| Name: | Description: | Size: | Format: | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 313.61 KB | Adobe PDF |
Authors
Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
In this article I focus on a trilogy of films of the eighties and nineties of the 20th century ̶ "Mystery Train" (1989), "Night on Earth" (1991) and "Coffee and Cigarettes" (2003) ̶ to highlight a deliberate authorial discourse on narrative cinema and the role of the master enunciator therein. In them narration is not only a way to convey meaning; it is the very meaning that is sought to be conveyed. Perceived as highly fragmentary, these films possess a hidden structural consistency which begs to be discovered, like a well-kept secret. "Mystery Train" is composed of three sets of events that befall three groups of people simultaneously in the American city of Memphis. Although the stories are told consecutively, the film demands that the chronological actions be put together through an operation of time mapping amounting to a process of spaciotemporal reconstruction based both on the constant elements in the three stories and the explicit variations thereof. "Coffee and Cigarettes" is an apparently random series of vignettes composed of people meeting in coffee houses, but in fact it turns out to be a complex pattern of narrative pairings based on disguised similarities (helped along by the non-consecutive order of the pairs). A former graduate in literature, Jarmusch fights spectatorial immersion via an intensification of narrative where beneath the apparent disconnection of the parts lies the well-conceived architecture of the whole.
Description
Keywords
Metanarrative Enunciation Mystery Train Coffee and Cigarettes Jim Jarmusch
Citation
CHINITA, Fátima. "Jim Jarmusch as meta-narrative master" In: "Les Variations Jarmusch" [online]. Arras: Artois Presses Université, 2017 (generated 31 janvier 2022). Available on the Internet: <http:// books.openedition.org/apu/15051>. ISBN: 9782848324302. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/books.apu. 15051.
Publisher
Artois Presses Université