MASTER THESIS Film Studies June 26, 2015
Tess Boissonneault ID 10847367
JIM JARMUSCH: FASHIONING A WORLD OF OUTSIDERS
Supervisor: M.A.M.B Lous Baronian
Second Reader: Abe Geil
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction………...2
Chapter I: Jarmusch the Outsider………...8
I.I The Modern Stranger or Jim in Akron………8
I.II The Lower East Side: A Collective Stranger………...10
I.III Outsider Cinema: Jarmusch the Independent Filmmaker………...12
I.IV Jarmusch’s Brand of Outsider………....14
Chapter II: Fashioned Space………..19
II.I Spatial Beings: The Body and Architecture……….19
II.II Fashioning Space: Body, Architecture and Fashion………...22
II.III Haptic Visuality: The Body, Architecture, and Fashion on the Screen……26
Chapter III: The Outsider Inside: A Spatial, Sartorial Analysis of Selected Jarmusch Films………..31
III.I Travelling Through Space………..31
III.II Interior, Domestic Space………...38
III.III Exterior, Architectural Space………...47
Conclusion………57
INTRODUCTION
A car drives through New Orleans. Slowly, steadily passing by both recognizable and less known locations: the Saint Louis Cemetery, downtrodden residential neighbourhoods, the swamp, the French quarter with its uncanny overhanging cast-iron balconies… A young man clad in a plaid suit, spectacles and bowtie sits on a train, hugging his luggage, surrounded by tough characters, the landscape out the train car gradually changes from scenes of rich forests to increasingly barren land… A woman walks purposefully through the ochre streets of Tangiers at night, her face covered with an ivory coloured scarf that matches the rest of her clothing, her pace measured, provoking bewildered looks as she goes… A man in a glassy blue suit debarks from an airplane, and moves through a modern airport, reflecting and being reflected by the glass and mirrored walls of the building.
These are but a few of the scenes in Jim Jarmusch’s films that have stayed with me after seeing them, clear images retained in my memory, continually provoking thoughts about his body of work. They have left me wondering how these moments, each from different films and disparate in context and character, have elicited such a strong affective response in me, and significantly, how Jarmusch’s films all seem to communicate a similar feeling or mood.
Of course, in considering Jarmusch’s work there are certain themes that have been deemed to be recurrent in his films, and justifiably so. That of culture blending, his uncanny ability to fuse different elements of high and low culture, of past and present culture, of Eastern and Western culture. That of genre appropriation, playing with elements of the Western, of the gangster flick, and most recently the vampire film, subverting them, reinventing them. And that of the outsider, his unrelenting interest in creating a world of outside characters, each plagued by miscommunication, and apparent loneliness, but also bestowed with an appreciation for the world, for its cultures and arts.
The outsider. This particular theme has resonated most within his films, within these indelible scenes. It has drawn me in to consider what makes Jarmusch’s films so rich, so affectively stimulating. As his films are narratively loose and his scripts are largely improvised or poetically enigmatic, it seems that it is his characters that drive his
films, though they are often themselves quite inscrutable, their pasts, present motivations, and futures only ever tacitly expressed (Suarez, 4).
There is also another element that arises consistently throughout Jarmusch’s work and predominantly in the scenes mentioned above: place. In fact, Jarmusch’s own creative process begins not with narrative or script, but rather with characters and actors, settings and locations. The Limits of Control (2009), for instance, originated from Jarmusch’s want to write a lead character for Ivorian actor Isaach de Bankolé, as well as to film in Spain, especially at Torres Blancas, an apartment building in Madrid featured in the film, as well as at a house Joe Strummer photographed for Jarmusch in the south of Spain (Jarmusch interview with Gavin Smith). Conceived from the very beginning as founding elements of his films, and as primary to the narrative, it is not surprising that character and setting might inform each other, might be connected in an affecting way. It is from this principal connection that I have drawn the inspiration for my analysis of Jim Jarmusch’s films.
A compelling argument could conceivably be made for the symbolic and narrative implications of character and place in Jarmusch’s films: for instance one could analyze Ghost Dog (from the eponymous film released in 2000) as a black samurai character living in an urban environment in relation to the historical popularity of samurai and martial arts films in marginalized black communities1. I will however take a different approach, looking to the aesthetic relationship between character and place in Jarmusch’s films in order to elucidate and even uncover how his films convey meaning. Specifically, I will be looking to the representations of character and space in order to unfold a particular understanding of the figure of the outsider in Jarmusch’s films. In analyzing character and place visually I have also taken a particular elemental approach in understanding their spatial relationship. That is, in taking character and place as starting points, they can be brought together under the concept of space, in that the character and the place they occupy are both spatial components. Further, in re-breaking down the concept of “space” within the films, and within scholarship surrounding the concept of space – which I will come back to – there are certain areas of focus that are taken up: that
1 For such an approach see Juan A. Suarez’s chapter “Citing, Touching, Dwelling: Ghost
Dog” in his book Jim Jarmusch, in which he accounts for the cultural context in which the film is set and made.
of the body, of architecture, and importantly the connective element between the two of them: apparel or fashion.
The study of fashion in film has in recent years grown into a diverse and increasingly prominent field of study as it inquires into the various connections shared between fashion and the cinema. Among these areas are the study of costume in film, especially related to gender and identity (Bruzzi, 1997), the emergence of collaborations between fashions houses and filmmakers (Breward, 2003; Ulhirova, 2013), and explorations into the spatial, aesthetic qualities of clothing within the mise-en-scène (Wortel and Smelik, 2013; Bruno). My reading of sartorial elements within Jarmusch’s films will fall somewhat in line with the latter understanding, as I will be considering “costume design as a piece of film architecture” (Stutesman, 21). In conceiving of fashion spatially, film scholar Giuliana Bruno has been of particular import, as I have borrowed and in some ways appropriated her notion of “fashioned space,” which she employs in discussing how the architectonics of film space create mood. That is, the idea that film conveys feeling through its visuals, specifically its treatment of spatial elements, has motivated much of the following work. Ultimately I will argue that the films’ fashioned space inform Jarmusch’s outsider characters, placing them visually and haptically within their worlds, suggesting that they are not simply aliens, disconnected in varying ways from the people and societies around them, but are in fact quite uniquely connected to their environments.
