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Year of the Horse
Year of the Horse
Year of the Horse |
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USA ,
1997, 107 min, black & white, color |
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Jim Jarmusch's low-tech tribute to the 30-year-old collaboration between grunge godfather Neil Young and his favorite garage band, Crazy Horse, is both a quirky little movie and a monument to one of rock & roll's greatest noisemakers. Partially culled from some gritty archival material shot in 1976 and 1986, and supplemented by lots of super-8 footage of Young and Crazy Horse between shows while on a concert tour (the concert footage itself appears to be shot on 16mm), Year of the Horse is very much like one of the band's paradoxical performances: epic but transitory, ragged but direct, focused but improvisational. Jarmusch understands Crazy Horse and its quixotic musical quest too well to embalm them in a conventional profile-and-performance "rockumentary." Instead, he honors the off-and-on marriage of Young and the others by treating the various chapters of their lives together as shadows in time, fleeting glimpses of a brotherhood that has no secrets. Jarmusch devotes some time to the ghosts in this film – Danny Whitten, Crazy Horse's original guitarist, and the band's late manager – then disperses them with eerie, soundless footage of black-and-white shapes that flutter off into their own void. It's the same poetic dance of light and shadow that caught Jarmusch's fancy in Stranger Than Paradise and Dead Man, but here – as with Neil Young and Crazy Horse at their musical best – it is pure in its essence, nonliteral, pouring in from some fount of raw discovery and inspiration. Exciting stuff, as are performances of band workhorses such as "Sedan Delivery" and the gorgeous "Like a Hurricane."
Tom Keogh
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Jim Jarmusch |
With his trademark shock of white hair and ultra-cool rock star persona, Jim Jarmusch is the archetypal auteur of American independent film. Steadfastly resisting the sirens of Hollywood, Jarmusch has fashioned stylish, worldly, and thoroughly hip movies that have been the toast of the international film circuit.
Born on January 22, 1953, in Akron, OH, Jarmusch was the son of a former film critic for the Akron Beacon Journal. As a child, he spent much of his time watching B-movie triple features. After graduating from high school in 1971, he ended up in New York before venturing to Paris one summer on an exchange program. He loved the place so much that he stayed there for a year, soaking up French culture, literature, and particularly films, spending much of his time going to the cinématheque instead of to classes. At that time, the hallowed French New Wave movement was still a recent memory and such luminaries as François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, and Jean-Luc Godard were still regularly making movies. Upon his return to New York, Jarmusch transferred to Columbia University, where, though he eventually received a degree in English literature, his love of film continued to inspire him. With no film experience, he was accepted into New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and soon found himself a teaching assistant to legendary maverick filmmaker Nicholas Ray. Ray helped him get funding for his thesis project, Permanent Vacation (1980). Though the film was later released to critical acclaim, his professors were underwhelmed by his final project and Jarmusch never got a degree from N.Y.U.
The stamp of Jarmusch is his tendency to a gently absurdist, understated comedy, which affectionately punctures the cool, hip pretensions and delusions of his self-consciously laconic loners. The compositions are uncluttered, often static and oddly formal, stressing the essential solitude of characters seemingly obsessed with self-definition. The sparing dialogue, generally minimalist performances and a preference for long takes evoke lives plagued by problems of communication, misunderstanding, rootlessness and inertia. At the same time, Jarmusch’s elliptical, dedramatised, episodic narrative style is symptomatic of his restlessly experimental interest in the method and structure of cinematic storytelling. Crucially, however, this interest in formalism is balanced by subtle wit, the warmth he clearly feels for his characters and a bemused, intelligent interest in the unfamiliar backroads of American life (the underrated Dead Man was a decidedly different western), so that he remains one of the most accessible, original and influential of that country’s independent film-makers.
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| 1980 Permanent Vacation |
| 1984 Stranger Than Paradise |
| 1986 Coffee and Cigarettes |
| 1986 Down by Law |
| 1989 Coffee and Cigarettes II |
| 1989 Mystery Train |
| 1991 Night on Earth |
| 1993 Coffee and Cigarettes III |
| 1995 Dead Man |
| 1997 Year of the Horse |
| 1999 Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai |
| 2002 Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet |
| 2003 Coffee and Cigarettes |
| 2005 Broken Flowers |
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