Journal articles on the topic 'Jarmusch, Jim Film'

Among the recent spate of independent vampire films, Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive uniquely depicts vampires whose immortality is under threat in a world tainted by environmental toxins. Facing their mortality as we humans face our own extinction, Adam and Eve are vampires of the Anthropocene. Only Lovers was often dismissed by critics as easy on substantial ideas and heavy on seductive sheen, and yet the film deftly deploys the vampire trope to explore enduring attachments, as well as endangered and endangering ways of life. Set in Detroit and Tangier, Jarmusch’s film tracks the roaming romance of his vampires, Adam and Eve, who are both cultured cosmopolitans and endangered species seeking refuge in an increasingly uninhabitable world. Adam and Eve keep alive forms of intimacy and aesthetic appreciation on the verge of extinction even as they adapt to ecological crises by adopting twenty-first-century modes of global consumption. Jarmusch strikes a careful balance between his characters’ complicity with and critique of the world they feed on. In the end the film is about survival and a white Euro-American hegemony that refuses to die.

Die Autoren zeigen zunächst, wie der Film Paterson filmische Erwartungen im Gefolge des Hollywood Mainstreamkinos unterläuft: No action, sex, crime, wobei Jim Jarmusch solche Erwartungsbrüche nicht nur durch die Art des Films schafft, der das alltägliche Leben seines Protagonisten, des Busfahrers Paterson aus der Provinzstadt Paterson (New Jersey) und dessen Frau Laura zeigt, er inszeniert sie auch im Film selbst. Der Film ist »amerikanischer Zen« und appelliert darin in besonderer Weise an die psychoanalytische Grundhaltung der nichts wollenden, gleichschwebenden Aufmerksamkeit. Was ihn auszeichnet, ist sein Bezug zur Lyrik. Zum einen gibt es Lyrik im Film – Paterson ist Dichter –, zum anderen ist der Film selbst (alltags-)lyrischer Art. Darin erweist er sich als eine Hommage an den großen amerikanischen Lyriker William Carlos Williams, dessen Langgedicht PATERSON (über Paterson, New Jersey) der hintergründige Referenzpunkt des Films ist. Im Hinblick darauf lässt sich in einer kulturpsychoanalytischen Perspektive der Film als symbolische Wiedergutmachung der durch die ökonomische Entwicklung »geleisteten« Zerstörungsarbeit und als Utopie eines Amerika verstehen, in dem Fortschritt und Mythos versöhnt sind.

Two first decades of the 21st century have revealed an increasing popularity of the horror genre. In particular, we have been witnessing the renaissance of Gothic cinema, especially the vampire sub-genre. It is conspicuous that the original vampire story formula has lately undergone numerous significant alterations. Vampires have evolved from cold and soulless monsters to humanised romantic heroes. In the new millennium, a static Gothic diegesis gets frequently replaced by a dynamic reality, in which movement is a predominant feature. This article is devoted to the motifs of the road, journey and travels in Jim Jarmusch’ film Only Lovers Left Alive.

AbstractIn Jim Jarmusch'sInt. Trailer. Night(2002) a young American actress, alone in her trailer for a ten-minute break, lights up a cigarette and puts on a CD of theGoldberg Variations. In this short, almost plotless experimental film Bach sounds outside the frameworks that typically motivate the diegetic presence of so-called ‘classical music’ in cinema, detached from the places and signifiers of high art and from high-level meanings and pointed occurrences. This unusual representation of listening opens up two complementary lines of enquiry: first, into the way in which Jarmusch draws on Bach to invent a reality that is strange and irreducible, marked by unexpected cultural affiliations and by an elusive affective realm; second, into the way in which, by thus channelling Bach into his poetics of the everyday, the director reinvents the music's own identity, putting forward a de-essentialized image of its cultural placement and aesthetic status.

