Since the early 1980s, Jim Jarmusch has produced a handful of idiosyncratic films that have established him as one of the most imaginatively allusive directors in the history of American cinema. Three of his films—Dead Man (1995), Ghost Dog (1999), and The Limits of Control (2009)—demonstrate the director’s unique take on Eastern and Aboriginal spirituality. In particular, they reflect Jarmusch’s rejection of Western monotheism’s fear-driven separation of life and death. While these films address historical issues of imperialism, colonialism, and genocide, they also demonstrate a uniquely spiritual form of resistance to conditions that political solutions have not resolved. The impact of Dead Man, Ghost Dog, and The Limits of Control cannot be fully felt without considering the multicultural sources from which the writer/director drew. In The Jarmusch Way, Julian Rice looks closely at these three films and explores their relation to Eastern philosophy and particular works of Western literature, painting, and cinema. This book also delves deeply into the films’ association with Native American culture, a subject upon which Rice has written extensively. Though he has garnered a passionate following in some circles, Jarmusch remains critically underappreciated. Making a case that this director deserves far more serious attention than he has received thus far, The Jarmusch Way thoroughly discusses three of his most intriguing films.

Collected interviews with the American independent film director of Permanent Vacation, Stranger Than Paradise, and Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

Although Jim Jarmusch is best known for his storied career in independent cinema, over the years he has produced hundreds of pieces of collage art, the majority of which has been rarely seen by the public. Drawing inspiration from the largest medium of cultural documentation--newspapers--Jarmusch delicately crafts each work by layering newsprints on cardstock. Doppelgänger Andy Warhols are posed in a vast tunnel not unlike the depths of the Large Hadron Collider, Patty Hearst's mugshots drift across Edwardian portraits, and a man's identity is disguised with a coyote's head: maybe he was a celebrity, politician, perp, or all three. In Some Collages, these small-scale (notecard-size) pieces are a reminder of how even the most mundane stock photography can be hijacked to create work that is scary-funny.

A low-budget breakout film that wowed critics and audiences on its initial release, Stranger Than Paradise would prove to be a seminal film in the new American independent cinema movement and establish its director, Jim Jarmusch, as a hip, cult auteur. Taking inspiration from 1960s underground filmmaking, international art cinema, genre cinema, and punk culture, Jarmusch’s film provides a bridge between midnight movie features and a new mode of quirky, offbeat independent filmmaking. This book probes the film's production history, initial reception, aesthetics, and legacy in order to understand its place within the cult film canon. In examining the film's cult pedigree, it explores a number of threads that fed into the film—including New York downtown culture of the early 1980s and Jarmusch’s involvement in music—as well as reflecting on how the film's status has developed alongside Jarmusch’s subsequent output and reputation.

Ozu's Tokyo Story is generally regarded as one of the finest films ever made. Universal in its appeal, it is also considered to be 'particularly Japanese'. Exploring its universality and cultural specificity, this collection of specially commissioned essays demonstrates the multiple planes on which the film may be appreciated. The introduction outlines Ozu's career as both a contract director of a major studio and as a singular figure in Japanese film history, and also analyses the director's cinematic style, particularly his narrative strategies and spatial compositions. Other essays situate Ozu's cinema in its relationship to Hollywood film-making: his relationship to aspects of Japanese tradition, situating the film within artistic modes, religious systems and beliefs, and socio-cultural and familial formations. Also included is an analysis of how Ozu has been misunderstood in Western criticism.

Michel Chion is renowned for his explorations of the significance of frequently overlooked elements of cinema, particularly the role of sound. In this inventive and inviting book, Chion considers how cinema has deployed music. He shows how music and film not only complement but also transform each other. The first section of the book examines film music in historical perspective, and the second section addresses the theoretical implications of the crossover between art forms. Chion discusses a vast variety of films across eras, genres, and continents, embracing all the different genres of music that filmmakers have used to tell their stories. Beginning with live accompaniment of silent films in early movie houses, the book analyzes Al Jolson’s performance in The Jazz Singer, the zither in The Third Man, Godard’s patchwork sound editing, the synthesizer welcoming the flying saucer in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the Kinshasa orchestra in Felicité, among many more. Chion considers both original scores and incorporation of preexisting works, including the use and reuse of particular composers across cinematic traditions, the introduction of popular music such as jazz and rock, and directors’ attraction to atonal and dissonant music as well as musique concrète, of which he is a composer. Wide-ranging and original, Music in Cinema offers a welcoming overview for students and general readers as well as refreshingly new and valuable perspectives for film scholars.

Since launching his career at the Village Voice in the early 1980s Greg Tate has been one of the premiere critical voices on contemporary Black music, art, literature, film, and politics. Flyboy 2 provides a panoramic view of the past thirty years of Tate's influential work. Whether interviewing Miles Davis or Ice Cube, reviewing an Azealia Banks mixtape or Suzan-Lori Parks's Topdog/Underdog, discussing visual artist Kara Walker or writer Clarence Major, or analyzing the ties between Afro-futurism, Black feminism, and social movements, Tate's resounding critical insights illustrate how race, gender, and class become manifest in American popular culture. Above all, Tate demonstrates through his signature mix of vernacular poetics and cultural theory and criticism why visionary Black artists, intellectuals, aesthetics, philosophies, and politics matter to twenty-first-century America.