ART OF THE REAL, JARMUSCH RETROSPECTIVE at Lincoln Center

[Chris Knipp]

Art of the Real

Jim Jarmusch retrospective at Lincoln Center


LA ÚLTIMA PELLÍCULA

A Film Society of Lincoln Center series that interprets documentary in the widest possible sense. I expect to provide screening notes on the following films of the series. I'll also attend one film from the complete retrospective of Jim Jarmusch, Dead Man.

ART OF THE REAL
April 11 - 26, 2014

The Film Society of Lincoln Center's new annual series Art of the Real is a nonfiction showcase founded on the most expansive possible view of documentary film. The inaugural edition features new work from around the world alongside retrospective selections by both known and unjustly forgotten filmmakers. It is a platform for filmmakers and artists who have given us a wider view of nonfiction cinema and at the same time brought the form full circle, back to its early, boundary-pushing days. Co-programmed by Dennis Lim and Rachael Rakes.

Focus on the Sensory Ethnography Lab
In a mere eight years, the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University has gone from an unusually ambitious academic program to one of the most vital incubators of nonfiction and experimental cinema in the United States. The films in this selection, including work produced at the SEL and work that inspired SEL makers, attest to the aspirations of sensory ethnography: to experience the world, and to transmit some of the magnitude and multiplicity of that experience. Presented in collaboration with the 2014 Whitney Biennial.

Click on the title above for the full program. I'll comment on just a few of the offerings.

PERMANENT VACATION: THE FILMS OF JIM JARMUSCH
April 2 - 10. 2014

Over the course of a single-minded yet constantly surprising career that has now spanned more than three decades, Jim Jarmusch has become a beloved, forever-cool icon of independent American (and world) cinema. His movies combine a romantic wanderlust, a sense of humor both humane and deadpan, and a connoisseur’s appreciation of the highs and lows of art and popular culture (Elvis Presley, Yasujiro Ozu, and William Blake, for starters). This complete retrospective—which includes 11 features and several shorts and music videos—leads up to the upcoming release of Jarmusch’s latest feature, Only Lovers Left Alive (a selection of the 2013 New York Film Festival, opening at the Film Society of Lincoln Center on April 11). Jarmusch’s latest exquisite genre reinvention, the film is a paean to the pleasures of long-term relationships in the guise of a vampire movie. It also strikes a pitch-perfect balance of melancholy and joy, and celebrates art’s enduring power to re-invigorate one’s experience of the world—something that could be said of all the films in this retrospective. Film Society of Lincoln Center page for this retrospective.

JIM JARMUSCH FILMOGRAPHY
1980 Permanent Vacation
1984 Stranger Than Paradise
1986 Down by Law
1989 Mystery Train
1991 Night on Earth
1995 Dead Man
1999 Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
2003 Coffee and Cigarettes
2005 Broken Flowers
2009 The Limits of Control
2012 Only Lovers Left Alive

I will view at Lincoln Center and comment on Jarmusch's Dead Man (1995).

Links to my Filmleaf Art of the Real and Jarmusch retrospective reviews:

Actress (Robert Greene 2014)--AOTR
Bloody Beans (Narimane Mari 2013)--AOTR
Change of Life/Mudar de Vida (Paulo Rocha 1966)--AOTR
Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch 1995)--Jarmusch retrospective
Red Hollywood (Thom Andersen, Noël Burch 1996; reformatted 2013)--AOTR
La Última Pellícula (Ray Martin, Mark Paranson 2013)-AOTR

[Johann]

This Jarmausch retrospective sounds bullet-cool, like the Man himself.
His use of music is better than Tarantino.
His intelligence and knowledge of cinema is wholly apparent in every frame of every film he did.

[Chris Knipp]

I'm just going to see DEAD MAN there today. None of the other Jarmusch films, but I've seen them all, including his new one, LAST LOVERS ON EARTH. It will be released at Lincoln Center at the end of this series I think. I didn't have that opinion about music vs. Tarantino. Maybe so, but Tarantino is more mainstream and speaks to a wider audience I'd think. Dead Man is my favorite Jarmusch film. It's puzzling how he even did it. It seems different from his others and it's hard to explain how he came to make it. I don't usualy write about retrospectives. How can one sum up the achievemtn of a living filmmaker whose work has been so distinctive yet so varied? An impossible task.

Take a glance at the Art of the Real titles and those I reviewed. It's a mixed bag. Variations in quality are great, and there are some that fit their theme and some that don't. RED HOLLYWOOD is one I probably should have seen, since it's 17 years old. I didn't see that there was much difference in the digital remaster, and it's pretty much a conventional documentary, even if some regard it as provocative.

In a couple days I'm returning to California and my coverage of Film Society of Lincoln Center events will be suspended for some time. The SFIFF, the San Francisco big film festival, will be coming, though. Lots of new titles from that, though many ill also be recycled from the past year's international festival circuit as usual. Here, it's Tribeca time, but I don't attend Tribeca -- I've already been here over a month.

Von Trier's NYMPHOMANIAC, VOLUME 1: I missed several opportunities to see it in press screenings here in NYC, but it has opened here today. I now see that possibly the DEAN MAN press screening was moved from ten a.m. to one-thirty to permit people perhaps to see the first Lincoln Center showing of NYMPHOMANIAC at 11 a.m. Maybe. Because press screenings got overbooked so there are still writers who haven't seen it.

[Johann]

I'll be seeing part one of Trier's new "provocation" next saturday. I'm always jacked up to see a new Trier.
(but I heard that there is a sequence/montage of male penises on display that was completely unnecessary)

[Chris Knipp]

On that score it's probably all unnecessary. But a friend who's seen it says it's also quite funny.