Abstract This article engages the metaphor of showrunner as auteur to examine freedom of expression in television. News articles offer the metaphor of showrunner as auteur, with Hollywood journalists discussing the writer-producers of the new Golden Age of Television. Media convergence, including cable and digital technologies, has disrupted traditional TV organisations and power brokers, bringing about a renaissance. Jenkins (2006) challenges scholars to see media convergence in terms of voice and participation, rather than technology. Following Jenkins, this study engages auteur theory, and Marshall McLuhan’s analysis of the medium and the message, to better understand TV showrunners. Critical insights from Marx and Bourdieu are considered with regard to the interplay of cultural and economic forces. The analysis compares earlier film directors-Jim Jarmusch and the Coen Brothers-with showrunners of the cable and digital era, including David Chase, the Wachowskis, David Benioff, and Diablo Cody. Because of disruptive technologies, TV showrunners are able to break free from media restraints and bridge the culture/economy binary that structures TV as a field of production. No longer bound by broadcast censorship and scheduled programming, TV showrunners are producing shows that express their signature messages, transforming TV into a cinematic experience.

The article is a kind of aesthetic experiment that reveals patterns between two stories from the life of the fictional character William Blake from the film "dead Man" by American Director Jim Jarmusch and French theater theorist and philosopher Antonin Artaud. The complexity of the work lies in the fact that the comparison takes place between a fictional hero and a real person who made identical metaphysical trips to the bosom of an ancient civilization. The path is presented as an experience of reincarnation with the possibility of gaining new knowledge, liberation from the burden of pain and illness, fears and anxiety. The author is interested, among other things, in the stages of transformation of the personality and its transition from a reasonable state to a mad state with the exit to purification and liberation of the hero in death. The metamorphosis of the transition to the territory of the transcendent (mad) develops into a holistic individual performance-a challenge to society. Theatricality as the highest form of life itself and its completion determine the initiation process of Artaud and Blake. Artezianka theatricality and tragedy are the tears of all life and the creative forces. Blake's theatricality is realized in a gradual alienation from the everyday world and immersion in the ritual world, which requires him to perform a number of mandatory rites, for example, applying the blood of a slaughtered animal to the face. Comparative analysis takes into account the concept of disease and morbidity, which is considered not from a medical point of view, but in philosophical and aesthetic discourses. For both characters, the fact of theatricalization of life, the Monstration of its aesthetic and moral categories through the optics of ritual and ritual practice of the Indians is postulated.

This article focuses on the centrality of the interstice to the underlying form of three of Jim Jarmusch’s films, namely, Stranger Than Paradise (1984), Dead Man (1995) and The Limits of Control (2009). It posits that the specificity of this form can be better understood by underlining its relation to aspects of Far Eastern form. The analysis focuses on the aforementioned films as they represent the most fully-fledged examples of this overriding aesthetic and its focus on interstitial space. The article asserts that a consistent aesthetic sensibility pervades the work of Jarmusch and that, by exploring the significance of the Japanese concepts of mu and ma, the atmospheric and formal qualities of this filmmaker’s work can be elucidated. Particular emphasis is paid to the specific articulation of time and space and it is argued that the films achieve a meditative form due to the manner in which they foreground the interstice, transience, temporality and subjectivity.

This essay offers close readings of films by the independent US directors Jim Jarmusch and Gus Van Sant with a particular focus on their slow-paced representation of everyday life. Building on the work of Henri Lefebvre, the author proposes that so-called “slow cinema” can be read not simply as an aesthetic choice, but as an alternative and potentially oppositional rhythm in the era of fast capitalism.

The paper gives insight into the revaluation of popular Gothic aesthetics in Jim Jarmusch’s 2014 production Only Lovers Left Alive. Drawing on critical theory and the postmodern theoretical framework, the article suggests that the film transgresses contemporary culture immersed in a “culture of death” that has produced a vast amount of cultural texts under the rubric of “Gothicism.” By considering Jean Baudrillard’s concept of transaesthetics and Judith Halberstam’s writings on contemporary monstrosity, the paper shows that a commodified Gothic mode has lost its older deconstructive functions that operated on the margins of the mainstream. Now entirely focused on the duplication of the same aesthetic codes and signs, Gothic productions conform to the rules of postindustrial culture, enriching entertainment imagery with the neutralized concept of “otherness.” Hence, the article engages primarily with Jarmusch’s indie aesthetics that goes beyond easily recognizable patterns and generic conventions and allows the director to emphasize that the arts are rejuvenating forces, the antidote to a commoditized environment. Then, the focus is on the construction of main characters—Adam and Eve, ageless vampires and spouses—who thanks to nostalgic theatricality and performance reconfigure the mainstream monstrosity. Ultimately, the article emphasizes that Jarmusch’s film, to a large extent, becomes a warning against the inevitable results of advanced capitalism practiced on a global scale.

