Down by Law

With his trademark shock of white hair and ultra-cool rock star persona, Jim Jarmusch is the archetypal auteur of American independent film. Born on January 22, 1953, in Akron, OH, Jarmusch was the son of a former film critic for the Akron Beacon Journal. In University, he went to Paris as an exchange student and spend most of his time at the Parisian Cinemas. Upon his return to New York, Jarmusch transferred to Columbia University, where, though he eventually received a degree in English literature. With no film experience, he was accepted into New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and soon found himself a teaching assistant to legendary maverick filmmaker Nicholas Ray. Ray helped him get funding for his thesis project, Permanent Vacation (1980). Though the film was later released to critical acclaim, his professors were underwhelmed by his final project and Jarmusch never got a degree from N.Y.U.

Jarmusch’s break came with his next film; the 30-minute short eventually evolved into Stranger Than Paradise (1984), thanks to Wim Wenders, who donated a cache of unexposed film. Upon its release, Paradise was hailed as a masterpiece. It earned a Golden Leopard at the San Locarno Film Festival, a Best Film of the Year award from the National Society of Film Critics, and the Camera d’or at the Cannes Film Festival for best first picture.Constructed as a series of discrete long takes broken up by black leader, the film was a conscious reaction against the hyperkinetic visual barrage of MTV. Paradise revealed a number of nascent motifs that would pervade Jarmusch’s later work. Popular perceptions of America as seen by outsiders are a constant theme in Jarmusch’s work. Another theme is Jarmusch’s fascination with music. As he has noted he drew inspiration from the do-it-yourself ethos of punk rock, which reached its zenith in New York just as he was directing his first feature.

Jarmusch’s next film, Down By Law, refined his trademark ironic wit and laconic style, adding gorgeous black-and-white photography and elegant tracking shots. Telling the story of an ebullient Italian tourist (Roberto Benigni) and two hepcat petty hoods thrown together in a jail cell, the film makes knowing use of Robert Bresson’s A Man Escapes (1956), along with almost every other Hollywood prison flick convention. His next two films, Mystery Train and Night on Earth (1991), were praised for their cleverness and charm, but critics increasingly complained that his films were a retread of his previous works. His 1995 opus Dead Man provided a response to this criticism. Panned by mainstream reviewers while hailed internationally as a visionary work of genius, the film had little of the hip irony or mannered style that marked Night on Earth. Instead, Dead Man was a bold, lyrical depiction of death and a penetrating look through gauzy myths of the American frontier. In 1999, Jarmusch released his follow-up, Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai. Borrowing from Seijun Suzuki’s loopy masterpiece Branded to Kill (1967), the film reworks the gangster genre, as Down by Law recast the prison film, gleefully combining clichés of the hip-hop gangsta, the Italian Mafioso, and the Japanese yakuza.

(From http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:95892~T1)