‘I would rather make a film about a guy walking his dog than the king of China,"
Jim Jarmusch
Paterson (2016) is Jim Jarmusch’s film about an unsung poet living in Paterson, New Jersey. In my estimation, the film is, perhaps, the greatest movie ever made about a poet.
Jim Jarmusch is an American film maker, born and bred in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. He was a startling apparition on the scene in New York City in the mid-seventies. Jarmusch is tall, dresses entirely in black, and has incandescent white hair. He is handsome, with ruggedly chiseled features complicated by perfect, cupid’s bow lips – Jarmusch’s lips are prettier than Mick Jagger’s or Clara Bow’s. No one has ever photographed Jarmusch’s eyes – he is always depicted wearing sunglasses. Perhaps, his eyes are red or purplish or either entirely black or entirely white. No one knows. Jarmusch is the quintessential punk-rock CBGB hipsters – he looks the way that Andy Warhol wished that he looked.
Jarmusch was a poor student and flunked out of severals schools before ending up a Columbia in New York City. He gravitated toward film, while performing intermittently in rock and roll bands. (He is friends with Neil Young and Iggy Pop and made documentary films about both artists, Year of the Horse in 1997 and Gimme Danger 2016 respectively.) In his last year at Columbia, he studied abroad in Paris, spending most of his time at the Cinematheque Francaise.
Back in New York, Jarmusch applied for admission to graduate program in the arts at NYU. He was accepted and spent a year working as a personal assistant to Nicholas Ray. Ray, a great director, had spent many years in an alcohol-induced oblivion and was dying when Jarmusch worked for him. (According to the story, Jarmusch submitted a script to Ray for credit in a course in screenwriting that the old director was teaching. Ray rejected the script and put a failing grade on it, noting that film was about "action" and the scenario didn’t have enough action in it. Jarmusch rewrote the script and defiantly removed all vestiges of action from the scenario. Ray liked the very pretty young man’s defiance and passed him.) Ray’s protracted dying was filmed by the German director, Wim Wenders, in the film Lightning over Water – Jarmusch is visible in the margins of the documentary shot by the great Robby Mueller. Later, Jarmusch used Mueller as his director of photography on a number of his pictures.
The first film directed by Jarmusch after his student production, Permanent Vacation (1980) was Stranger than Paradise released to much acclaim in 1984. (I showed that film to this group about 1986). Stranger than Paradise is a black and white comedy entirely comprised of sequence shots – each shot equals one sequence in the film. The film is very funny and engaging – the plot involves a young man from a Baltic country who tours the United States with his cousin and his cousin’s girlfriend. The trio’s objective is to see Lake Erie and the film ends with a sequences in which the characters stare out over a frozen expanse of ice mumbling dead-pan comments that there really isn’t all that much to see. Stranger than Paradise is an excellent film, an important independently produced picture, and was a box-office success – it didn’t have to earn much money to recoup the $125,000 that the movie cost. Stranger than Paradise launched a brief film making movement centered in Soho in downtown Manhattan, the so-called "No Wave."
Jarmusch’s next picture, Down by Law, (1986) was shot in lustrous black and white by Robbie Mueller in New Orleans and had conventional movie stars, albeit eccentrically cast – the film stars the Italian comedian, Roberto Benigni as well as the Soho musical luminaries Tom Waits and John Lurie. Mystery Train (1989) was shot in color in Memphis and involves three groups of lovers who have come to the town hoping to connect with the spirit of Elvis Presley – the Japanese man in the Japanese sequence ("Far from Yokohama") is Masatosi Nagase; he appears as the Japanese tourist and poet who speaks with Paterson in Paterson. Mystery Train is a warm film and very beautifully produced – the action all revolves a seedy Memphis hotel where Screamin’ Jack Hawkins plays a desk clerk. I showed the film to this group in the summer of 1990 and it was a favorite of Terry Dilley. Life on Earth (1991) is an anthology film in which all the stories involve a cab ride in a different city – the movie takes place in Helsinki, Los Angeles, and three other cities, beginning at dawn in LA and ending just before dawn in Helsinki. It is also a very fine film. (While making this film, Jarmusch met Aki Kaurismaki, the Finnish director, and Jarmusch was cast in a small role in The Leningrad Cowboys Go America.)