<p>Neste artigo construímos um diálogo entre o filme <em>Permanent Vacation </em>(1980), <em>ópera prima </em>de Jim Jarmusch e o romance de iniciação de Fabián Casas, <em>Ocio</em> (2000). Para isto, propomos pensar a noção de <em>transmedialidade </em>como uma ferramenta que nos habilite criar um diálogo intermedia e transgender ao interior de uma mesma poética, mas também de uma mesma problematização dos sujetos protagonsitas entre duas obras.</p>

This article draws from Gilles Deleuze’s interpretation of the Nietzschean concept of “the eternal return” in order to read Jim Jarmusch’s film Broken Flowers as being not merely a study in duration, apathy and reactive nihilism, but also a film which, through its formal repetitive structure, also offers pathways to transformation and affirmation. As such, I argue that the central protagonist, Don Johnston undergoes a subtle yet crucial change in the course of the film from a state of ressentiment to affirmation and becoming. I also characterise the film as an absurdist quest or road movie.

In this paper we argue that montage is at the heart of contemporary human geography. We demonstrate the centrality of montage in a wide variety of domains, including the analysis of modernity, the critique of political economy, and the practice of spatial science, before drawing out the implications of this centrality in the wake of so-called ‘nonrepresentational’ theory. While nonrepresentational styles of thought ordinarily veer off into considerations of performance, practice, and enactment, the ontological and epistemological play of montage plunges theoretical practice into what Agamben, Baudrillard, and Benjamin call ‘imagelessness’, ‘obscenity’, and the ‘optical unconscious’. Each of these is addressed in turn, and each is illustrated with stills taken from the films of Jim Jarmusch. The overall aim of the paper is to sensitize human geographers to the duplicitous operation of the discipline's cinematic optical unconscious, and in so doing to open up a space for a more considered engagement with geography's much-vaunted visuality.

The essay examines the image of the hero in the contemporary neo-mythological field of mass screen culture. The author identifies the main features of the hero archetype and the core cultural meanings forming this concept and analyzes images of the neo-mythological heroes of our time, taking examples of mass cinema and authorial cinema and revealing differences between these two categories. According to the author, mass culture creates the hero model according to the principle of bricolage, remaining within the framework of the Christian eschatological paradigm and synthesizing it with scientific and technical progress or other elements but not reproducing the structure of the archaic myth. When the stereotype of happy ending replaces tragedy, it completely changes the true archetype of the hero more characteristic of art-house or authorial cinema. Examining the films of Jim Jarmusch and Alejandro Gonzlez Irritu, the author analyzes the method of deconstruction in authorial cinema, a cinema which seeks to reveal the meanings of the archaic hero archetype. If mass cinema acts within the simulacrum system without transcending its limits endlessly repeating the same models and often using only superficial formal properties authorial cinema tries to explode the structure in such a way as to widen the boundaries of the senses or to discover them under the layers of simulacra. Thus, screen culture has the characteristics of a neo-mythology, forming the neo-myth and developing its elements and structures, producing a stream of neo-mythological images in the media landscape. The conglomerate of various structural elements borrowed from different traditions fully reflects the postmodern situation that turns symbols and archetypes into a set of simulacra. The era of postmodernism is a stage in the development of culture characterized by the problem of the impossibility of creating anything new. Postmodernism is a creative crisis which leads to excessive visuality and, paradoxically, to visualitys death.

JIM JARMUSCH'S AESTHETICS OF SAMPLING IN GHOST DOG - THE WAY OF THE SAMURAI ICE Cube's "Gangsta's Fairytale" (1990), Tupac Shakur and Snoop Dogg's "2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted" (1996), 50 Cent's "What Up Gangsta" (2003): from the end of the 1980s, in countless raps,(1) the gangster persona has inspired a host of MCs, who since then have adopted - and adapted - an imagery and themes the American film industry started dealing with sixty years earlier.(2) However, this cross-fertilization can work the other way round too. A director like Jim Jarmusch has chosen to invigorate Ghost Dog - The Way of the Samurai not only with the charismatic power of the black gangster, but also with a particularly rich intertextual network and an aesthetics of sampling clearly reminiscent of that taken up by rap artists since the end of the 1970s. Indeed, rap music's dominant feature...

