Word: jarmusch
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...character, "Dead Man" subverts the Western genre by relying on visual and sound effects, rather than plot events, to chart the progress of the character. The film is shot in black and white, an effect which "was built into the story from the moment I started imagining it," says Jarmusch. "A guy goes into a world that becomes very unfamiliar to him and the black and white allowed that kind of eerie, unfamiliar quality to be maintained." The use of black and white was necessary to further dismantle the Western rubric because "the color values of Westerns have become...
...cinematography in "Dead Man" is mesmerizing. Under Jarmusch's direction, the western wilderness plays itself out in gray forms emerging from a bleached-out screen or disappearing into a white mist. Through such a lens, a mountain is as immaterial as a stick of kindling, a laketop as impenetrable as a cliff's face. The film is handled episodically, with a full fade to black between scenes. These pauses in the narrative slow the film down and thwart the efforts of audience members to gauge the pace or predict the plot. The moments of blankness, which Jarmusch describes as "respiration...
Ironically, "Dead Man" is so strong in terms of style and sound that the script ends up being the weakest part of the film. Though Jarmusch intended the Native American character to break the two stereotypes of either "the savage who must be eradicated...or the all-knowing sage...that must mix in completely with nature." The character Nobody seems to resemble the latter. He is both overly noble and gratingly mystic, even if his mysticism is related not to "nature" but to the writings of William Blake. Gary Farmer portrays Nobody with the kind of inscrutable poker-face...
...choice of the poet William Blake as a central reference for the script was serendipitous, according to Jarmusch, yet the cloying axioms of the self-obsessed Blake are not any less cloying when they appear here. Still, the work of a more verbally interesting poet could have potentially overloaded this tautly balanced film...
...Dead Man" is a strangely compelling creation--unconventionally paced, vaguely plotted, preoccupied with elements of sound and image which would be background in other films. That all this material can be plumbed from the rather sterile idiom of the Western is a major achievement for Jarmusch, and an intense, sensual experience for the audience. While the William Blake theme is somewhat inconclusively handled, it does create a literary feel to the work which increases its intellectual potency. This is also true of the epigram from Henri Michaux which opens the film and gives it its title: "It is preferable...