The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (211 page)

He is a true experimenter in forms—notably in
Angelic Conversation
, where he uses rephotographed home movies against Judi Dench’s reading of Shakespearean sonnets. He is a furious scold to the deterioration of nature and social fabric in Britain—as witness
Jubilee, The Last of England
, and
War Requiem
. And he is an uninhibited celebrant of gay sex—as in
Sebastiane, Caravaggio
, and
Edward II. Blue
proved to be the work of blindness, with just a field of blue and seas of ecstatic talk.

Jim Jarmusch
, b. Akron, Ohio, 1953
1982:
Permanent Vacation
(s). 1984:
Stranger Than Paradise
. 1986:
Coffee and Cigarettes
(s);
Down by Law
. 1988:
Coffee and Cigarettes, Part Two
(s). 1989:
Mystery Train
. 1991:
Night on Earth
. 1995:
Dead Man
. 1997:
Year of the Horse
. 1999:
Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
. 2002: “Int. Trailer Night,” an episode from
Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet
. 2003:
Coffee and Cigarettes
. 2005:
Broken Flowers
. 2009:
The Limits of Control
.

Jarmusch has a rare feeling for urban desolation, for loneliness, and the sweet, whimsical overlap of chance and companionship. It is gentle, offbeat, and poignant—but does it make whole films? And does it really make a marriage of Jarmusch’s leaning toward raw pop culture and SoHo modishness? I’d guess that Jarmusch feels drawn to shorter film forms—videos or even deadpan, a-commercial commercials. There’s plenty of evidence by now that he lacks the drive or the will to sustain narrative, or even character, over a long haul. In hindsight,
Stranger Than Paradise
(still his best film) seems to have the innocent energy of beginning. By now, he seems like a born maker of episodes.

He was educated at Columbia and NYU; he immersed himself in film study at the Cinémathèque Française; and he was an assistant to Nicholas Ray at the end of Ray’s life. In addition to his own films, Jarmusch has often worked for others in New York’s avant-garde: he was an assistant on
Lightning Over Water
(80, Wim Wenders and Ray); he did sound on
Burroughs
(83, Howard Brookner); he acted in
Straight to Hell
(87, Alex Cox), in
Leningrad Cowboys Go America
(89, Aki Kaurismaki), and in
In the Soup
(92, Alexandre Rockwell).

Even in
Stranger Than Paradise
, the value of the people was tenuous. Their lives were so much at the mercy of randomness, entropy, and dispersal. As time has passed, that melancholy hangs in Jarmusch’s way sometimes (as in
Down By Law
) in oppressively pretty compositions. It is hard to see where he is going—and very likely that he would retort that the notion of “going” anywhere is a fallacy.

Dead Man
had many enthusiasts, who saw an ironic deconstruction of the Western. I could see that tone, too, but I couldn’t tell where it was going, or why Jarmusch might be interested in the Western. His strength originally was the empty duration in very plain lives (which is not a very commercial area). But giving it up for a certain genre glamour—see also
Ghost Dog
and its “samurai” shadowing—leaves a very private filmmaker wondering just how independent he can manage to be.

Humphrey Jennings
(1907–50), b. Walberswick, England
All films are documentaries:
1938:
Penny Journey
. 1939:
Spare Time; Speaking from America; S.S. Ionian (Her Last Trip); The
First Days
(codirected with Harry Watt and Pat Jackson). 1940:
London Can Take It
(codirected with Watt);
Spring Offensive/An Unrecorded Victory; Welfare of the Workers
(codirected with Jackson). 1941:
Heart of Britain; Words for Battle
. 1942:
Listen to Britain
(codirected with Stewart McAllister). 1943:
Fires Were Started; The Silent Village
. 1944:
The Eighty Days; The True Story of Lilli Marlene
. 1945:
A Diary for Timothy
. 1946:
A Defeated People
. 1947:
The Cumberland Story
. 1949:
Dim Little Island
. 1950:
Family Portrait
.