The presented article is devoted to the study of the image of creativity and mythology of William Blake in the film by J. Jarmusch "Dead Man". The author has carried out a detailed philosophical and art analysis of the film "Dead Man" and graphic works by William Blake, in particular, the series of engravings “Heads of Ghosts”, engravings “Ghost of the Flea” and “The Lost Boy”. The author also examined poetry and mythology in the work of William Blake based on the material of the works "The Marriage of Hell and Eden" (1973), "Songs of Innocence" (1789) and "Songs of Experience" (1973). Having conducted a comparative analysis of the works of W. Blake and the film by J. Jarmusch, the author revealed the similarities among the characters, mythology, plot and attitude in the movie "Dead" by J. Jarmusch and the works of W. Blake, interpreted the reason for citing the works of W. Blake in the movie "Dead Man" ... As a result, a conclusion was made about the commonality of the worldview attitudes of the work of J. Jarmusch "Dead Man" and the work of W. Blake. The article highlights the common features of the investigated works and the film: quotations from works of other authors, acquiring new meaning (citing the works of John Milton and Dante W. Blake correlates with the quotation of W. Blake in the film "Dead Man"); initiation motive; wandering motive; the idea of the wrongness of the world and the dualism of the universe. The author notes that the main artistic ideas of the works under consideration by William Blake are reflected in the film "Dead Man" by J. Jarmusch. In synthesis, they acquire a new meaning – the path of the soul to salvation through the overcoming of false ideas, vices, knowledge of the truth. This work uses the method of philosophical and art history analysis, developed by the Siberian art history school.

Neste artigo trazemos uma análise reflexiva sobre o filme Ghost dog, do diretor independente Jim Jarmusch. Para tal propósito, trabalhamos com conceitos como representação e identidade, com ênfase nas interações dialógicas que, na tela, vêm a se criar entre as entidades ficcionais que compõem o universo diegético deste longa-metragem, assim como outros filmes do mesmo cineasta. Percebe-se que, neste filme e na obra de Jarmusch como um todo, o dialogismo e o reconhecimento do outro não são apenas elementos recorrentes, mas adquirem um papel meramente estrutural, tanto do ponto de vista temático, como modal. Por absurdo, isto ocorre mesmo num filme como Ghost dog, no qual, evidentemente, Jarmusch representa um conflito inter-cultural.

The aim of the article is to prove that the Dead Man soundtrack written by Neil Young plays an essential part in understanding and interpreting Jim Jarmusch’s film. The author of the article highlights the meaningful role of Dead Man in the director’s oeuvre, analyses the film’s structure, examines the process of recording the soundtrack as well as characterizes the selected scenes. He singles out the music motifs, their functions, and outlines the musical and dramatic effect of the film.

O artigo volta-se à análise do longa-metragem Paterson (2016), do diretor norte-americano Jim Jarmusch, obra que apresenta como principal referência os eventos que sucedem a vida cotidiana. A trama do romance acontece em um cenário urbano, sob o protagonismo de um tranquilo motorista de ônibus que descreve os acontecimentos do seu dia a dia em abstrações poéticas. O trabalho propõe-se a uma reflexão sobre os impactos que provém da organização da vida cotidiana ordenada pelo tempo da produção linear. A vida cotidiana pode ser compreendida a partir de um cenário progressivo de fenômenos mediados por acontecimentos ordinários e regulares (instância temporal), que respaldam — e encontram respaldo — no senso comum como forma de conhecimento (instância da produção de significados). A partir de análise de sequências do filme, o artigo indica uma reflexão sobre a constituição da vida cotidiana em interface com as categorias do pensamento fenomenológico oriundas da filosofia peirceana. Compreende-se, em sintonia com Cañizal (2001), que as formas de expressão poética mobilizadas pelo longa-metragem endereçam a uma ruptura do conhecimento padronizado, sublinhando a poiésis como categoria metafísica que expande os aspectos de representação da realidade.

