Wanting to be writer, Jim Jarmusch studied American and English Literature in the Columbia University in 1971. He went to Paris for a year to study French literature. Here he discovered European cinema, and American cinema has never been the same ever since.

A happy accident during his film course at the New York University, started him out on the road to film making. His scholarship money meant to reach the university, reached him. Jim used up the money to expand a short film he had made in the course, into a feature length film. Thus was born ‘Permanent Vacation (1980)’, which set the tone for the type of films Jarmusch would become world renowned for.

Jim Jarmusch is not concerned with the existential queries of his protagonists, or even their search for purpose in life. Instead, his focus is on characters that live on the margins of society, the deadbeats, the lovable losers and the unadulterated oddballs. Mundane life is explored, and the ordinary emphasized in his movies.

Jarmusch is an anti-pop culture, anti-narrative Indie filmmaker who has consistently broken Hollywood stereotypes. He has often said, “Life has no plot, why must films or fiction?” And he or his films, make no pretences of having any. Situations creep up before his characters which they have no option but to walk through.

Jim Jarmusch is the collector of life’s short vignettes. Not only was his first film an extension of his short film, his next ‘Stranger Than Paradise’ - the story of two losers, whose life is disrupted by the arrival of a cousin from Europe - was originally not more than 30 minutes. This film won Camera d’or at the 1984 Cannes Film Fesival, and became a reference point in the history of American Indie filmmaking.

His next film, ‘Down By Law’, described by Jarmusch as a ‘neo-beat-noir-comedy’, concerns the view of America from the eyes of the outsider and outcasts, a theme further explored in his next film, ‘Mystery Train’.

His fascination for shorts, is again seen in his next venture ‘Night on Earth’, a set of five stories, occurring at the same time, in different parts of the world, all connected by their protagonist’s cab ride. Despite apparently unconnected plots, the five stories are linked by a humanistic concern, and present moving insights into the human condition.

His next film, starring a young Johnny Depp, ‘Dead Man’, was a Western, in the most un-western manner. Here again, Jarmusch broke Hollywood stereotypes of movie making.

‘Ghost Dog’, that mixes eastern spirituality with western notions, was his most commercially successful film.

Jim Jarmusch has made only 10 films till date. Yet, he has become the Hercules of independent cinema in a commercially sensitive Hollywood. He has charted a course others would hopefully make into a independent road, to be used by filmmakers for a long long time.

© Palador Pictures Pvt. Ltd., 2008 

JIM JARMUSCH'S FILMOGRAPHY: 

Director:

• Broken Flowers (2005) 
• Coffee and Cigarettes (2003)
• Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet (2002)
• Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999)
• Year of the Horse (1997)
• Dead Man (1995)
• Coffee and Cigarettes III (1993)
• Night on Earth (1991)
• Mystery Train (1989)
• Coffee and Cigarettes II (1989)
• Down by Law (1986)
• Coffee and Cigarettes (1986)
• Stranger Than Paradise (1984)
• Stranger Than Paradise (1982)
• Permanent Vacation (1980)

 Writer:

• Broken Flowers (2005) 
• Coffee and Cigarettes (2003)
• Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet (2002)
• Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999)
• Dead Man (1995)
• Night on Earth (1991)
• Mystery Train (1989)
• Coffee and Cigarettes II (1989)
• Down by Law (1986)
• Coffee and Cigarettes (1986)
• Stranger Than Paradise (1984)
• You Are Not I (1981)
• Permanent Vacation (1980)