In bringing together bodies, architecture, and fashion spatially within the film image in order to read and inform the character of the outsider in Jarmusch’s films, it is first necessary to establish what exactly the role of the outsider entails in Jarmusch’s work, what the significance of it is. The first chapter of this thesis will look to Jarmusch himself, both as a sort of outsider in his personal life growing up, as well as professionally, as an independent filmmaker. In understanding him as a sort of outsider-auteur, and looking to his influences, specifically from the no-wave film and music scene in which he took part during his time in New York in the 1970s and 80s, our exploration of his characters as outsiders can be better understood. The chapter will also look to the various manifestations of the outsider in Jarmusch’s films in order to reinforce and establish the role of the outsider as a dominant theme in his work. The emphasis in
determining his characters as outsiders will be placed not only on their narrative characterizations, but importantly on their sartorial attributes as well, on their individual styles, in order to begin to consider them as aesthetic outsiders.
The second chapter, after having established the significance of the figure of the outsider within Jarmusch’s life and work, will develop the theoretical framework from which the analysis of Jarmusch’s films will be derived. The development will gradually build through the spatial elements I have laid out: first by investigating the inherent spatial connections between the body and architecture as developed by French philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre in his book The Production of Space (1974), as well as the social consequences of the body in space. Next, clothing will be brought into the discussion primarily through Giuliana Bruno’s conception of “fashioned space” as an affective combination of architectural, corporeal, and sartorial elements, as well as her understanding of architecture and fashion as historically and spatially tied in many ways. Finally, in bringing the spatial elements together with and on the film screen I have found Laura Marks notion of “haptic visuality” to be particularly useful as she presents a way of reading film not restrained to symbolic aesthetic analysis but which focuses on the surface of the image, reading the significance of textures rather than emphasizing objects. She also presents her haptic approach to reading films in conjunction with intercultural cinema, which usefully presents an opportunity to consider Jarmusch’s films as fitting in in some ways to this broad branch of cinema. In establishing Jarmusch’s outsider characters as connected to their environments through their bodies and importantly through their clothes, such elements as texture and appearance and surface become crucially important.
The third and final chapter of the thesis will consist of the analyses of three of Jarmusch’s films, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999), The Limits of Control (2009), and Only Lovers Left Alive (2013). The analysis will base itself on the theoretical foundation laid out in Chapter II, combining Marks’ haptic visuality, Bruno’s concept of fashioned space, and Lefebvre’s spatial theory in order to construct a reading of the films that accounts for each of the spatial elements as informing the role of Jarmusch’s outsider. The analysis will be structured through three spatial themes: that of travel and transport, of indoor or habitable space, and finally of outdoor, architectural settings. I
have chosen to focus the analysis on these three particular films because each of them presents a compelling setting for the spatial themes I am employing, while also collectively embodying the various types of outsiders Jarmusch has created.
Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai’s titular character is an assassin, living by the ancient code of the samurai. He is, however, living within the context of a contemporary urban suburb. He lives apart from his community in a rooftop shanty, his closest companions are his carrier pigeons, and his best friend is a Haitian ice cream man, played by Isaach de Bankolé, who does not speak English. Ghost Dog is a man of few words, and he is outside of many things: the colourful gangs in his neighbourhood simply nod to him in acknowledgement, and he is a singular threat to the Italian mafia for whom he has worked. Throughout the film he remains largely unknown to the people around him, even to us, the audience. We do not know, for instance, how he has come to live by the code of the samurai, or the story behind the photo of a girl on his wall. We do, however, come to understand Ghost Dog as in tune with his environments, and adept at moving within them, as he expertly combines old philosophies with his contemporary milieu, handling guns and cars with as much ease as he does his Hagakure book. We can begin to understand this connection through the narrative, as Ghost Dog demonstrates an affinity for animals, for example, but I will argue that Ghost Dog’s character can be understood as paradoxically both outside of his society and inside his environment primarily through how he aesthetically, texturally, and haptically fits into his space.
The Limits of Control (2009) follows the journey of an assassin, as he travels through parts of Spain, meeting with enigmatic characters, gathering instructions, moving towards his final mission. We know even less about this man than we do Ghost Dog, not even his name, as he is simply credited as the “Lone Man,” and he barely speaks at all. On his journey he moves through and inhabits many spaces: the streets of Madrid, Seville and Almeria; airports, taxis, trains; museums and various buildings and apartments. All the locations are deliberate, and though they are each quite distinct, the Lone Man fits into them visually, his suits and his purposeful movements even sometimes making him invisible within his environments.
In Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), the main characters Eve and Adam, though they are bonded to each other in love, are apart from the rest of humanity by virtue of being
ancient vampires. They observe humanity from without, engaging with it through culture, as Adam secretly releases music albums, and they both spend their time absorbing books, music, and science. Importantly, the film also takes place between two different but equally relevant cities: Detroit and Tangiers, as Eve moves from her apartment in Tangiers to stay with Adam in Detroit and both finally make their way back to Tangiers in the end. The cities themselves are characters in the films, just as Spain played a crucial role in The Limits of Control, not simply as settings but rather as engaged with the characters through their shared space.
Another, rather incidental reason I’ve chosen to focus my analysis on these three particular Jarmusch films is that through small details within the films it is possible to conceive of the three stories as taking place within the same world. Eve, for instance, when flying from Tangiers to Detroit, flies with the same airline that the Lone Man in The Limits of Control flies on: the cinematically fitting Air Lumière. At the end of Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, Ghost Dog hands off the shiny blue suit he has just worn in his final job to his friend the ice cream man, saying that he can get it tailored to fit him. In The Limits of Control, the Lone Man, also played by Isaach de Bankolé, sports a perfectly tailored shiny blue suit for the first third of the film, prompting us to wonder whether this mysterious man might not be the same Haitian ice cream man from Ghost Dog’s world. Ghost Dog and the Lone Man also share the peculiar habit, a Jarmushian assassin signature perhaps, of swallowing the small papers on which they receive messages or codes. Though reading into this may seem somewhat trivial, I have nonetheless entertained this speculation and have relished the idea that Jarmusch’s outsiders may all be in fact be living within the same world.
CHAPTER I: JARMUSCH THE OUTSIDER
The role of the outsider has had an undeniable presence throughout Jim Jarmusch’s corpus. From his very first feature film, Permanent Vacation (1980), in which Allie (Chris Parker) wanders around New York City by himself meeting various, equally alien characters, to Dead Man (1995) in which William Blake (Johnny Depp), an accountant from Cleveland, who moves to the rough and changing landscape of the Western frontier, meets Nobody (Gary Farmer), a native-American raised primarily in Europe, to his most recent film Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) in which two withdrawn vampires discuss the world, it is easy to notice Jarmusch’s affinity for, fascination and sentimentality towards the outsider. The following chapter will look to Jarmusch’s life, from his childhood in Ohio, to his years living in New York City as a young adult, to his professional practices and his role in independent cinema in order to gain insight into how Jarmusch himself may be considered an outsider. The chapter will then investigate how his being an outsider has translated into his films through his various characters, and how his characters in turn are represented visually as outsiders.