Samurai and Chinese martial arts themes inspire and permeate the uniquely philosophical lyrics and beats of Wu-Tang Clan, a New York-based hip-hop collective made popular in the mid-nineties with their debut album Enter the Wu-Tang: Return of the 36 Chambers. Original founder RZA (“Rizza”) scored his first full-length motion-picture soundtrack and made his feature film debut with Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (Jim Jarmusch, 2000). Through a critical exploration of the film’s musical filter, it will be argued that RZA’s aesthetic vision effectively deterritorialises the figure of the samurai, according to which the samurai “change[s] in nature and connect[s] with other multiplicities” (Deleuze and Guattari, 9). The soundtrack consequently emancipates and redistributes the idea of the samurai from within the dynamic context of a fundamentally different aesthetic intensity, which the Wu-Tang has always hoped to communicate, that is to say, an aesthetics of adaptation or of what is called in hip-hop music more generally: an aesthetics of flow. At the center of Jarmusch’s film is a fundamental opposition between the sober asceticism and deeply coded lifestyle of Ghost Dog and the supple, revolutionary, itinerant hip-hop beats that flow behind it and beneath it, and which serve at once as philosophical foil and as alternate foundation to the film’s themes and message. Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai tells the story of Ghost Dog (Forest Whitaker), a deadly and flawlessly precise contract killer for a small-time contemporary New York organised crime family. He lives his life in a late 20th-century urban America according to the strict tenets of the 18th century text Hagakure, which relates the principles of the Japanese Bushido (literally, the “way of the warrior,” but more often defined and translated as the “code of the samurai”). Others have noted the way in which Ghost Dog not only fails as an adaptation of the samurai genre but thematises this very failure insofar as the film depicts a samurai’s unsuccessful struggle to adapt in a corrupt and fractured postmodern, post-industrial reality (Lanzagorta, par. 4, 9; Otomo, 35-8). If there is any hope at all for these adaptations (Ghost Dog is himself an example), it lies, according to some, in the singular, outmoded integrity of his nostalgia, which despite the abstract jouissance or satisfaction it makes available, is nevertheless blank and empty (Otomo, 36-7). Interestingly, in his groundbreaking book Spectacular Vernaculars, and with specific reference to hip-hop, Russell Potter suggests that where a Eurocentric postmodernism posits a lack of meaning and collapse of value and authority, a black postmodernism that is neither singular nor nostalgic is prepared to emerge (6-9). And as I will argue there are more concrete adaptive strategies at work in the film, strategies that point well beyond the film to popular culture more generally. These are anti-nostalgic strategies of possibility and escape that have everything to do with the way in which hip-hop as soundtrack enables Ghost Dog in his becoming-samurai, a process by which a deterritorialised subject and musical flow fuse to produce a hybrid adaptation and identity. But hip-hip not only makes possible such a becoming, it also constitutes a potentially liberating adaptation of the past and of otherness that infuses the film with a very different but still concrete jouissance. At the root of Ghost Dog is a conflict between what Deleuze and Guattari call state and nomad authority, between the code that prohibits adaptation and its willful betrayer. The state apparatus, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is the quintessential form of interiority. The state nourishes itself through the appropriation, the bringing into its interior, of all that over which it exerts its control, and especially over those nomadic elements that constantly threaten to escape (Deleuze and Guattari, 380-7). In Ghost Dog, the code or state-form functions throughout the film as an omnipresent source of centralisation, authorisation and organisation. It is attested to in the intensely stratified urban environment in which Ghost Dog lives, a complicated and forbidding network of streets, tracks, rails, alleys, cemeteries, tenement blocks, freeways, and shipping yards, all of which serve to hem Ghost Dog in. And as race is highlighted in the film, it, too, must be included among the many ways in which characters are always already contained. What encounters with racism in the film suggest is the operative presence of a plurality of racial and cultural codes; the strict segregation of races and cultures in the film and the animosity which binds them in opposition reflect a racial stratification that mirrors the stratified topography of the cityscape. Most important, perhaps, is the way in which Bushido itself functions, at least in part, as code, as well as the way in which the form of the historical samurai in legend and reality circumscribes not only Ghost Dog’s existence but the very possibility of the samurai and the samurai film as such. On the one hand, Bushido attests to the absolute