there are about seven venues where films screen simultaneously—starting on Friday night at 7:00, and on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday from 9:00 a.m. to midnight—and you have to pick and choose which films you want to go see where and when. Because of this, rarely are two people’s Telluride experiences identical. For my first film, I saw The Counterfeiters. Werner Herzog introduced the film and its filmmaker, Stefan Ruzowitzky. It’s the story of a Jewish man who is arrested by the Nazis so that they can take advantage of his counterfeiting skills. He is imprisoned in a concentration camp, and the story is about the difficult balance between cooperating and living, and not. It was very tough and graphic, but I enjoyed it. Having gotten up at 3:00 a.m. to catch my flight, I called it a night without a double feature.
