How Jim Jarmusch used music to put a spell on Hollywood — theguardian.com

Jim Jarmusch has been one of US cinema’s drollest, driest voices for more than three decades but there are no excerpts from his films during Jim Jarmusch Revisited, an evening of music from his work at the Barbican, London. No dazed Johnny Depp in the trippy western Dead Man, no shock-haired Tilda Swinton in the vampires’ lament Only Lovers Left Alive, no serene Adam Driver as a bus-driving poet in Paterson. For the first three numbers, though, the nine-piece band is concealed by a gossamer-thin curtain on to which images from Jarmusch’s milieu are projected: criss-crossing metal fire escapes, a deck of cards, a day at the track. And smoke. Lots of smoke. (“I’ve smoked so many cigarettes,” he once said. “I am a cigarette. You know?”) This creates the illusion that the music is emanating from inside that footage, which feels exactly right. Jarmusch came to prominence in the early 80s, when movies were first being used as tools to sell soundtrack albums, but his were different. Music wasn’t there to shift units; it lived in the fibres of the celluloid.

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