I.I The Modern Stranger or Jim in Akron
Despite being born and raised in the United States, Jarmusch himself has always been a sort of outsider within his surroundings, which might explain his motivation for writing such marginal characters and his empathetic relationship towards them. Born in Akron, Ohio in 1953 and raised in a middle-class family, Jarmusch has admitted to never having felt like he quite fit in, saying of his childhood peers “what was interesting or important to me didn’t seem to be what was cool to be interested in or what was supposed to be important” (quoted in Jacobson). At the time Jarmusch lived there, Akron – the home of Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company – was an industrial hub in the United States, and most residents worked factory jobs or in small business, making it a predominantly working to middle class town. In an interview with Harlan Jacobson in 1985, Jarmusch described his environment in Akron as being extremely homogenous, and one in which “there was no tension, because people weren’t aware of any kind of class
divisions…everyone aspired to have certain things – two cars, their own house, a color TV.”
Not only setting himself apart by having contrasting ambitions and more off kilter interests, Jarmusch also physically did not fit in with his peers from a young age. Anecdotally, in an interview with The New York Times journalist Lynn Hirschberg, Tom Waits, musician and a long-time friend of Jarmusch’s, explained “The key, I think, to Jim, is that he went gray when he was 15. As a result, he always felt like an immigrant in the teenage world. He's been an immigrant - a benign, fascinated foreigner - ever since. And all his films are about that.” His shock of white hair, which to this day remains a signature of Jarmusch’s, did, in his youth, set him apart from other teenagers and likely contributed to his uncanny ability to look into American culture from an outsider position despite being born there.
Jarmusch’s outsider position early in his life can be understood through early 20th century German philospher and sociologist Georg Simmel’s conception of “the stranger” as one who, for various reasons, exists on the periphery of mainstream culture or society (Marotta, 122). Simmel explains that the figure of the stranger is a unique one in that the stranger exists within society but is both “near and far at the same time” (Simmel, 148). That is, the stranger possesses the interesting combination of not being part of the native community, for lack of a better term, but in this distance has particular, somewhat “objective”, insights into the community in question (Simmel, 145). Simmel’s notion of the stranger is not based on the individual however, as he sees the figure of the stranger as more of a social type, as one who is defined as being apart from the “country, the city, the race” through their “alien origin” (148). The idea of Simmel’s stranger was taken up by and further developed by Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, who made a distinction between the modern stranger and the postmodern stranger. As Bauman explains, “what the modern strangers did not fit was the vision of order” that defined modernity; they clashed and challenged the industrial, Fordist work model, and dominant social roles by not complying with them (Bauman, 18). Though Jarmusch, by being born to American parents in the United States, does not by definition fit into Simmel’s conception of the stranger as someone set apart by their alien origins, in not having an interest in working for two cars, a house and a TV, and importantly, in not wanting to work in a factory or
maintain a standard nine to five job, Jarmusch was set apart from the community in which he grew up, and was put at odds with the ambitions of those around him. In this sense, Jarmusch can be considered a modern stranger in Akron. His reluctance towards pursuing a standard, middle-class job, to fitting into the system, however, was not entirely unique, as many young people of his generation shared in the same frustrations and dissatisfactions with the modern state of America and sought to find alternatives in cultural hubs such as New York City.
I.II The Lower East Side: A Collective Stranger
“We were this community in this burned out part of New York and it didn’t feel like there was any limitation.”
Sara Driver in Blank City
After finishing high school in Akron, and a year of college in Chicago, Jarmusch moved to New York City to study writing at Columbia and subsequently film at NYU (Hirschberg). His years in New York from the late 1970s to early 1980s were extremely formative: if Jarmusch did not fit in in his hometown of Akron, he certainly found a home in the Lower East Side of New York City, where several middle-class, university-educated young people flocked, disenchanted with their small town homes, seeking the energy of urban life (Suarez, 17).
New York at the time was in a particular state, the city was nearly bankrupt, crime and poverty were rampant, and the energy was frenetic. As musician James Chance explains of the period in the documentary Blank City (2010), “the straight people were trying to escape New York, so the only people that wanted to come to New York were like freaks, you know, crazy people.” The Lower East Side then, in its dilapidated state, was a sort of sanctuary for those, especially young people, who did not fit into the modern model of order, who did not aspire to own “things” or to live in a strictly run society. It was, as it had been for the beat generation, and the avant-garde artists before, a sort of haven for those outside the mainstream. Jarmusch’s generation of outcasts in this particular environment remained outside societal order by producing artistic output that
challenged established artistic norms in many ways.2 The No Wave and Post Punk scenes, as they came to be labeled, partook equally in film, music and art. Young people took to the streets armed with Super 8 cameras, making predominantly fictional or documentary style films, the same people formed bands where playing an instrument was not a requisite and both films and music were performed within the same circuits (Masters). The films and bands were different in their individual styles, and what connected them was a commitment to defying norms, breaking artistic boundaries and a nihilist sensibility.
You couldn’t sound like these bands if you knew how to play. You couldn’t make one of these films if you knew how. That’s the thing that was really unique – these things were done by people who were really sophisticated intentionally, but their knowledge of technique was primitive. What made it so exciting was the contradiction and the friction between those two things. (Scott B in Masters)
John Lurie, a musician as well as one of Jarmusch’s frequent collaborators, and star of Stranger than Paradise (1984) explains that he did not admit to playing the saxophone, which he had been trained in, because the scene’s aesthetic was not about refined talent, but raw expression (Blank City). In this sense, the “no wavers” - as they disliked being labeled - set themselves apart from other, previously fringe artistic movements, such as the 1970s avant-garde film scene, which suffered from “increasingly academic formalism” (Hoberman 1979), and rock and punk music, which had become too industrialized.
No Wave filmmaker and artist James Nares reminisces about the process of making films at the time, speaking of the seedy means used in order to finance them, saying “we were writing the rules and trying to break a few at the same time” (Blank City). Though a community within themselves, in setting themselves so against the mainstream grain, and by increasingly aligning themselves artistically with other marginalized groups, such as the black and Hispanic populations in other New York
2 For more interviews and accounts of the No Wave, Post Punk scene in New York see
Thurston Moore and Byron Coley’s book No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980 (2008).
boroughs3, the no wave artists were in many ways a collective and influential “stranger,” creating works and music that expressed, from a certain level of critical distance, the state of their society.
