“Life has no plot, why must films or fiction?”
– Jim Jarmusch
Jarmusch’s biggest trademark is the lack of action and the slow pace in his films, a lot of it influenced by Ozu, Kurosawa, Mizoguchi (fig. 3), and other Japanese directors and also French Nouvelle Vague. We see the moments before and the moments after, but not the action itself. In the Q&A for his latest work – Paterson – at the Lisbon and Estoril Film Festival he talked about his fascination with these moments. The example he gave was in Night on Earth (1991), he stated that most film makers when having a character getting into a taxi decide to film the character entering the car and then leaving or they cut right after the character gets in to the next action, while he decided to make a whole film just about that moment; when the characters walk into a taxi and what takes place inside of it. Therefore successfully making a film out of the scenes he says most directors would have left out.
This is also applicable in the way he approaches genres, Dead Man is a Western, but it is not portrayed like the other westerns, it is not about the good and bad guy and doing what is right, but it is about a journey towards rebirth and death, it goes into layers of much deeper meaningsthan what westerns really are. Ghost Dog is not a mafia movie, but it is about honour, spirituality and in a way about practice what you preach, nowadays people only partially follow their beliefs, mainly because they either do not understand it at it’s fullest or for personal interest and Only Lovers Left Alive is not about vampires but about the meaning of life and immortality. Jarmusch does not explore the theme but various sub-themes, he looks for the underbelly of these genres.
Another interesting point is how he portrays human stereotypes. The leading men in cinema are expected to be masculine and strong-willed and they fight for the good and the underdog, but in Jarmusch’s films they seem to drift through their lives, lost and without a sense of purpose. Allie in Permanent Vacation, Willie and Eddie in Stranger Than Paradise, Adam in Only Lovers Left Alive, William Blake in Dead Man and Jack and Zack in Down By Law, they are all the leading male characters and yet all of them are saved or find their way back into life through either what is usually the weaker men or by women. In Dead Man, Blake finds his way through a Nobody, the Native American man, Jack and Zack escape prison and make it through their journey thanks to Bob, the goofy naïve Italian foreigner.
While in Only Lovers Left Alive and Stranger Than Paradise the male characters find themselves dependent on the women to lead them. Jarmusch takes what is usually represented as the underdog in cinema and makes them the heroes. He makes his lead females shine, without them the other characters do not develop or move forward, it is like they hold the wisdom of life. Jarmusch does not hide his admiration towards women in an interview he expressed his admiration for Tilda Swinton, “Once I was listening to her, I think we were at lunch with Patti Smith, and I thought: ‘Oh boy, if all culture breaks down, I’m following them. They’re my leaders, the women are the way to go.’ One of the great moments in my life” (Ehrlich, 2014). In other instances, he has also said that the person he trust the must to look at his work when he is writing a script and to be his critic is his long time partner Sarah Driver. This respect and fascination of him towards women is seen for example in Only Lovers Left Alive with Eve saving and pulling Adam out of his self absorbing misery and keeping everything in control while the other characters seem to be going into a downward spiral, while in Stranger Than Paradise, Eva just with her short presence makes the two male leads get out of their boring and depressing routine and do something with their lives.
Another example of how Jarmusch opposes the majority is found in Down by Law, where Bob in one scene says that he might have found a way to escape the prison and in the next scene th
ey are already free running away, skipping the main action (fig. 4). In Only Lovers Left Alive the same happens, when Adam and Eve wake up after going out the night before they find Eva next to Ian already dead, but we never see her killing him, which would usually be the central activity.
Furthermore, this leads to time ellipsis, a great influence from Ozu, for we are shown the before and after of each action like on the examples above, but Jarmusch additionally applies this in another very important aspect of his films, travelling.
In Mystery Train we have a long scene of the Japanese couple arriving to Memphis and heading from the station to the hotel and you see the time passing not by having the characters arriving to the train station and then immediately cutting to them arriving to the hotel, or through time lapse or the change of light. You know that the characters are walking for a while by having jump cuts of them changing positions while carrying the suitcase, instead of ignoring the commute in between, as it can be seen in figure 5.