[Chris Knipp]

On re-watching Jim Jarmusch's DEAD MAN for the first time since its US release eighteen years ago:

DEAD MAN (Jim Jamusch 1995)

In more ways than one Dead Man can be seen as the fulfillment of a cherished counterculture dream, the acid western. This ideal has haunted such films as Jim McBride's Glen and Randa, Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie, Monte Hellman's The Shooting and Two-Lane Blacktop, Robert Downey's Greaser's Palace, and Alex Cox's Walker, not to mention such novels as Rudolph Wurlitzer's Nog and Flats. Yet in some ways Dead Man goes beyond all of them in formulating a chilling, savage frontier poetry to justify its hallucinated agenda--a view at once clear-eyed and visionary, exalted and laconic, moral and unsentimental, witty and beautiful, frightening and placid.
--Jonathan Rosenbaum's original review of DEAD MAN.

Rosenbaum feels DEAD MAN'S failure to score with many US critics (Metacritc rating of DEAD MAN was 58%) directly relates to his independence, unlike Tarantino, from producer editing and cooperation with American commercial interests, maintaining ownership of all his negatives and getting non-US (here German) financial support for the film. It shows at Lincoln Center in the retrospective PERMANENT VACATION: THE FILMS OF JIM JARMUSCH Saturday, 5 April 2014 at 9:00pm, Sunday, 6 April at 1:15 pm, Wed. 9 April at 6:30 pm, and Thurs., 10 April at 3:45 pm. Shown with Jarmusch's music video for Neil Young's "Dead Man Score" (5 mins.).

This remains my favorite Jarmusch film despite my enjoyment of his witty, oddball early ones and the penultimate, poorly received LIMITS OF CONTROL. The viewers and critics who turned on Jarmusch for making DEAD MAN, it occurs to me, are a little like the folkies who screamed betrayal when Bob Dylan put down his acoustic guitar and went electric. DEAD MAN paints on a bigger, darker, more ambitious canvas.

Click on the title above for my review of the film as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center's 2-10 April 2014 series, Permanent Vacation: The Films of Jim Jarmusch.

[oscar jubis]

Film critics often have to review a film immediately after watching it in order to meet deadlines. The reviews are not only first impressions but quickly written ones. In the case of the new Trier film, which I watched Friday, the reviews are quickly produced first impressions of the first half of a movie. At this point, I'm glad I don't have to say anything about it. But yeah, I'll agree with what both of you have heard: that there are funny bits, and unnecessary ones.

[Chris Knipp]

Gee I was hoping you'd have something to say about DEAD MAN.

[oscar jubis]

I was wondering what I have already posted here about Dead Man, but the search engine is not working. Anyway I think this is a great film (even though I am supremely annoyed by one scene of extreme violence I found gratuitous) .

[Johann]

DEAD MAN is also my favorite Jarmusch. And I loved The Limits of Control more than anyone here.
Dead Man is an absolute Masterpiece. Black and white, with a haunting and effective music score by Neil Young.
I haven't seen it in a few years Chris but your review has re-awakened my feelings for it.
Rosenbaum's BFI book on the movie is on my bookshelf. It's a great appreciation of the film.

What is the film trying to tell us?
I'm not sure it has an actual message. If there is one, it's that life does not always go the way you'd like, and that it's sometimes wise to go with the direction that life is seemingly taking you. William Blake (Johnny Depp) finds out his "new job" doesn't exist and so his life takes a sharp turn down a strange road/river.

I loved it and always will. Jealous you saw in on a big screen. I've only seen it on a TV set.

[Chris Knipp]

I didn't know about the BFI Modern Classics book on DEAD MAN by Rosnbaum available from Amazon US as you'l see if you click on the link above). What does the story mean? Good question, which maybe Rosenbaum answers; but I cited e.e. cummings' "a poem must not mean but be." Oscar said here earlier Jarmush focuses on character not narrative. That means the being of character not the meaning of story. DEAD MAN is about dying, its rituals and inevitabilities (Blake's Poems of Innocence and Experience). And of course about the American West and the white man's oppression.

I've seen it twice on the big screen now. Probably the sound was better this time; the Walter Reade Theater's sound system is excellent. But the effect was powerful in the smaller Paris Theater in 1996 where the screen is bigger relatively, and the energy of the film was drained a bit this time by there being only half a dozen people at the press screening, for some reason. Oscar, there are several horrifying images that that I'd forgotten, the crushing of the dead marshall's head with the foot and the cannibalistic hit man gnawing on human flesh. Oscar: the site's search engine hookup doesn't work, true, but usually Filmleaf topics can be found via Google directly. I'm not sure what discussion of DEAD MAN on the site you are looking for but here are a couple:

Filmleaf discussion of favorite Westerns.

Filmleaf discussion of Jarmusch's importance and career. (2004) i.

[oscar jubis]

Thanks Chris. Now I know how to find old posts.
And yes, those are the 2 horrifying images I try but can't forget, particularly "the crushing" one". They have no precedent in Jarmusch's filmography, seem gratuitous to me, and out of step with his "cool aesthetics".

[Chris Knipp]

I guess I'm glad I chose right for the horrifying moments. And I had forgotten them, or at least the head crush one. But I think I could argue that they are not out of keeping exactly with the rest of the film, which has other really gross and shocking sights and statements pretty much throughout. Even the mad shooting at buffalo is disgusting, early on.

If you google old Filmleaf discussions it'll often take you to "Archie" and you just click on the title and you'll go to the site and thread.

[Chris Knipp]

Where's tabuno?

[oscar jubis]

He hasn't posted since Nov. 13th! I hope he comes back.