of religion, or as Deleuze and Guattari describe it: “a center that repels the obscure … essentially a horizon that encompasses” and which forms a “bond”, “pact”, or “alliance” between subject/culture and the all-encompassing embrace of its deity: in this case, the state-form which sanctions samurai existence (382-3). On the other hand, but in the same vein, the advent of Bushido, and in particular the Hagakure text to which Ghost Dog turns for meaning and guidance, coincides historically with the emergence of the modern Japanese state, or put another way, with the eclipse of the very culture it sponsors. In fact, samurai history as a whole can be viewed to some extent as a process of historical containment by which the state-form gradually encompassed those nomadic warring elements at the heart of early samurai existence. This is the socio-historical context of Bushido, insofar as it represents the codification of the samurai subject and the stratification of samurai culture under the pressures of modernisation and the spread of global capitalism. It is a social and historical context marked by the power of a bourgeoning military, political and economic organisation, and by policies of restraint, centralisation and sedentariness. Moreover, the local and contemporary manifestations of this social and historical context are revealed in many of the elements that permeate not only the traditional samurai films of Kurosawa, Mizoguchi or Kobayashi, but modern adaptations of the genre as well, which tend to convey a nostalgic mourning for this loss, or more precisely, for this failure to adapt. Thus the filmic atmosphere of Ghost Dog is dominated by the negative qualities of inaction, nonviolence and sobriety, and whether these are taken to express the sterility and impotence of postmodern existence or the emptiness of a nostalgia for an unbroken and heroic past, these qualities point squarely towards the transience of culture and towards the impossibility of adaptation and survival. Ghost Dog is a reluctant assassin, and the inherently violent nature of his task is always deflected. In the same way, most of Ghost Dog’s speech in the film is delivered through his soundless readings of the Hagakure, silent and austere moments that mirror as well the creeping, sterile atmosphere in which most of the film’s action takes place. It is an atmosphere of interiority that points not only towards the stratified environment which restricts possibility and expressivity but also squarely towards the meaning of Bushido as code. But this atmosphere meets resistance. For the samurai is above all a man of war, and, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, “the man of war [that is to say, the nomad] is always committing an offence against” the State (383). In Ghost Dog, for all the ways in which Ghost Dog’s experience is stratified by the Bushido as code and by the post-industrial urban reality in which he lives and moves, the film shows equally the extent to which these strata or codes are undermined by nomadic forces that trace “lines of flight” and escape (Deleuze and Guattari, 423). Clearly it is the film’s soundtrack, and thus, too, the aesthetic intensities of the flow in hip-hop music, which both constitute and facilitate this escape: We have an APB on an MC killer Looks like the work of a master … Merciless like a terrorist Hard to capture the flow Changes like a chameleon (“Da Mystery of Chessboxin,” Enter) Herein lies the significance of (and difference between) the meaning of Bushido as code and as way, a problem of adaptation and translation which clearly reflects the central conflict of the film. A way is always a way out, the very essence of escape, and it always facilitates the breaking away from a code. Deleuze and Guattari describe the nomad as problematic, hydraulic, inseparable from flow and heterogeneity; nomad elements, as those elements which the State is incapable of drawing into its interior, are said to remain exterior and excessive to it (361-2). It is thus significant that the interiority of Ghost Dog’s readings from the Hagakure and the ferocious exteriority of the soundtrack, which along with the Japanese text helps narrate the tale, reflect the same relationship that frames the state and nomad models. The Hagakure is not only read in silence by the protagonist throughout the film, but the Hagakure also figures prominently inside the diegetic world of the film as a visual element, whereas the soundtrack, whether it is functioning diegetically or non-diegetically, is by its very nature outside the narrative space of the film, effectively escaping it. For Deleuze and Guattari, musical expression is inseparable from a process of becoming, and, in fact, it is fair to say that the jouissance of the film is supplied wholly by the soundtrack insofar as it deterritorialises the conventional language of the genre, takes it outside of itself, and then reinvests it through updated musical flows that facilitate Ghost Dog’s becoming-samurai. In this way, too, the soundtrack expresses the violence and action that the plot carefully avoids and thus intimately relates the extreme interiority of the protagonist