Fig. 5: Japanese couple Memphis arrival in Mystery Train (1989)
Besides the way that the travelling scenes are represented in the films, some of them also have a deeper meaning, most of his characters embark on journeys that usually lead them to some sort of enlightenment or self discovery, even if it is not their original purpose. The film that goes deeper into it is Dead Man starting with an eight minute long train ride to the town of Machine, this sequence might seem too long but it is actually extremely important for the film as it intensifies a decay as the train gets closer to its destination, a creepy almost hellish place where William Blake is suppose to start his new life. This works as a premonition of what is going to happen in the film. Soon after Blake arrives he finds out that the position he was offered has been already filled, he finds himself lost without job or money and in a middle of a misunderstanding he gets shot but manages to kill the person who shots him and runaway. Blake’s true journey starts here, he ends up being hunted down for the murder of the man he killed but this leads him to come across a Native American called Nobody with whom he embarks on a spiritual journey. Nobody tries to take the bullet out of Blake’s chest but it is too close to the heart and so the film follows his acceptance to the fact that he is already a dead man.
Premonition and foreshadowing is something familiar to some of Jarmusch’s films, “where the real and unreal blend into each other, and where elements first encountered as signs (in conversation, stories and dreams) have a way of turning into things. (…) The characters in Down by Law manage to escape prison by putting into practice a plan they had seen in a film. In Ghost Dog, book, songs and cartoons foreshadow with uncanny exactitude many of the turns of the plot (fig. 6); and in Broken Flowers, a letter about a son in search of his father and an old film seen on television generate the main sequence of events.” (Suárez, 2007: 23)
Fig. 6: Cartoons foreshadowing in Ghost Dog (1999)
What happens in these books and those cartoons eventually occurs in the film development even though that is very subtly mentioned. For example, Ghost Dog reads Rashomon in which the first story talks about two characters who have different points of view of something that happened to them, in the film this references to the way Ghost Dog and Louie meet. Ghost Dog remembers the story as being attacked by a group of men armed with a gun who are about to shoot him, while Louie remembers the moment with Ghost Dog only being beaten up.
More recently we may see it in Paterson which is full of foreshadowing. When Laura dreams about having twins, Paterson starts seeing twins everywhere (fig.7). It is mentioned that Paterson does not own a mobile phone, it comes asconversation topic 
between him and two other characters in different occasions; he insists that he does not need one, even though it sounds like it is not very relevant that he does not have a phone, half way through the film his bus breaks down and he has no way of contacting anyone to report the accident and has to borrow a phone from a little girl. Laura also insists that he has to make photocopies of his little secret book of poems in case anything happens to it, which is something he keeps delaying until one day he accidentally leaves the book in the living room and the dog tears it apart before he has the opportunity of making a copy.
Cross Cultural fusion is another important and undeniable aspect in his films, the most prominent one being Ghost Dog that mixes Hip-hop, Samurai and Mafia culture into one character. Ghost Dog is a black man, who leads his life through Hagakure, a book containing the samurai code. When he was young Louie, a Italian gangster, saves him and Ghost Dog takes him as his mentor through the samurai code. Though it might sound like a lot of cultural appropriation in one film, in some sort of way Jarmusch manages to craft it in a way that it does not feel like so. Ghost Dog is a lonely man who finds fascination and a way of living through a little bit of Japanese culture, which is acceptable, in a way we all find some things that fascinate us in other cultures and that we adopt into our lifestyle, and his involvement in the Mafia culture is because he gets saved by a Mafioso and wants to find a way to thank him and show is gratitude to this man who saved his life. In Paterson, the main character’s wife, Laura, is played by the Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani, though her nationality is never mentioned it is obvious that she is Middle-Eastern (although he also mentioned at the Paterson Q&A that she is supposed to be Persian-American) and among her several hobbies she decides that she should follow one of her passions, being a country singer. However, Jarmusch mentioned that initially when he wrote the character, she was supposed to be white but because he was so fascinated by Golshifteh Farahani he decided to cast her, so this could have been an accidental cross-over.
