Background
Ethnicity:
His mother is of German and Irish descent and his father was of Czech and German descent
Jarmusch, Jim was born on 22 January 1953 in Akron, Ohio, United States.
Ethnicity:
His mother is of German and Irish descent and his father was of Czech and German descent
Jarmusch, Jim was born on 22 January 1953 in Akron, Ohio, United States.
He was educated at Columbia and NYU; he immersed himself in film study at the Cinémathèque Française; and he was an assistant to Nicholas Ray at the end of Rav’s life.
In addition to his own films, Jarmusch has often worked for others in New York’s avant-garde: he was an assistant on Lightning Over Water (80, Wim Wenders and Ray); he did sound on Burroughs (83, Howard Brookner); he acted in Straight to Hell (87, Alex Cox), in Leningrad Cowboys Go America (89, Aki Kaurismaki), and in In the Soup (92, Alexandre Rockwell).
Even in Stranger Than Paradise, the value of the people was tenuous. Their lives were so much at the mercy of randomness, entropy, and dispersal. As time has passed, that melancholy hangs in Jarmusch’s way sometimes (as in Down By Law) in oppressively prettv compositions. It is hard to see where he is going—and very likely that he would retort that the notion of “going” anywhere is a fallacy.
Dead Man had many enthusiasts, who saw an ironic deconstruction of the Western. His strength originally was the empty duration in very plain lives (which is not a very commercial area). But giving it up for a certain genre glamour—see also Ghost Dog and its “samurai” shadowing—leaves a very private film-maker wondering just how independent he can manage to be.
Jarmusch has a rare feeling for urban desolation, for loneliness, and the sweet, whimsical overlap of chance and companionship. It is gentle, offbeat, and poignant—but does it make whole films? And does it really make a marriage of Jarmusch’s leaning toward raw pop culture and Sollo modishness? Jarmusch feels drawn to shorter film forms—videos or even deadpan, a commercial commercials. There's plenty of evidence bv now that he lacks the drive or the wall to sustain narrative, or even character, over a long haul. In hindsight. Stranger Than Paradise (still his best film) seems to have the innocent energv of beginning. By now, he seems like a born maker of episodes.