Most of Jennings’s work was commissioned by the guiding patrons of the British documentary movement—the GPO Film Unit, the Ministry of Information, and the Crown Film Unit. Nor is there much doubt that Jennings’s rather hesitant initiation in film was confirmed by the experience of war, which was the vindication of the whole documentary movement. His films were made for patriotic purposes, and belong to the climactic period of British documentary as inspired by Grierson. It would seem to be difficult to function as Jennings did and not belong to the documentary brotherhood. Yet, the lasting distinction of his work emphasizes the ways in which he was a private if not solitary figure, an individual artist inspired by a nation at war and able to take advantage of the artistic opportunity it provided.

When Grierson spoke of the “creative treatment of actuality” he was aspiring to some fusion of filmmaking and social action. He wanted, at the least, to educate the public into a greater involvement in the ordering of its own affairs. By contrast, Jennings is much more fatalistic and aloof, even if he had deeper insights into the British. In retrospect, one can see how far his wartime films pursued a personal vision, rooted in English life but full of intellectual and poetic reference, so that he seems now to rise above war and the immediate circumstances of his films. In short, he looks like one of the few major English directors, a true war artist in the way that Henry Moore’s drawings in the Underground and Evelyn Waugh’s
Sword of Honour
trilogy transcend war and reassert the primacy of the human imagination.

It is important to stress the background that led Jennings to film. East Anglia offers one of the most self-contained and enduring of educations in English social history and art: it is the world of agricultural peasantry, of Constable, Benjamin Britten, and Akenfield. Jennings went to Perse School and Cambridge, where he won a starred first in English. He stayed on to do research into the Elizabethans and became a member of an exceptional intellectual and artistic circle that produced the magazine
Experiment
. It was as concerned with science and history as with the arts, and Jennings conceived the project of a vast anthology of readings in British history, to be called
Pandemonium
. The scholarly book speaks for his academic training and for a mystical involvement with the idea of England. It is not too much to call it Blakean: Jennings viewed industry and the machine with a mixture of wonder and mistrust. Like Blake, he measured the span of civilization in England and was wary of the future. This accounts for the pessimism that hardens in his work, especially after the war.

Jennings wrote poetry and painted. In 1936 he helped to organize an important surrealist art exhibition in London. His own work was not as extreme, but it used imagery with the same combined emotional and intellectual force. Jim Hillier has drawn attention to the way Jennings employs the images of Tarot cards and stressed how far the compositions in his films are reinforced by such a code, which is not apparent to many viewers. Or not immediately so. In fact, Jennings’s image is not simply more elegant than most, but more contradictory and poignant. He has an eye for absurdity, for the beauty of violence, the oddity of the everyday, and the disruptive liberation that can come from pictures of a city—like London—suddenly made naked by war. His images of blitz are not only documentary but examinations of the potential for discovery in circumstances that dislodge us from fixed systems and responses. Houses torn open disclose inane domestic interiors: no doubt about the violence that has been done, but Jennings also seems to ponder over those once neat containers of soft civilization. War acted for Jennings like the high-pressure inspiration that carries the surrealist into the subconscious.

He joined the GPO unit in 1934 as designer, editor, and actor. After a period with Len Lye, at Shell, where he was in charge of the color work on
The Birth of a Robot
(36), he returned to the GPO and began directing. His early work is conventional, although it shows an unusual visual awareness. His most creative period was very brief:
Listen to Britain, Fires Were Started
, and
A Diary for Timothy
.

Perhaps it was Jennings’s intuition of pandemonium that makes those three films the most vivid and accurate account of civilian Britain at war. But it is the artist’s awareness of the threat of chaos that gives them a very moving feeling for all culture threatened by destruction. They are war films without an enemy. There is something anonymous and all-pervasive in the dangers that hover over London and from which “fires were started.” Of course, London seldom saw its enemy face to face, and the films record that long-distance battle. But, philosophically, Jennings sees war as an inevitable ordeal that binds people together. In
Fires Were Started
, for instance, the Germans who drop fire bombs are barely referred to. The loss of one fireman is not harped on sentimentally, but treated with resignation. There is something almost quietist in the view of human figures battling the blazes, just as Jennings never quenches the wild beauty of fire.
A Diary for Timothy
ends with a dissolve from flames to the face of the baby Timothy and with a worried question about what peace will mean. Just as
Fires Were Started
was made after the blitz, but retained a sense of possible apocalypse, so
Diary
was made when victory was undoubted but as Jennings grew more fearful of the consequences of peace.