In 1995, Jarmusch made his most controversial film, the remarkable Western Dead Man. This film stars Johnny Depp, Gabriel Byrne, and Robert Mitchum in his last role – the picture cost 9 million dollars. Neil Young wrote and performed the soundtrack. The film is opaque and mystical; it has been derided and despised by Native Americans and admired by some of them as well. (Johnny Depp plays an Indian who is obsessed with the writings of the British visionary poet, William Blake.) The movie was not successful in the United States but was a huge hit on the art house circuit in Europe and Asia. I don’t like the picture and think it is pretentious and dull – but the film has a certain charisma: it creates a mood and doggedly sustains it.
After Dead Man, Jarmusch’s films are generally internationally funded. He made Ghost Dog – the Way of the Samurai with Forest Whitaker in 2000. This picture is an idiosyncratic gangster film abourt an American hit man obsessed with Yamamoto’s samurai manual, the Hagekura or Way of the Samurai. In my view, the film is too hip by half and doesn’t succeed.
Jarmusch dropped out of sight with respect to narrative feature films for almost five years, surfacing with a new picture, Broken Flowers in 2005. (During the hiatus, Jarmusch made a documentary with Neil Young, Year of the Horse, and edited some loose bits of footage from earlier black and white films into an anthology called Coffee and Cigarettes – these fragmentary films were shot during the production of Jarmusch’s earlier movies and feature people smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee who just happened by the set when those films were made. The snippets are droll but the film as a whole seems self-indulgent to me.) Broken Flowers was Jarmusch’s stab at making a commercially viable romantic comedy and the picture is grounded in an excellent performance by the always-bankable Bill Murray. Murray plays a man who receives a letter telling him that one of his ex-girlfriends became pregnant with his child, had the baby, and that Murray’s characters has a teenage son that is unknown to him. Murray sets out to visit each former girlfriend to discover the truth about his son. The movie was well-reviewed, but even Bill Murray couldn’t make the picture a success in the United States. It tanked at the box office here but did very well internationally, eventually earning more than 47 million dollars world wide. After Broken Flowers, Jarmusch directed The Limits of Control, a 2009 crime film that I haven’t seen and that is reportedly not wholly successful. Jarmusch followed The Limits of Control with an immensely stylish and thought-provoking vampire movie Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) – the film was largely made in the ruins of Detroit and it’s a wonderful picture, moody, romantic, and, also, very funny. Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston play the titular lovers, ancient vampires named Eve and Adam. The film has all the elements that fans expect in a Jarmusch film – dead pan humor, a great soundtrack, gloomy, gothic (Byronic) romance, stunning nocturnal camera work with a bow to some of Jarmusch’s signature obsessions: his interest in Nikolai Tesla and Iggy Pop. (Jarmusch’s 2016 documentary Gimme Danger is about Iggy Pop.)
William Carlos Williams and Paterson
Although it is not necessary to the appreciation of Jarmusch’s Paterson, a viewers enjoyment of the film will be enhanced by some allusions to the work of the great poet, William Carlos Williams and his problematic magnum opus, the epic poem, Paterson.
Williams was born in 1888 and spent his life in New Jersey. His grandmother was English; Williams wrote a notable poem about the last day of her life. His father married a Puerto Rican woman, hence, his middle name. Williams graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a medical degree around 1913 and spent most of his life working as the director of pediatrics at the Passaic Hospital. From 1913 until the end of his life, he lived in a large, but plain home on 9 Ridge Road, East Rutherford, New Jersey. The house displayed a shingle that read "William C. Williams, M.D." For most of his life, he was a very busy doctor specializing in obstetrics and pediatric practice. He delivered babies and made house-calls.
