jim jarmusch Jim Jarmusch reaktion books To bamalu, for having been there all the time In loving memory ofmy Maria Published by Reaktion Books Ltd 33 Great Sutton Street London ec1v 0dx www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2015 Copyright © Sara Piazza 2015 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers Printed and bound in China by 1010Printing International Ltd A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library isbn978 1 78023 441 0 Contents Introduction 7 music Voices: Amos Poe 22 1 Flashback: New York Stories 34 Voices: Phil Kline 50 2 Jarmusch, the Musician 61 Voices: John Lurie 92 3 John Lurie, Gamelan and Minimal Music 105 Voices: Marc Ribot 126 4 Memphis Hip Hop, Mestizos and Samurai 133 words Voices: Masatoshi Nagase 170 5 The Battle Against Verbocentrism 175 Voices: Roberto Benigni 207 6 The Melting Pot of Words, the Way of Cultural Relativism 212 Voices: Luc Sante 236 7 Jarmusch, the Poet 242 noise Voices: Eszter Balint 284 8 Communicating at all Cost: Intelligent Noise 293 Voices: Taylor Mead 310 9 Silence 314 Voices: Ennio Morricone 335 Voices: Jim Jarmusch 346 References 357 Profiles of Interviewees 386 Musical Filmography 390 Acknowledgements 398 Photo Acknowledgements 400 Index 402 Introduction In the spring of 1931 – just four years after the official advent of the Talkies – a German film made history by, among other things, showing in an undisputable manner the expressive and narrative power of the in- visible on the screen: Fritz Lang’s M. Apart from the bulging eyes of Peter Lorre in the role of child killer Hans Beckert, what also strikes the memory of those who have seen the film is without a doubt the melody that Beckert whistles to his little victims before abducting and killing them. ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’ was composed by Edvard Grieg for Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gyntand today its popularity has tran- scended the theatre by entering into everyday life – partly, it must be said, thanks to the telephone companies around the world often using it as a standard ringing tone. In Mit is this melody that betrays Beckert, and it is a detail of no small consequence that the one to discover and report the killer is an elderly, itinerant vendor who has lost his sight. A small but eloquent sign hanging from the old man’s neck declares him to be ‘Blind’, an adjective that works in both German and English and – alluding perhaps to the use of the written word so typical to the title cards of silent cinema – clears up any misunderstanding: it is hearing, far more than sight, that demonstrates itself to be the decisive sense in the disturbing story told by Lang in his first sound film, the key to which is a simple whistle. The apparently banal act of whistling is in reality far more com- plex than it might seem due to containing melody, voice – a vehicle for word – and finally an acoustic signal, and so synthesizing in a single The blind vendor, sound material all three fundamental acoustic layers that make up the M, dir. Fritz Lang (1931). non-visible sphere on film: music, words and noise. 7 It is these three invisible mainstays that will bolster my journey into the cinema of Jim Jarmusch, whose career kicked off roughly 50 years after the release of Lang’s film and in New York, at that time an ‘island-city’ very similar to West Berlin. According to Jarmusch: Berlin is an incredible city. It seems to be very similar to New York in terms of tension and atmosphere, but for very different reasons. Like being a walled-in island, torn in half, with the constant military presence.1 In 1987he lived in Berlin for almost a year and his reference to the mili- tary presence naturally alludes to the atmosphere of a city that at the time was still cut in two by 43km of brick and barbed wire.2In the New York of 1981, the date of Jarmusch’s statement about Berlin, bricks and barbed wire played an integral part in the topography of some of the city’s neighbourhoods, Manhattan’s Lower East Side in particu- lar, but it was more about ruined buildings, crumbling walls and earthen lots that were semi-abandoned and fenced off. In this scenario, Jarmusch set his first full-length feature, Permanent Vacation(1980), shot as his graduation thesis film for nyuGraduate Film School, which, however, was turned down by the commission at the time. To produce the film Jarmusch used his scholarship money – the Louis B. Mayer fellowship – that had been sent directly to him instead of to the School.3 This already alludes to a trait of Jarmusch’s method of working that would continue in the decades to come: all the phases of film finance are hand - led directly by him and not delegated to intermediaries, because ownership of the work – in other words the negative – must be the director’s, as both the work’s creative and financial point of reference. Thus the role of the producer is comparable to that of a collaborator who renders the actual shooting of the film materially possible but does not dictate conditions or influence the creative process. This method of working – often associated with the nebulous and versa- tile notion of ‘indie’, or independent, a label that Jarmusch, willingly or not, carries with him everywhere – naturally involves risks. The main risk is of taking for ever to complete a project or, in the worst case, not even finishing it. Having made eleven feature films since 1980,4and following a four-year absence from cinemas, Jarmusch still manages to look at this with irony, as demonstrated by his opening response at the 2013Cannes Film Festival press conference for the world premiere 8 | introduction