to an outside, a nomadic exterior that forecloses any possibility of nostalgia but which suggests rather a tactics of metamorphosis and immediacy, a sublime deterritorialisation that involves music becoming-world and world becoming-music. Throughout the film, the appearance of the nomad is accompanied, even announced, by the onset of a hip-hop musical flow, always cinematically represented by Ghost Dog’s traversing the city streets or by lengthy tracking shots of a passenger pigeon in flight, both of which, to take just two examples, testify to purely nomadic concepts: not only to the sheer smoothness of open sky-space and flight with its techno-spiritual connotations, but also to invisible, inherited pathways that cross the stratified heart of the city undetected and untraceable. Embodied as it is in the Ghost Dog soundtrack, and grounded in what I have chosen to call an aesthetics of flow, hip-hop is no arbitrary force in the film; it is rather both the adaptive medium through which Ghost Dog and the samurai genre are redeemed and the very expression of this adaptation. Deleuze and Guattari write: The necessity of not having control over language, of being a foreigner in one’s own tongue, in order to draw speech to oneself and ‘bring something incomprehensible into the world.’ Such is the form of exteriority … that forms a war machine. (378) Nowhere else do Deleuze and Guattari more clearly outline the affinities that bind their notion of the nomad and the form of exteriority that is essential to it with the politics of language, cultural difference and authenticity which so color theories of race and critical analyses of hip-hop music and culture. And thus the key to hip-hop’s adaptive power lies in its spontaneity and in its bringing into the world of something incomprehensible and unanticipated. If the code in Ghost Dog is depicted as nonviolent, striated, interior, singular, austere and measured, then the flow in hip-hop and in the music of the Wu-Tang that informs Ghost Dog’s soundtrack is violent, fluid, exterior, variable, plural, playful and incalculable. The flow in hip-hop, as well as in Deleuze and Guattari’s work, is grounded in a kinetic linguistic spontaneity, variation and multiplicity. Its lyrical flow is a cascade of accelerating rhymes, the very speed and implausibility of which often creates a sort of catharsis in performers and spectators: I bomb atomically, Socrates’ philosophies and hypotheses can’t define how I be droppin’ these mockeries, lyrically perform armed robberies Flee with the lottery, possibly they spotted me Battle-scarred shogun, explosion. … (“Triumph”, Forever) Over and against the paradigm of the samurai, which as I have shown is connected with relations of content and interiority, the flow is attested to even more explicitly in the Wu-Tang’s embrace of the martial arts, kung-fu and Chinese cinematic traditions. And any understanding of the figure of the samurai in the contemporary hip-hop imagination must contend with the relationship of this figure to both the kung-fu fighting traditions and to kung-fu cinema, despite the fact that they constitute very different cultural and historical forms. I would, of course, argue that it is precisely this playful adaptation or literal deterritorialisation of otherwise geographically and culturally distinct realities that comprises the adaptive potential of hip-hop. Kung-fu, like hip-hop, is predicated on the exteriority of style. It is also a form of action based on precision and immediacy, on the fluid movements of the body itself deterritorialised as weapon, and thus it reiterates that blend of violence, speed and fluidity that grounds the hip-hop aesthetic: “I’ll defeat your rhyme in just four lines / Yeh, I’ll wax you and tax you and plus save time” (RZA and Norris, 211). Kung-fu lends itself to improvisation and to adaptability, essential qualities of combat and of lyrical flows in hip-hop music. For example, just as in kung-fu combat a fighter’s success is fundamentally determined by his ability to intuit and adapt to the style and skill and detailed movements of his adversary, the victory of a hip-hop MC engaged in, say, a freestyle battle will be determined by his capacity for improvising and adapting his own lyrical flow to counter and overcome his opponent’s. David Bordwell not only draws critical lines of difference between the Hong Kong and Hollywood action film but also hints at the striking differences between the “delirious kinetic exhilaration” of Hong Kong cinema and the “sober, attenuated, and grotesque expressivity” of the traditional Japanese samurai film (91-2). Moreover, Bordwell emphasises what the Wu-Tang Clan has always known and demonstrated: the sympathetic bond between kung-fu action or hand-to-hand martial arts combat and the flow in hip-hop music. Bordwell calls his kung-fu aesthetic “expressive amplification”, which communicates with the viewer through both a visual and physical intelligibility and which is described by Bordwell in terms of beats, exaggerations, and the “exchange and rhyming of gestures” (87). What is pointed to here are precisely those aspects of Hong Kong cinema that share essential