Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man and the Rhythm of Musical Form

Abstract

By closing the circle of overlapping themes of time, rhythm and kinesis in music and film we come to the stage where all the available findings and conclusions about film’s musicality and the ways of achieving it can be demonstrated integrally in individual case studies. The first two of these studies — Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man and Darren Aronofsky’s π — come from the tradition of American independent cinema, a strange and elusive beast in the biggest movie jungle in the world which has been celebrated by many filmophiles, renounced by its auteurs and pronounced dead or even non-existent by press and scholars many times in the last few decades. The term ‘independent’ in relation to American film has been alternately used to mark either economic or aesthetic and stylistic independence from the mainstream, or both, thus causing sometimes contradictory or ambiguous uses of the term (Hillier, 2001; Wood, 2004); but most importantly it has become a savvy marketing term that studios use these days to promote films which are perceived as being somehow ‘edgy’ or ‘controversial’.