Long before the unintended consequences of globalization became matters of economic life and death, Jim Jarmusch has explored in his films the creative contradictions involved in living in a connected modern world. His films depict a fraternity of searchers and dreamers, screen characters who are moved across time zones by random circumstance, the emotional weight of the perfect song played at the perfect time, and who, while obsessing about the perfect cup of coffee, are casually and often humorously contemplating the deepest of philosophical conundrums.

In his review of Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum got at the essence of the director. He wrote, “From the start of his career Jarmusch has been a settler in the still barely discovered territory of global culture. He's not simply or exclusively an ‘American independent’ but an astute connoisseur of cultural essentials that escape boundaries of nationality, ethnicity, language, gender, and age, and he's broaching a realm of experience and potential bonding that's daily becoming more important to the quality of everyday life on the planet.” 

With The Limits of Control, his 11th feature, due out this May, FilmInFocus took a look back at Jarmusch’s career and identified the tributaries and byways that connect his films.

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Permanent Vacation

Permanent Vacation: Jarmusch's first feature, Permanent Vacation, almost wasn't one. Originally born as the director's NYU thesis short, the film became Jarmusch's debut when he dropped out of school and then expanded it to 77 minutes. Recently reissued by Criterion on the Stranger than Paradise DVD, Permanent Vacation is a poetically rendered and sparsely populated ode to a late 20th century urban bohemia, a time in which culture was creative while our cities crumbled. Writes Nick Pinkerton at Reverse Shot, "The movie's puffed-up melancholia and unabashed love affair with being a hip, unattached, good-looking young guy is winningly straight up. It's enamored with the simple acts of turning on a record player, going to a repertory house, or walking around the city and seeing some crazy shit—enamored enough to make a movie out of all that stuff." And while Permanent Vacation is a time capsule to the Gotham bohemia of the time, the writer Luc Sante saw instead in the film's downtown cool something almost timeless: "Permanent Vacation… drew its style from the Italian neorealists and presented an archetype of questing youth that harks back all the way to the early 19th century romantics. In the face of a dominant posteverything cynicism, it sought poetry and transcendence and romance, even if it could acknowledge such things only with a deadpan stare that superficially looked like indifference."