similarities with hip-hop music as such and which permeate the Wu-Tang aesthetic and thus, too, challenge or redistribute the codified stillness and negativity that define the filmic atmosphere of Ghost Dog. Bordwell argues that Hong Kong cinema constitutes an aesthetics in action that “pushes beyond Western norms of restraint and plausibility,” and in light of my thesis, I would argue that it pushes beyond these same conventions in traditional Japanese cinema as well (86). Bruce Lee, too, in describing the difference between Chinese kung-fu and Japanese fighting forms in A Warrior’s Journey (Bruce Little, 2000) points to the latter’s regulatory principles of hesitation and segmentarity and to the former’s formlessness and shapelessness, describing kung-fu when properly practiced as “like water, it can flow or it can crash,” qualities which echo not only Bordwell’s description of the pause-burst-pause pattern of kung-fu cinema’s combat sequences but also the Wu-Tang Clan’s own self-conception as described by GZA (“Jizza”), a close relative of RZA and co-founder of the Wu-Tang Clan, when he is asked to explain the inspiration for the title of his album Liquid Swords: Actually, ‘Liquid Swords’ comes from a kung-fu flick. … But the title was just … perfect. I was like, ‘Legend of a Liquid Sword.’ Damn, this is my rhymes. This is how I’m spittin’ it. We say the tongue is symbolic of the sword anyway, you know, and when in motion it produces wind. That’s how you hear ‘wu’. … That’s the wind swinging from the sword. The ‘Tang’, that’s when it hits an object. Tang! That’s how it is with words. (RZA and Norris, 67) Thus do two competing styles animate the aesthetic dynamics of the film Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai: an aesthetic of codified arrest and restraint versus an aesthetic of nomadic resistance and escape. The former finds expression in the film in the form of the cultural and historical meanings of the samurai tradition, defined by negation and attenuated sobriety, and in the “blank parody” (Otomo, 35) of a postmodern nostalgia for an empty historical past exemplified in the appropriation of the Samurai theme and in the post-industrial prohibitions and stratifications of contemporary life and experience; the latter is attested to in the affirmative kinetic exhilaration of kung-fu style, immediacy and expressivity, and in the corresponding adaptive potential of a hip-hop musical flow, a distributive, productive, and anti-nostalgic becoming, the nomadic essence of which redeems the rhetoric of postmodern loss described by the film. References Bordwell, David. “Aesthetics in Action: Kungfu, Gunplay, and Cinematic Expressivity.” At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World. Ed. and Trans. Esther Yau. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2004. Bruce Lee: A Warrior’s Journey. Dir./Filmmaker John Little. Netflix DVD. Warner Home Video, 2000. Daidjo, Yuzan. Code of the Samurai. Trans. Thomas Cleary. Tuttle Martial Arts. Boston: Tuttle, 1999. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP,1987. Forman, Murray, and Mark Anthony Neal, eds. That’s the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 2004. Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. Dir. Jim Jarmusch. Netflix DVD. Artisan, 2000. Hurst, G. Cameron III. Armed Martial Arts of Japan. New Haven: Yale UP,1998. Ikegami, Eiko. The Taming of the Samurai. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995. Jansen, Marius, ed. Warrior Rule in Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Kurosawa, Akira. Seven Samurai and Other Screenplays. Trans. Donald Richie. London: Faber and Faber, 1992. Lanzagorta, Marco. “Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai.” Senses of Cinema. Sept-Oct 2002. http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/cteq/02/22/ghost_dog.htm>. Mol, Serge. Classical Fighting Arts of Japan. Tokyo/New York: Kodansha Int., 2001. Otomo, Ryoko. “‘The Way of the Samurai’: Ghost Dog, Mishima, and Modernity’s Other.” Japanese Studies 21.1 (May 2001) 31-43. Potter, Russell. Spectacular Vernaculars. Albany: SUNY P, 1995. RZA, The, and Chris Norris. The Wu-Tang Manual. New York: Penguin, 2005. Silver, Alain. The Samurai Film. Woodstock, New York: Overlook, 1983. Smith, Christopher Holmes. “Method in the Madness: Exploring the Boundaries of Identity in Hip-Hop Performativity.” Social Identities 3.3 (Oct 1997): 345-75. Watkins, Craig S. Representing: Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1998. Wu-Tang Clan. Enter the Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers. CD. RCA/Loud Records, 1993. ———. Wu-Tang Forever. CD. RCA/Loud Records, 1997. Xing, Yan, ed. Shaolin Kungfu. Trans. Zhang Zongzhi and Zhu Chengyao. Beijing: China Pictorial, 1996. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Eubanks, Kevin P. "Becoming-Samurai: Samurai (Films), Kung-Fu (Flicks) and Hip-Hop (Soundtracks)." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/11-eubanks.php>. APA Style Eubanks, K. (May 2007) "Becoming-Samurai: Samurai (Films), Kung-Fu (Flicks) and Hip-Hop (Soundtracks)," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/11-eubanks.php>.