Their contentedness of living with almost no money, no real jobs, and working collectively to create films and music to be enjoyed by each other, of wanting to reinvent creative forms, so to speak, made the fringe viable for a short period of time. But as is the fate of many outsiders, living “in a state of suspended extinction” (Bauman, 19), the vibrancy of the fringe scene in the Lower East Side did not last, as certain artists were increasingly tempted by financial success and assimilated into the mainstream, and as the Lower East Side became increasingly gentrified4. “No Wave was a blip – a blinding flash of art that barely lasted long enough to qualify as a movement, yet left scars on underground culture still evident today” (Masters). That Jarmusch lived and made his first films within the brief moment now referred to as the no wave scene is significant, as the collaborative spirit and aversion towards mainstream culture that characterized the creative output at the time became two foundational elements on which he continued to base his work.
I.III Outsider Cinema: Jarmusch the Independent Filmmaker
In maintaining “the style of punk production” (Suarez, 20) that had been so crucial to the no wave movement, even after its dissolution, Jarmusch has translated his status as an outsider into his professional directorial practices. That is, throughout his career, Jarmusch has sustained his place on the peripheries of the film industry by remaining entirely independent. The term “independent” within the film world has remained somewhat ambiguous, without any strict definition, but for the sake of this thesis and Jarmusch’s recognized reputation as an independent director, my conception of it will fall in line with the relatively broad definition of it given by Roger Ebert. He explains it as “a film made outside the traditional Hollywood system, often with unconventional
3 See for instance Charlie Ahearn and Fab 5 Freddy’s collaborative film project Wild Style
(1983).
4 For a more detailed overview of the Lower East Side’s history and gentrification see
financing, and it’s made because it expresses the director’s personal vision rather than someone’s notion of box-office success” (quoted in Levy, 3). In other words, independent cinema itself exists by virtue of being outside of the Hollywood system.5
After the critical and relative popular success of Jim Jarmusch’s second film, Stranger than Paradise (1984), which won the Golden Camera Award at Cannes in 1984, Jarmusch opted out of several deals offered to him by Hollywood Studios – he notes that most of the film projects offered to him were “teenage sex comedies” (Levy, 188) – and he has since continued to own the full rights to his films while finding funding from mostly European or Japanese backers (Suarez, 2).
In his book Cinema of Outsiders: The Rise of American Independent Film, Emanuel Levy suggests that the nature of independent cinema is itself inherently related to being an outsider. He says,
The main characteristic impulse of the new independent cinema has come from “outsiders”…The characters are outsiders, the filmmakers are outsiders. Indie cinema is committed to cultural diversity, showcasing new works by filmmakers whose voices have been unheard or ignored in dominant culture (52).
What is particularly interesting about Jarmusch’s role within independent cinema is that he has adamantly remained within its sphere. That is, he defies the diametric conception that independent film is “the minor leagues” and that Hollywood and its studios are “the majors” (Jarmusch in Hirschberg). His work process, what Suarez refers to as the “style of punk production,” of frequently working with the same small group of actors and crews, of emphasizing collaboration above all else, and of loosely structuring his films’ narratives, has been sustainable throughout his career without ever buying into the Hollywood complex.
Not only that, and likely in light of that, Jarmusch’s films have found the most critical success outside of the United States, and academic studies dedicated to Jarmusch’s work have predominantly come out of Europe, particularly from Italy and Germany (Suarez, 2). Because of all these factors, Jarmusch possesses the interesting,
5 For a more detailed overview of American independent cinema and its politics see E.
Deirdre Pribram’s book Cinema & Culture: Independent Film in the United States, 1980-2001 (2002).
and relatively unique role of being an American director still living within the United States, whose films are dependent on European funding and whose work is most popular outside of his home country. By virtue of these elements alone, Jarmusch can be understood as an outsider within the film industry. British actress Tilda Swinton, a frequent collaborator of Jarmusch’s, in discussing his work and directorial style surmised as to why he has remained so popular abroad saying, “He possesses the distinct ability to make films about America, or about American values from the perspective of a, still American, outsider…he explains America to aliens, while remaining an alien himself” (Hirschberg). This sensibility, of being near and far to the American experience can be related back to Simmel’s concept of the stranger, as one who possesses a certain, detached outlook on the society they inhabit. Levy explicitly associates Simmel’s stranger to the outsider filmmakers in his book as well, saying,
Their position is determined by the fact that they do not really belong, they are an element of the system but not fully part of it. The outsiders’ perspective benefits from being in and out at the same time, from not being fully integrated. Because of their partial involvement, outsiders can attain a degree of freedom that allows them to deviate from the norms… (58).
Though native to the United States, Jarmusch’s own dislocation from his peers and community growing up seems to have instilled in him this same ability to represent American society in his films with elements of nearness and distance, as well as his affinity for staying outside of the mainstream film industry.
Interestingly as well, Jarmusch has admitted to his aversion of creating “popular” films, stating, “If I made a film that a lot of people liked, I might wonder what I did wrong” (quoted in Hirschberg). This sensibility towards filmmaking, of never conceding to the mainstream, and of creating films with full creative control inevitably keeps Jarmusch precisely where he wants to be, on the peripheries of popular success, outside the commercial film industry.
“The view we get of America…is very much outside of the expected one. It’s about people who are outside. And I guess that concern must come from my own experiences of feeling that way.” Jarmusch quoted in Jacobson
Jarmusch’s own position as and accord with the outsider has manifested itself quite explicitly in his work as each and every one of his characters can be understood in some way or another as marginalized, or existing on the fringe. Jarmusch’s whole world is one of outsiders. And his characters come in all shapes and sizes of outsider: he has dealt with the figure of the immigrant, the nonconformist, the fugitive, the assassin, the tourist, the transient, the bohemian, and even the vampire in his films. Elements from the mainstream make rare appearances in his work, the most damning representation of which could be read through Bill Murray’s character in The Limits of Control (credited as “The American”), as a suit whose purpose seems to be obliterating and subsuming liberal, bohemian culture. The result of these brief evidentiary and contrasting bits of the mainstream in his films is a cinematic world where things are overwhelmingly seen and understood through the perspective of the stranger, whether that be Eva in Stranger Than Paradise, a young Hungarian immigrant navigating her way through American Society, Nobody in Dead Man, an ostracized Native American raised in Europe, or Helmut, the immigrant taxi driver trying to figure out New York City in Night on Earth.