As an artist he faltered after the war, unable to escape the declining system of documentary patronage or to maintain the passion of his wartime films. It is difficult to imagine what feature films Jennings might have made. His view of people was fond but impersonal, like Japanese paintings. But, had he lived—he was killed in an accident in Greece—he could not have condoned the ugliness and lazy socialism of Free Cinema. In the subdued caution of postwar Britain, he might have found sufficient anger to become a Buñuel-like figure. His fires were, like Blake’s, a condition of the soul and might even have burned down English good manners.

Norman Jewison
, b. Toronto, Canada, 1926
1962:
Forty Pounds of Trouble
. 1963:
The Thrill of It All
. 1964:
Send Me No Flowers
. 1965:
The Art of Love; The Cincinnati Kid
. 1966:
The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming
. 1967:
In the Heat of the Night
. 1968:
The Thomas Crown Affair
. 1969:
Gaily, Gaily
. 1971:
Fiddler on the Roof
. 1973:
Jesus Christ Superstar
. 1975:
Rollerball
. 1978:
F*I*S*T
. 1979:
And Justice for All
. 1982:
Best Friends
. 1984:
A Soldier’s Story
. 1985:
Agnes of God
. 1987:
Moonstruck
. 1989:
In Country
. 1991:
Other People’s Money
. 1994:
Only You
. 1996:
Bogus
. 1999:
The Hurricane
. 2001:
Dinner with Friends
(TV). 2003:
The Statement
.

After studying at the University of Toronto, Jewison worked in British TV as a writer and actor. He returned to Canada and in 1958 joined CBS to direct spectaculars. Jewison has long since dissipated the promise of
Forty Pounds of Trouble; The Thomas Crown Affair
has shown the depths of hollow prettiness of which he is capable. Yet, he remains unpredictable, a gadfly among directors, lavish with real locations, but indifferent to authenticity so that
In the Heat of the Night
could have been shot in the studios of the 1940s. With big projects, Jewison has seemed overawed—thus
The Cincinnati Kid
suffers from Steve McQueen’s dullness and compares badly with
The Hustler; The Russians Are Coming
, however, an ostensible loser, is very funny.
Forty Pounds of Trouble
turned a potentially sentimental picture about a knowing child into a very funny study of Tony Curtis. Nor were the two Doris Day movies as bad as they threatened to be.
In the Heat of the Night
and
Fiddler on the Roof
are at least enjoyable hokum, too sophisticated to stress their spurious significance. While directing
Jesus Christ Superstar
in Israel, Jewison also contrived to produce a Western,
Billy Two Hats
(73, Ted Kotcheff), in which Gregory Peck plays an elderly Scottish outlaw—with such flexibility can movies perish?

Jewison has continued to produce for others:
The Dogs of War
(80, John Irvin);
Iceman
(84, Fred Schepisi); and
The January Man
(89, Pat O’Connor). His own films included the meritorious
Soldier’s Story
(note that Jewison was intending to do a Malcolm X film until Spike Lee claimed the project for a black director).
Soldier’s Story
got a best picture nomination, as did the charming
Moonstruck
, a lightweight work based in generous human observation and a lot of canny acting.

In 1999, Jewison picked up the Irving Thalberg Award. If “picked up” sounds a little casual, I have to say that the movies have reached a strange point when a Jewison can get that lofty award—one that was kept for the top stream of filmmakers—whereas Jewison has never been better than, say,
In the Heat of the Night
, a carefully rigged melodrama, and
The Hurricane
(made in the year of his award), a hideously contrived selling of the facts in the Rubin Carter case. It is all very well to say that no one now remembers Thalberg. In which case, abandon his award. Don’t cheapen it.