(Mark Robson, US 1971, 105 min., 35mm)
Rod Steiger stars as a sexist big game hunter who abandoned his family seven years earlier. His once dull wife (Susannah York) has turned witty and intellectual and is deciding about marrying a pacifist doctor or a vacuum cleaner salesman. In a rare foray into cinema, the late Kurt Vonnegut Jr. adapted his own stage play for a delightful and occasionally surreal comedy-drama “about the end of the bullish dominating male”—Pauline Kael.
(Jim Jarmusch, US 1984, 90 min., 35mm)
Developed from one of his early short films, Jarmusch’s deadpan comedy classic introduces us to Eva, Willie, and Eddie, and follows their bleak but humorous cultural landscape in 1980s America. Garnering prizes at Cannes and from the National Society of Film Critics, this low-budget gem helped establish Jarmusch as one of the premier voices in what was then a fresh and subversive “independent” American cinema.
Program Notes
Stranger Than Paradise is Jim Jarmusch’s breakout film. His second feature, it won the prestigious Camera d’Or prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1984. It’s a story of alienation and assimilation, themes which become common in Jarmusch’s developing oeuvre. He states, “I’ve always felt like an outsider in a lot of ways, but in the same way I’m drawn to humor, miscommunication and the things that arise out of misunderstanding.” In this film he explores a sense of place and the relationship to America by an assimilated Hungarian immigrant and his newly arrived sixteen year old cousin.
Stranger Than Paradise began life in 1982 as a thirty minute short film entitled The New World. Filmed over the course of one weekend, The New World was shot on surplus film donated by Wim Wenders left over from his production, The State of Things (1982). Remarking upon the importance of this gift, Jarmusch once said, “I wrote the first part of Stranger Than Paradise because I had that film material available to me.” Ironically, Wenders’ The State of Things depicts a movie stalled mid-shoot because the supply of film stock was exhausted prematurely.
While Jim Jarmusch was making The New World, he wrote a longer script that would ultimately become an extension of the short film. After screening The New World to critical praise at several film festivals in Europe and then receiving a much needed loan and finally, securing backing funds from German TV, he completed the last two parts of Stranger Than Paradise, bringing the film in for a total budget of $110,000. This was a remarkable feat as budgets for most film productions at that time averaged fifteen million dollars or more.
An interviewer once asked Jarmusch if the actors in Stranger Than Paradise were real actors or if they were just playing themselves. He answered, “Well, they were not really actors. Well, they’re actors of varying degrees, but they worked hard rehearsing the film and developing a character. I don’t think they’re playing themselves.” He said in a later interview, “If you can work with the actor to get to a place where they are confident in their character, then you let their character react to the scene that you’re filming.”
Shot on location in New York City, Cleveland and Florida, Stranger Than Paradise is an elegantly composed film. It is characterized by sparse interiors and a vast terrain covered in snow and littered with hulking remnants of the Industrial Age. Its stark beauty, set in minimalist black and white still yields a story with multiple layers of meaning. On the surface the characters seem to be cold and uncaring, mirroring the landscape, but just underneath, just behind the eyes lies a tender vulnerability and almost painful sensitivity to the world around them.
~Jennifer Miko, Selznick School, Student
FOR FURTHER READING
(Danny Boyle, UK 2007, 107 min., 35mm)
In the year 2057, a motley group of astronauts and scientists (played by, among others, Cillian Murphy and Michelle Yeoh) are sent from a freezing Earth to reignite the dying sun with nuclear missiles. This thoughtful sci-fi epic reunited the writer (Alex Garland) and director (Danny Boyle) of the modern-day horror classic, 28 Days Later. “Boyle’s spiritual and metaphysical musings intertwine neatly with his pop sensibility, imbuing this with an art-house intelligence without diluting its summer blockbuster appeal”—Joshua Katzman, Chicago Reader.
(Otto Preminger, US 1944, 85 min., 35mm)
On Valentine’s Day we present one of the most hauntingly romantic of all films noir. Tough and crude cop McPherson (Dana Andrews) investigates the murder of beautiful advertising executive Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney) and falls in love with her portrait. The chief suspects are Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb), Laura’s cynical friend and companion; Shelby Carpenter (Vincent Price), her good-for-nothing fiancé; and Ann Treadwell (Judith Anderson), her rich, unscrupulous aunt who loves Shelby. Filled with shocking twists and revelations, Preminger’s classic gracefully mixes elegance with decadence.
(Edmund Goulding, US 1947, 111 min., 35mm)
The dark and seamy side of carnival life is the subject of one of the grittiest and most menacing films noir. Tyrone Power plays a cynical carny who looks down on all the “hicks” getting swindled along the midway. Soon, he works his way up to a phony mind-reading act that makes him rich—but before long he’s taught a severe lesson in humility. This powerfully memorable film also reminds us of the original meaning of the word “geek.”