What is particularly affecting about Jarmusch’s characters is that despite their individual circumstances being very different from one another in his films, they can still be understood as possessing certain similarities that can be seen as fitting into a particular brand of outsider: Jarmusch’s brand of outsider. These similarities stem from each of his characters possessing a certain idiosyncratic understanding of the world, a certain manner of fitting into it. And, like Jarmusch himself, his characters do not seem particularly discontent with their place on the margins, in fact, they seem to thrive there.
This particular mode of fitting into the world is importantly represented in part through the characters’ own modes, in the French sense of the word. That is, through their clothing styles, which are, from character to character, quite distinct. From Zack’s metal plated shoes in Down by Law (1986), which are all he cares about as his girlfriend throws his belongings out the window, to Jun and Mitsuko’s Japanese Rockabilly style in
Mystery Train (1989), to William Blake’s layering of Native American ornamentation throughout his journey in Dead Man, to the Lone Man’s meticulous suits in The Limits of Control, to Christopher Marlowe’s attachment to his 16th century vest in Only Lovers Left
Alive, it becomes clear that style and costume are of express significance in Jarmusch’s work. Juan A. Suarez, in his book Jim Jarmusch, speculates as to the importance of the characters’ individual styles saying that most of them “seem to operate under the stoic assumption that they are mere pawns of destiny, bad times are always around the corner, and there is little they can do about that; but they insist on being at least masters of their own style” (Suarez, 56). As outsiders within their societies, they consolidate themselves through their stylistic choices, they assert themselves through them.
Notably, there has always been a strong link between outsiders and their dress, as Dick Hebdige explores in his book Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979). In it, he looks at certain subcultures, most notably the punk scene born out of the United Kingdom, as demonstrating their aversion to conformity to the mainstream primarily through their stylistic choices. He says, “The challenge to hegemony which subcultures represent is not issued directly by them. Rather it is expressed obliquely, in style” (17). By wearing certain clothing styles, and accessories, members of subcultures, or indeed in a broader scope, outsiders, take on traits that can be read as “tokens of self-imposed exile”– Hebdige specifically mentions the appropriation of the safety pin into the punk aesthetic as an example (2). Jarmusch’s characters’ outward appearances, work to a particular effect, that is, in being so closely related to their interiors they communicate their outsider status while at the same time working to tie them into their surroundings, which I will come back to in depth.
In looking to Jarmusch’s characters sartorial attributes as communicating their outsider status it is important to first introduce another element of clothing as expressing identity, this time related directly to cinema. That is, the importance of costume design in relation to characterization. Costume and styling in all films is, as we know, crucial, as information is portrayed about cinematic characters through their attire. As Adrienne Munich notes in her introduction to Fashion in Film, “costumes fuse seamlessly with characters’ identities; what a character wears in a film often seems natural and transparent, though it is as carefully crafted and as intensely constructed as any other
aspect of film production” (2). As people in their everyday lives construct their appearances through clothing and appearance, in film this takes on an even greater significance, as these appearances are often deliberately and implicitly communicating aspects of a character that may not be communicated otherwise. In other words, “costume design plays on our deepest responses to clothes and all their aspects (shape, colour, texture), aspects which augment, indeed almost stand in for, our perceptions of sex, authority, comfort/discomfort, and stature” (Stutesman, 20).
Considering this conception about costume in film, Jarmusch becomes a rather interesting case study in that his films are not necessarily as constructed as other (read Hollywood) films. His narratives are quite loose, the extra-narrative information is extremely minimal, and often the dialogue in his films deviates from any explicatives. His attention to sartorial style is, however, quite deliberate and exact. Tilda Swinton, in an interview with Courtney Howard speaks of the collaborative process that went into the costume design for her and Tom Hiddleston’s characters in Only Lovers Left Alive, saying “we had to keep alive that they were living in all centuries at once. So every element, the height of the heel, the substance of the pants, the cut of the jacket had to, or rather needed to not indicate one period…” The costuming, in maintaining the timeless element for the two characters in question, inevitably sets them apart from the other, secondary and background characters in the film who are in more explicitly contemporary dress, establishing them already as different, as outside the norm. Jarmusch has also been quite candid about his attention to sartorial detail, particularly in discussing the Lone Man’s suits in The Limits of Control, noting that he worked with costume designer Bina Daigeler6 to get exactly the style of suit he envisioned, making minute changes and alterations until they were satisfactory. He elaborates, “the suits Bankolé wears: those were in my head, and I wanted them to be a very specific way. I’m not a fashion guy, but I’m aware of style…We had to find the fabrics, and they’re basically color-coding each act of the film…I was very particular” (quoted in Smith). The attention to detail paid to the characters’ costuming by Jarmusch and his team as well as the diegetic importance of style to the characters themselves, make Jarmusch’s films
6 Bina Daigeler also collaborated with Jarmusch on the costume design for Only Lovers Left
Alive, and has designed for such notable titles as Volver (dir. Pedro Almodóvar, 2006) and Biutiful (dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2010).
compelling cases for sartorial analysis and as will be developed in the following chapter, compelling cases for taking up the concept of “fashioned space.”
CHAPTER II: FASHIONED SPACE
“The fashioning of space is a predicament of architecture, art, design, and cinema” Giuliana Bruno, 319
In the preceding chapter the figure of the outsider was discussed as a social role within the framework of Jim Jarmusch’s life and work, this chapter will further theorize the outsider as not only a social role but as also manifesting itself spatially. In order to understand Jarmusch’s characters as uniquely connected to their environments, that is, as social outsiders but as very much inside their surroundings, I will approach his films through various levels of space. Starting from Henri Lefebvre’s conception of the body and architecture in space from his book The Production of Space, and building through Giuliana Bruno’s notion of “fashioned space,” a term that introduces clothing and sartorial elements to the spatial discourse already surrounding the body and architecture, and finally bringing film into the dialogue by means of Laura Marks’ concept of “haptic visuality”, I will establish the theoretical foundation on which the analyses of Jarmusch’s films will be based.
II.I Spatial Beings: The Body and Architecture
The connection between architecture and the body is not a new one, as the very nature of architecture is meant to house and accommodate the body. Buildings are constructed to be occupied by humans, stations and bridges are built to aid our transportation, and cities are designed in the effort to facilitate human movement and habitation. Beyond this more functional relationship, however, the body and architecture are also importantly connected spatially. Twentieth century philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre’s work is useful in delving into this spatial bond between the body and architecture. In his seminal book The Production of Space from the mid nineteen-seventies, he sets out to establish a theory of space, which emphasizes the constructed nature of space and its inherent and crucial relation to the society by which it is produced. At the base of this is Lefebvre’s goal of understanding the “genesis of space as an ensemble that is at once social and mental, abstract and concrete,” and in order to achieve
this he says that one must take into consideration both the physical elements of space, an inventory in a certain sense, as well as the more abstract elements of space, the social elements related to it (295). For the purpose of this thesis, I will specifically engage with Lefebvre’s recurring discussion throughout the book of the human agent within space and the body as producing space as well as his discussion of architecture as producing space.
