Jim Jarmusch: Music, Words and Noise

418 Pages·2015·6.346 MB·English

by  Sara Piazza

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