Jim Jarmusch

Remaining an outsider makes you mature but never old. Word of Jarmusch, who since the 1980s has been making uncompromising films – faithful to himself, yet complex in his artistic pursuit, which has become a hallmark of much American independent cinema. Winner of the Caméra d’Or at Cannes at age 21 with Stranger than Paradise, which revealed his minimalist, laconic, and meditative style, Jarmusch has in forty-five years directed around fifteen feature films, many marked by an irreverent approach to genre – the backbone of the American production system – which the Ohio-born director tends to sublimate into deeply personal works: stylistically linear yet dense in their premises and artistic outcomes. Such is the case with the anti-Western Dead Man, a 1990s cult film, a spiritual and hallucinatory journey featuring an iconic Johnny Depp and a minimalist score composed by Neil Young. Music, indispensable to Jarmusch, runs through his work in dialogue with different styles and great artists – from Wu-Tang Clan, in the magnificent Ghost Dog, to Tom Waits, who appears in Down by Law (where Jarmusch directs his friend Roberto Benigni) and Coffee and Cigarettes, and now returns as an actor in Father Mother Sister Brother. Another stylistic hallmark of Jarmusch is the static image, which allows time for poetic substance to seep into the frame and saturate it, as in Paterson with Adam Driver. Jarmusch’s apparent simplicity – and at times banality – becomes a revelatory gesture. In this stylistic austerity, never forced but always coherent and measured, resound his extra-American roots: Godard, Bresson, Ozu, Kaurismäki…