Lefebvre also considers the social ramifications of space and his discussion of social status is quite elucidating for the spatial conception of the outsider that I am developing. He conceives of social space as tied to the society of which it is a part, and within that society, he discusses spaces as designated, as connected to social roles. In its perhaps simplest manifestation, for example, we can look at the space of a school: such a space is designated; it is intended for people in certain roles, namely teachers and students. Lefebvre explains, “A specific social status…implies a role and a function: an individual and a public identity. It also implies a location, a place in society, a position” (182). That he discusses social roles in spatial terms is significant, as he emphasizes not only a person’s position within their social strata, so to speak, but the physical locations of people within space as well. Notably, Lefebvre also stresses “humans beings are in space…they cannot absent themselves from it, nor do they allow themselves to be excluded from it” (132).
If we think about the figure of the outsider within social space taking these two ideas into account, we can start to recognize the diametric existence of the outsider: inevitably inside space, included in it, but outside of designated space, so to speak. Through the representation of the outsider in Jim Jarmusch’s films, we can see this manifested in certain ways: the characters are marginalized socially, and typically do not occupy designated spaces: they live on the fringes, in rooftop shacks (Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai), are hardly sedentary, moving from city to city (Only Lovers Left Alive), and operate and move within transient spaces, trains, and airports, and rented apartments (The Limits of Control). Their inclusion, however, should not be discounted, as they seem in many ways to be entirely connected to the spaces they occupy. Lefebvre hints to the persisting nature of space, noting that “no space disappears completely, or is utterly abolished in the course of the process of social development… ‘Something’ always survives or endures…” (403), and I would argue that many of Jarmusch’s
characters reflect a particular understanding of this. The most explicit example would be to look at Eve and Adam in Only Lovers Left Alive, as ancient vampires, having lived through many centuries, Eve and Adam have first hand experience of the changes space undergoes, of social space in flux. They have seen it, they have lived it, and have consequently come to inhabit their spaces with this understanding. Their discussion about the current state of Detroit, one of the film’s two urban settings, illustrates this appreciation. Adam has chosen to live in Detroit for its desolate and impoverished condition, and the abandoned buildings, drained economy, and the anonymity that go along with it. He has found his “wilderness,” as Eve remarks. Detroit, which was once the pinnacle of the American auto industry, a rich and vibrant city, is now a testimony to the failings of American capitalist society, its whole landscape has changed: the once majestic buildings and imposing auto-factories are crumbling and decrepit, and the residential city is decaying and overgrown with nature. As Adam and Eve discuss the state of the city, Eve foresees that the city will rise again, once the “water wars” start. The characters are able to understand the inconstancy of space because of their own longevity, and in this regard are more in tuned with the spaces they inhabit despite, and as I argue, because of their outsider position.
Importantly, architecture also structures space, that is, buildings and infrastructure organize what Lefebvre refers to as “nature” or “absolute space” and turn it into “social space”, a space constructed for the purpose of the society in question. Bodies, as corporeal, spatial entities, also occupy and structure space, in that they operate within it. As Lefebvre puts it, “the body with the energies at its disposal, the living body, creates or produces its own space; conversely, the laws of space…also govern the living body and the deployment of its energies” (170). Through this conception of space, bodies and architecture become intrinsically connected as they both simultaneously produce and occupy space. On another level it is notable that the space that architecture produces is what governs the human body’s actions within space. In line with this, Lefebvre conceptualizes of the composition of social space as “a series of enveloping levels each of which implies the other, and the sequence of which accounts for social practice” (294). In other words, the construction of our social space can be understood in levels, for instance, the body, the home, the street, the city, the surrounding land, etc. can all be seen
as layers of space, in which, through navigation, social life takes place. This notion of envelopment will be further emphasized especially in bringing in the concept of sartorial attributes into the spatial discourse, as clothing, in quite literally enveloping our bodies, becomes another, insulating layer of space.
II.II Fashioning Space: Body, Architecture and Fashion
Here, I will develop what is one of the guiding concepts of this thesis, one that takes as its basis the discourse between body and space and begins to include elements of design within it; it is “fashioned space”. The concept of “fashioned space” was put forth by film scholar Giuliana Bruno and entails a particular aesthetic understanding of space in relation to creating affect. It is important as well that she uses the term “fashioned” in order to describe the space in question, as she envisions fashion in the sartorial sense as “a form of imaging” (2011, 85), and in turn, looking to fashion’s latin root factio, which signifies the act of making, she also emphasizes the constructed, fabricated nature of space, specifically the film space (2002, 123).
In a way, Bruno can be seen as bringing the sartorial element into Lefebvre’s work as she conceives of clothing as an architecture of the body, as another level of envelopment within space. She says, “…the fold of clothing is the first space you live in. You access it, as if you were entering your house, your own primary architecture. As you put it on, it suits you. It can host your soul and house your moods” (Bruno 2003, 116). Of course the concept of fashion as related to mood has been iterated elsewhere as well, for instance in filmmaker Maya Deren’s unpublished essay “Psychology of Fashion”, written in response to an exhibit held in 1945, she discusses the expressive qualities of fashion, saying “it is the sole means at the disposal of most people for giving expression to their creative urge. Their one way of adding, through imagination to the sum total of reality; and by expressing, through the nature of their imagination, their individuality” (436). Thus, she relates people’s physical exteriors to their psychological interiors, emphasizing not only the physical envelopment of clothing but, as Bruno also does, the affective, expressive layer that clothing can convey.
In considering the figure of the outsider in relation to fashion, this notion of outwardly communicating, through apparel, a person’s interior, is significant. On one
level, if we understand the outsider as a social position, in Lefebvre’s terms, part of what cements their peripheral social position is their appearance. Here, Dick Hebdige’s discussion of styles and subcultures is again worth bringing up, as he intimates that fashion is a strong conveyor of place. That is, unlike mainstream culture, “whose defining characteristic…is a tendency to masquerade as nature,” subcultures set themselves apart visually and outwardly through their deliberately “fabricated” styles (Hebdige, 102). Of course, though most of Jarmusch’s characters are not distinctly part of any subcultures, there is still a strong tie between subcultures, such as Jarmusch’s own participation in the no-wave, post-punk scene, which established themselves against the grain of mainstream life, and the lone marginal characters in Jarmusch’s films who seem to, more inadvertently, do the same. Suarez makes a direct connection between the sartorial choices of Jarmusch’s characters and the punk subculture saying of their unconventional appearances that “these characters also remind us – as punk did all along – that looks, after all, do matter and that one should not underestimate style” (Suarez, 58).
