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UBC Theses and Dissertations

Jim Jaarmusch and the American national cinema Urquhart, Peter

Abstract

Jim Jarmusch is an American independent film-maker whose work, despite its relative popularity and droll veneer, is consistently contra-Hollywood, thematically, aesthetically, and ideologically. In this thesis, I demonstrate through my close analysis of Jarmusch's four major works to date — Stranger Than Paradise (1984), Down By Law (1986), Mystery Train (1989), and Night on Earth (1991) — that Jarmusch's work should best be regarded beside representative examples of other contra-Hollywood national cinemas, rather than held up against the Hollywood cinema. Ultimately, this thesis argues that Jarmusch's oeuvre is a superlative instance of the American national cinema — ah entity not commonly held to exist. I define the American national cinema as one constituent part (like the French national cinema) of the meta-set of the international art cinema practice, and as this entity is distinguishable from Hollywood, and from other nations' commercial cinemas. In Chapter One, I lay the foundation for the above argument with appeals to various expert sources, especially those concerning concepts of ideology, auteurism, national cinema, and the art cinema as a classifiable mode of film practice. The following four chapters consist of close analyses of Jarmusch's four major works. Chapter Two considers how Jarmusch inverts the stereotypes of dreary communist East and sunny capitalist West in Stranger Than Paradise. The emphasis in Chapter Three is on the "things-are-not-as-theyseem" nature of every American cultural phenomenon raised in Down By Law, and how these reversals illuminate Jarmusch's take on his culture. Chapter Four considers the centrality of the relationship of race to American popular culture which Mystery Train posits. Chapter Five shows how Night on Earth. as a natural outward extension of Jarmusch's thematic and stylistic preoccupations, is designed explicitly as an American art film, as I am using the term here. In chapter six, I briefly recapitulate some of the theoretical and industrial suggestions that I proposed at the outset, weigh them against the evidence presented in the four close analyses, and conclude that a contra-Hollywood American national cinema surely exists, and that Jim Jarmusch's work is its exemplary illustration.

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