His use of humour is at times unexpected because he mostly does not rely on solely visual comedy completely nor does he use the classical style of set up and punch line. Instead of that, he usually resorts to the use of repetition comedy. This works by supplying the audience with a sentence or visual cue, some times funny by itself, other times not funny at all. Then, the line or visual reference is repeated throughout the film, often when the viewer has begun to forget it. The use of repetition makes the line funnier every time it is repeated and usually is used to frustrate the main character. In Paterson when Paterson gets home he notices that the mail box is tilted and he puts it back in place and this happens mysteriously every day and halfway through the week we find out that it is the dog who has been doing it. In Dead Man there is the current gag of characters asking William Blake if he has tobacco, though he does not smoke, as it can be seen in the examples bellow. What makes this gag funny is not only the constant repetition from several characters, but also their denial of his response because somehow it seems unbelievable that he does not have tobacco each gradually starts annoying Blake.
Another big characteristic trait is the fade to black screen at the end of each sequence or action, “ (…) allowing each sequence to maintain its own integrity rather than submitting to the demands of ‘continuity’, allowing the viewer a moment for reflection” (Richardson, 2010: 194), with these gaps the audience has time to think and process what they just saw instead of bombing them with action after action. This also allows each scene to work on itself, like the film was made by individual shorts that were put together.
A term that it is mandatory while talking about Jarmusch is collaborators; he never mentions the people he works with as his director of photography, producer or actor, he always mentions them as his collaborators. This is also what makes his films so personal, it is usual to see the same actors in several of his films and the same crew, for example, Robby Müller and Melody London have worked five times as his cinematographer and editor, respectively.
During a retrospective Q&A in 2014 Jarmusch described working with Robby Müller as “trusting your instincts and your intuition,(…) keep thinking, don’t be set in your script. It’s something that came from Nick Ray who said ‘If you just gonna shoot the script then why bother?’ and it’s something Robby also instilled in me and Robby Müller is a kind of brilliant a man whose a very rebellious teenager, in part of his spirit, and yet an incredibly technically gifted person, (…) [he] has an incredible scientific technical mind and yet a completely aesthetic. (..) I wouldn’t even be here without Robby Müller”.
Fig. 8: Dead Man (1995) & Mystery Train (1989)
Cinematography by Robby Müller
Another cinematographer that he has worked with closely is Fredrick Elmes, known mainly for his work with David Lynch, specially Blue Velvet (1986). Elmes was the cinematographer for Night on Earth, some sections of Coffee and Cigarets (2003), Broken Flowers and recently Paterson. Elmes spoke about his experience about working with Jarmusch, specifying how their closeness helped the process: “Jim and I have known each for many years and have done several films together. The needs for each film are different (…)” He reinforces how much importance Jarmusch gives to details for the story telling and how he addresses it “(…)the approach to details is always the same. As he writes the script he comes up with little story elements that connect between conversations or scenes (…)”. He then mentions the value given to the different locations chosen and how they can relate between themselves: “(…) as we go through the locations we find visual cues that are similar between locations and we figure out ways to join them. As we shoot we find new elements and we remain conscious of finding ways to repeat and connect those visual ideas. It gives the film a great deal of depth. Even though nothing appears to happen on the surface, there’s a whole lot working underneath” (O’Falt, 2016).
Fig. 9: Night On Earth (1991)
Cinematography by Fredrick Elmes
With actors it is common to see Roberto Benigni, John Hurt, Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, TomWaits and John Lurie as regulars in his films, this is motivated through Jarmusch’s writing process, as he explains “I always start with characters rather than with a plot, which many critics would say is very obvious from the lack of plot in my films – although I think they do have plots – but the plot is not of primary importance to me, the characters are. I start with actors that I know personally or I know their work, and there are things about their work or their presence or their own personality that make a character, that exaggerates some qualities and suppresses other qualities” (Hertzberg [ed], 1999: 181). A good example of the importance of his collaboration with actors is for example in Limits of Control (2009), Jarmusch used an essay that Tilda Swinton had written called “The State of Cinema” in some of her dialogue in the film. In return his actors are completely dedicated to him and his work, Swinton in several occasions having expressed her admiration for Jarmusch and even, during the promotion tour for Only Lovers Left Alive when asked about the challenges of making the film she replied “(…) it’s a challenge for me to know that Jim Jarmusch isn’t making a film every year, because that’s what I want. So that is literally the only challenge I can think of” (Swinton, 2013).
During the filming process he works closely with each actor to get closer to the character’s true persona by rehearsing scenes that are not in the script while off camera to help them establish the characters by reacting like them and getting deeper into their skin, although he does mention that he only does this with actors he knows they are willing to do it, trying to respect the actors methods too.