Fashion does not only communicate place or externalize the interior, however, for it also conveys affect through its spatial, and material properties. Bruno puts this notion forward saying, “an agent of imaging and a maker of worlds, fashion is akin to architecture as a form of visual design that can convey mental atmospheres (2011, 90). That is, through their relationship to the space they inhabit, similarly to architecture, clothing and fashion, in themselves designing and affecting the space, have the ability to create feeling or mood. Bruno also notes that there is evidence of fashion being conceptualized in spatial terms in such avant-garde movements as Italian Futurism in the early 1910s, which was also notable as being an art movement that placed a strong emphasis on clothing, particularly men’s clothing. In brief, the Futurists emphasized and based their movement on the modern themes of speed and obsolescence, incorporating elements such as modern technology, and the industrial city into their work. Giacomo Balla, author of the Futurist Manifesto of Men’s Clothing from 1914, called for a reimagining of men’s fashion that reflected these fast and modern times, wanting asymmetrically cut suits and colourful and bold design prints (quoted in Braun, 34). Importantly, Balla also envisioned these new fashions as interacting within the modern city: “the consequent merry dazzle produced by our clothes in the noisy streets, which we
shall have transformed with our futurist architecture, will mean that everything will begin to sparkle like the glorious prism of a jeweller’s gigantic glass-front”. Giuliana Bruno cites Balla as conceiving of clothing as existing “in the realm of architecture, for they participate in the architectonics of city streets” (2002, 322). That is, the space of a city is not simply a matter of buildings and bodies; sartorial elements also come into play, and are in fact essential to the being of a city. Clothes and fabrics are in play within space, they are moving, textured, coloured, and animated forms connecting people’s bodies to the space around them, they are a significant part of the imaging of space.
Not only does Bruno discuss fashion in spatial terms however, she also discusses space and specifically architecture in sartorial terms. As she elaborates,
Fashion ties architecture to the body metonymically, since clothing lies between the body and building. It informs architecture, for architecture itself is dressed, designed, and engaged with ornament and the lack thereof to such an extent that, in modern times, it has become an art of clothing. On the threshold of interior and exterior, fashion and architecture…make private and social space, reversibly fashioning the body (Bruno 2002, 123).
In this sense, she likens both architecture and fashion to each other in relation to their roles towards the body, again emphasizing their primordial function of shielding, enveloping the body. Material and textile have come into architectural theory throughout history in other ways as well, significantly, in mid-nineteenth century German architect Gottfried Semper’s work. Semper, who designed such intricate edifices as the Semper Opera House in Dresden, conceived of and wrote The Four Elements of Architecture (1851), one of which was the wall, or more generally, the architectural enclosure. Semper, in tracing the history of architecture through structures in such societies as Ancient China and Assyria ascertains that the wall had its origins in arts such as tapestry and weaving. At the time, walls did not yet possess the structuring and supporting roles they came to have, as roofs were supported by pillars, and walls were often made of lighter materials or of “moveable screens” (Mallgrave and Semper, 34). Semper also suggests that architectural embellishments, such as wall motives, intricate facades and coating or plating could be attributed to textile patterns and ornamentation (37). Of
course, the role of the wall changed, and Semper credits the Romans as being “the inventors of architecture as a self-existing art, which may exist for itself without the assistance of the other branches of art” (38). Still, that he iterated the long historical tie between textile and the architectural wall helps us now to reinforce that not only does architecture influence fashion, especially within the modern context, but that in fact sartorial elements have long influenced architecture as well. Thus, not only can thinking of fashion spatially inform our understanding of sartorial elements, but areas usually discussed in relation to fashion such as texture, material, and appearance also inform our understanding of space, or more specifically in this case, architecture. The result of this is a conception of fashion that allows us to read sartorial elements in film beyond “the mere use of costumes,” opening up and emphasizing the role of design within “the larger field of spatio-visual fabrications” (Bruno 2011, 90), consequently also opening up the way to reading architecture as spatial design. In understanding fashion spatially, it is possible to consider the social functions of clothing, but to also go beyond them, in a sense, situating fashion not only in relation to the clothed person but also, and even primarily in relation to the other enveloping layers of space (Bruno 2002, 319).
In further developing her discussion of fashioned space in relation to film, and in accounting for the visual manifestation of understanding architecture, body, and fashion as spatial elements, Bruno pays particular attention to Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai’s cinematic style. Wong Kar-Kar-Wai’s work seems to epitomize Bruno’s concept of fashioned space in that he stylishly and purposefully represents space by combining and even inverting the roles of sartorial and architectural elements in his films, “refusing to distinguish between costume and set design but rather treating them jointly” (Bruno 2011, 87). In discussing his films, particularly In the Mood for Love (2000), she delves into how the film’s aesthetic fashioning creates a certain atmosphere which in turn conveys mood. Importantly, she puts an emphasis on the textures that comprise the space, and the effect of layering textures in the space and having them move within it: “When the fashionably attired bodies draped in exquisite textures travel through an equally designed space, seamlessly set against the surface of the urban fabric, this fashioning makes mood” (Bruno 2011, 89). Accordingly, the connections between the body, architecture and
fashion can be seen as emphasized in film, as all three spatial elements become physically compressed into one surface: the screen image.
Fashioned space as a concept considers all the elements of the screen image in relation to one another: body, clothing, and architecture are linked in the screen space and are all subjected to other elements of the mise-en-scène such as framing, camera angle, and lighting. If we consider this combination of what is represented on the screen as compressed onto the screen - not unlike paint upon a canvas - and read the images as they are on the screen plane, rather than reading into their illusionistic depth, a method that will be developed below in discussing Laura Marks’ haptic visuality, we seek to gain a distinctive insight into Jim Jarmusch’s films, one that will elucidate the spatial conception of the outsider.
II.III Haptic Visuality: The Body, Architecture, and Fashion on the Screen
Having formed the connection between the spatial elements and the medium of film theoretically, the question now becomes one of how to read them as interconnected, how to situate the bodies and fashions of the outsiders in their surroundings in the screen image? Although in Bruno’s discussion of fashioned space she does not explicitly engage with Laura Marks’ notion of haptic visuality, Marks’ framework provides us with an entryway into reading the fashioned space of Jarmusch’s films.
