A Film Canon

With his first major film, Jim Jarmusch offers a striking answer to the perennial question of how to translate a chamber drama from theatrical to cinematic language. In an innovative approach, Jarmusch presents his film as a series of single shots, each separated by several seconds of blackness, thereby transforming the shot itself into a kind of chamber, and imbuing his characters - hipster Willie (John Lurie), his friend Eddie (Richard Edson) and Hungarian cousin Eva (Eszter Balint) - with the anomie that comes from being trapped in a world of cinematic cliche and convention; or, alternatively, from realizing how much you need to denude the world to rid it of cinematic cliche and convention, as evinced in a series of sublime moments in which the leached, black-and-white cinematography coalesces into confrontations with pure, uncomprehending whiteness, so many continuations of the blank screen that concludes The 400 Blows. For the most part, these shots last between one and three minutes - and, while Jarmusch makes sufficient use of mirrors, windows and doors to prevent them ever feeling too static or photographic, there's nothing like the mobile, exploratory, choreographed camera that might be expected, nor any tendency to linger before or after characters have left the scene. It's this absence of spatial or temporal depth that gives the film its loose, circular quality - a kind of slowed-down version of the horse and dog races that generate the most tangible moment of dramatic conflict - and breaks down the distinction between indoors and outdoors enough to ensure that the road trip that structures the three acts takes place in celluloid rather than physical space, as the characters continually and unsuccessfully grope their way towards the next frame: "You come to someplace new, and everything looks the same." It's a testament to his direction, then, that Jarmusch never lets the momentum of the road further mobilize his recurrent, rudimentary pan back and forth, as laconic and limited as if the camera were tied to a post, nor lets its romance play up the immigrant narrative too much, his elliptical conclusion converging circularity and immigration into permanent vacation, the key characteristic of the American wanderer: "I had to buy a ticket to get on the plane to get her off the plane."