Harry´s Blog

Other directors can make films on important themes. I like to go to see them. However, I prefer to make films using details that others edit out. I’ve always been interested in the little things that are considered unimportant but that make up most of our lives.
- Jim Jarmusch

Yes, Jim takes those details and weaves them together in his films. His pace is slow and at times he uses blackouts between scenes. The movement is often drawn out and the mood often infused with black and absurd humor. You’d think that his films would be boring, but they’re anything but.

Example’s are scenes in Ghost Dog and Dead Man:

Ghost Dog is a hit man who’s samurai code has been gleaned from a pocket book he carries around with him. His best friend is a Haitian Mr Tastee Ice Cream van hawker who only speaks French. Ghost Dog: “I don’t understand him. I don’t speak French, only English. I never understand a word he says.”

The gun battle in Dead Man is the most slapstick screen violence I have ever viewed. The mild-mannered accountant hero is caught in bed with a gunslinger’s girlfriend. The latter draws his pistol and shoots the girl dead, wounding the accountant with the same bullet. The hero awkwardly reaches for a pistol on his bed table which it seems to go off of its own volition, shooting the assailant in the neck.

Jarmusch spent his last semester of studying literature at Columbia University in Paris, where he spent his days in the Cinémathèque and became enamored of French films. The influence shows in his style. The sardonic humor is reminiscent of Truffaut, but the flavor of his films is very American. The “details that others edit out,” the bits and pieces, the odds and ends, fall into place so that everything seems to fit. I feel very akin to Jim since I use the same method in structuring my literary work. I often take seemingly unrelated segments, endeavoring to make them form a composition. I consider swing music and film cutting as influences in the craft of bringing out the harmony and rhythm that are inherent in language. A writer works to achieve visual images in the reader’s mind. So there is some kind of similitude between celluloid and the word.

This should be about Jim’s films, and perhaps going off on a personal tangent is a good way of expressing my admiration for them.

- Herbert Kuhner