Williams was also a very great poet, one of the principal innovators in American verse. With Ezra Pound, he founded the imagist movement about the time of World War One. He maintained close and life-long friendships with Pound and T. S. Eliot as well as Louis Zukofsky and, later, was friends with another New Jersey poet, Allen Ginsberg. (He wrote the introduction to the 1956 edition of Ginsberg’s Howl). In the twenties, Pound was associated with the Objectivist Movement, a style of poetry that makes use of documentary materials embedded in a matrix of verse. Zukofsky is another important Objectivist as is Muriel Rukeyser in her epic The House of the Dead, an angry book-length poem about Silicosis in railroad workers involved in drilling tunnels in West Virginia. Charles Reznikoff, the author of Testimony, a series of books derived from legal reports, is also a well-known Objectivist. Paterson, a book that incorporates legal documents, historical citations, and fragments of letters and other writings, is an example of a work influenced by Objectivism.
Joyce’s Ulysses made a powerful impression on Williams and led him to write a 85 line poem on the city of Paterson in 1926. Williams was at the height of his career as a pediatrician and didn’t return to the subject until the late thirties. He was greatly influenced as well by T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land but felt that the British poet (actually an expatriate American) was overly pessimistic about the modern world. Williams was friends with Hart Crane, a poet who had made the Brooklyn Bridge the subject of his optimistic and rapturous The Bridge and felt that Crane’s approach to modernity was morally superior to Eliot’s gloom. In the late thirties, Williams experimented with form and began to develop his epic into the shape that it took when first published as Paterson Book One in 1946. By this time, Williams’ debt to Joyce was primarily to Finnegan’s Wake. In Joyce’s Wake, the sleeping city of Dublin is imagined as a great giant; the giant’s dreams are the subject of the book. Williams’ imagines Paterson as a giant "asleep on h is right side with head at waterfall (so that) the rushing water fills his dreams." Although Paterson is "eternally asleep, his dreams walk about the City where he persists incognito."
Paterson is very diffuse and contains pioneer accounting books, archival political writings and letters, texts about the Federal Reserve, and descriptions of the controversy between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. In form, the poem often follows the model of Pound’s Cantos, particularly the development of "ideographs" consisting of snippets of verse, prose texts, and quotations from economics or history books. Volumes of the epic were published 1948. 1949, 1951, and 1958. Williams was appointed Librarian at the Library of Congress, a position that was highly controversial on account of his friendship with Ezra Pound, then committed to St. Elizabeth’s in Washington on charges of insanity relating to his treasonous conduct during World War II. Williams was an avuncular fellow who liked everyone and whom everyone liked in return. He couldn’t bear being disliked and was treated for clinical depression in 1952. Later, he suffered a series of debilitating strokes but composed some of his finest work after those illnesses in the late fifties. The five volumes of Paterson were combined into a single text in 1963 and published by New Directions. Williams wrote in a variety of forms – he wrote a play performed on Broadway, his autobiography, several novels and a well-received book of criticism, In the American Grain. His short story, "The Use of Force", is one of the greatest of all American writings of that kind – it is equal to similar works by Hawthorne, Poe, Hemingway and Faulkner. Williams died in March 1963 and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize posthumously.
In Book One of Paterson, Williams announces the principle underlying all of his poetic practice: "Say it – no ideas but in things..."
In my view, his greatest poem is Asphodel that Greeny Flower", a monumental work, in which these famous lines occur:
it is difficult \ to get the news from poems \ yet men die miserably every day \ for lack \ of what is found there
Some correlations between the poem and the film are worth identifying:
2. The hero spends his days driving his bus through Paterson – he is like the animate dreams of Paterson in Williams’ poem walking through the city but not knowing his true nature;
3. The Great Falls of the Passaic at Paterson are central to the epic poem and the film;
4. The poem Paterson chronicles the great men and women who were born in the city – similarly, Jarmusch’s film identifies great athletes, comedians (Lou Costello), musicians, and poets who came from the city. In the context of the poem, these people are the "animate" dreams of the city;
5. Williams celebrates the diversity of America and thought of himself as an American Puerto Rican poet – Paterson’s wife seems to be an immigrant (in fact, she is Persian) and the city is shown to be full of immigrants.
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