In thinking of the images represented on the screen as compressed onto the screen the notion of surface is of great import. In their book Surface Tensions: Surface, Finish and the Meaning of Objects, Glenn Adamson and Victoria Kelley address the often neglected domain of ‘surface properties’ within the study of aesthetics. They explain that such pejorative terms as “skin deep,” “shallow,” and “superficial” indicate and reinforce that surface properties are often positioned negatively in opposition to more “substantive interiorities,” and are consequently discounted as conveyers of meaning (1). Marks’ method of haptic visuality is one solution to this rather vacuous conception of surface, as her express intent in the approach is to, like Adamson and Kelley, find the significance of the image in its surface and in its materiality, rather than through its “symbolic representation” (Marks 2000, 141).
Laura Marks’ definition of the haptic can begin to be understood through the acknowledgement of the hierarchical nature of the senses that has dominated much of Western thought throughout modernity (Jay, 543). This hierarchy, often referred to as ocularcentrism, privileges vision above the other senses and consequently debases the rest of the senses. As Steve Connor notes, “through medieval and early modern Europe, the rankings have remained remarkably consistent. Heading the pack, and well apart from it, comes the dominion sense of sight…” he then places hearing, smell and taste and finally touch as following in the “rankings” of senses. The basis of ocularcentrism comes from the perception that seeing is the main means of attaining knowledge, that the most information we seek to gain is through the faculty of vision (Connor 2004). As Martin Jay aptly notes in his book Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (1993), evidence of this is discernible even through our languages and colloquialisms, using visual terminology to reference the act of knowing – strikingly, he points out that the French word voir (to see) finds its way into such terms as savoir (to know) and pouvoir (to be able, or, more evocatively, power) (Jay, 2). More recently, however, a counter-discourse has emerged in opposition to ocularcentrism, which emphasizes the importance of the other senses in relation to vision, namely touch. This anti-ocular discourse, though varied,7 supports an understanding of the way of being in the world related to touch and the other senses as well as sight, as the emphasis on being and knowing through touch “entails a more intimate relation to the world” (Jay, 557). Laura Marks engages with this discourse - what she calls “tactile epistemologies” - and seeks to further complicate ocularcentrism by reemphasizing the sense of touch through its ability to store “powerful memories that are lost to the visual,” especially through the medium of film (Marks 2000, 130).
In order to relate the sense of touch to the medium of film, a distinctly audio-visual platform, Marks has conceived of the notion of haptic audio-visuality, which entails a rethinking of vision in which “the eyes themselves function like organs of touch” (Marks 2000, 162). Importantly, she sets ‘haptic visuality’ in contrast to ‘optical visuality’, and in doing so establishes two varying ways of seeing, understanding and ultimately reading
7 For an in depth account of the varied arguments and discourses surrounding antiocularism
see Martin Jay’s book Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (1993).
film. ‘Optical visuality’ is aligned with our usual way of seeing, that is, of distinguishing forms or objects in space, and of perceiving depth (Connor). In analyzing film, optical visuality seems to be the standard practice, looking to elements or objects as distinguished in the foreground or background and associating meaning with them. Importantly, the unbalanced nature of the relationship between the subject to the object, in which the object is subordinated, is associated with optical visuality. In other words, the subject or figure would typically be seen in “abstraction” from space, as the focal point of the composition (Marks 2000, 141). ‘Haptic visuality,’ in contrast, entails moving over the surface of the image or object, and its aim, as Marks succinctly explains, is “not to distinguish form so much as to discern texture. It is more inclined to move than to focus, more inclined to graze than to gaze” (Marks 2000, 162). Reading the image in this way, of grazing rather than gazing, complicates and obscures the disparity between the subject and object. In looking over the entire screen, we can understand the subject and objects as equal within the image, as indistinct parts of a unified image. Marks explains, “the viewer’s vision takes a tactile relation to the surface of the image, moving over the figures that merge in the image plane as though even faraway things are only an inch from one’s body” (Marks 2000, 181). Notably as well, in her haptic readings of films, Marks seeks not only to employ haptic visuality, but to engage with both the tactile and the optical, to re-establish a “flow” between them (Marks 2002, xiii). In other words, she seeks not to completely obscure the objects represented on the screen, but still approaches them from a haptic manner, understanding them as interconnected within the image, rather than standing out in it.
This haptic approach to vision can also be valuable beyond the film screen, for instance, in Henri Lefevbre’s spatial theory, looking at architecture, he argues for a sort of haptic visualisation of architecture within space, saying “it is helpful to think of architectures as ‘archi-textures,’ to treat each monument or building, viewed in its surroundings and context, in the populated area and associated networks in which it is set down, as part of a particular production of space” (118). In “fashioned space” as well, in treating the screen space as comprising of textures brought forth through bodies, fashion, and architecture, it seems a natural fit to bring in Marks’ haptic theory, as it does not
consider elements of the image separately but as interconnected, as equal contributors on the surface of the screen image in creating affect.
Importantly, and in bringing Jarmusch into the discussion of the haptic image, Marks discusses haptic visuality in relation to a particular movement in cinema, what she calls “intercultural cinema.” She defines the term rather broadly explaining that it signifies both film and video projects made within “the new cultural formations of Western metropolitan centers, which in turn have resulted from global flows of immigration, exile, and diaspora” (2002, 1). That is to say, the films are largely products of and are marked by the movements between various cultures, and in a way become syntheses of them (Marks 2002, 11). Marks also begins to lay out a very broad formal criteria for intercultural films – they are often experimental, short pieces – but the emphasis continues to remain on the fact that they tend to draw from many types of representational practices, and thus are also formally defined by their synthesis of various styles. Significantly, she credits this formal fusion, of combining various cultural representational traditions with “contemporary Western cinematic practices” (1), as the reason why pieces of intercultural cinema appeal to senses other than vision and are made up of “haptic images.” Though in many ways Jarmusch does not fit the model for Marks’ conception of an intercultural filmmaker – of course he is an American by birth and notably born to white, American parents – there are certain areas in which his approach to films and his films themselves could be understood to a degree as intercultural. I do not mean to include Jarmusch and his corpus in Marks’ collection of intercultural cinema, however, simply to align the concept with his work in order to better understand it as haptic.
Jarmusch’s personal approach to representing culture, and in a broader sense conceiving of culture is very particular and could be seen on a certain level as intercultural. In an interview with Tod Lippy he explains,
I’m not really interested in nationalities or borders, though I am very interested in cultures and what makes them different from other cultures. And I’m also very fascinated by those areas where the lines of culture blur, because in those blurred edges is where synthesis occurs and gardens grow.
