Industrial Culture

Stranger Than Paradise is a 1984 American deadpan comedy film. It was written and directed by Jim Jarmusch, and stars jazz musician John Lurie, former Sonic Youth drummer-turned-actor Richard Edson, and Hungarian-born actress Eszter Balint. The film features a minimalist plot in which Willie and his friend Eddie go to visit Willie's cousin Eva in Cleveland. The film in notable for its high historical importance, particularly upon independent cinema. The low-budget aesthetics of the film set an example for later independent directors.

The film is a three-act story about self-identified "hipster" Willie (John Lurie), who lives in New York City, and his interactions with the two other main characters, Eva (Eszter Balint) and Eddie (Richard Edson). In the first act, Willie's cousin Eva comes from Hungary to stay with him for ten days because Aunt Lottie, who she will be staying with, will be in the hospital. Willie at first makes it clear that he does not want her there, but soon begins to enjoy her company. This becomes especially true when Eva steals food items from a grocery store, and gets a TV dinner for Willie. He ends up buying her a dress, which she later discards. After ten days, Eva leaves, and Willie is clearly upset to see her go. Eddie, who had met Eva previously, sees her right before she goes.

The second act opens with a long take showing Willie and Eddie winning a large amount of money by cheating at a game of poker. Willie decides, because of all the money they now have, to leave the city. They decide to go to Cleveland to see Eva. However, when they get there they are just as bored as they were in New York. For example, they end up tagging along with Eva and a friend, Billy, to the movies. They eventually decide to go and head back to New York.

Jarmusch was born to a European American family of middle-class suburbanites in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio in 1953. His mother had been a reviewer of film and theatre for the Akron Beacon Journal before marrying his father, a businessman who worked for the B.F. Goodrich Company. She introduced the future director, the middle of three children, to the world of cinema by leaving him at a local theater to watch matinee double features such as Attack of the Crab Monsters and Creature From the Black Lagoon while she ran errands. The first adult film he recalls having seen was the 1958 cult classic Thunder Road (starring Robert Mitchum) the violence and darkness of which left an impression on the seven-year-old Jarmusch. Another B-movie influence from his childhood was Ghoulardi, an eccentric Cleveland television show which featured horror films.

Despite his enthusiasm for film, Jarmusch, an avid reader in his youth, had a greater interest in literature, a pursuit in which he was encouraged by his grandmother. Though he refused to attend church with his Episcopalian parents (not being enthused by "the idea of sitting in a stuffy room wearing a little tie"), Jarmusch credits literature with shaping his metaphysical beliefs and leading him to reconsider theology in his mid-teens. From his peers he developed a taste for counterculture: he and his friends would steal the records and books of their older siblings – William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Mothers of Invention. They made fake identity documents which allowed them to visit bars at the weekend but also the local art house cinema – which though it typically showed pornographic films would on occasion feature underground films such as Robert Downey, Sr.'s Putney Swope and Andy Warhol's Chelsea Girls. At one point, he took an apprenticeship with a commercial photographer. "Growing up in Ohio", he would later remark, "was just planning to get out".

Jarmusch is ascribed as having instigated the American independent film movement with Stranger Than Paradise. Critic Lynn Hirschberg declared Stranger than Paradise in a 2005 profile of the director for The New York Times to have "permanently upended the idea of independent film as an intrinsically inaccessible avant-garde form". The success of the film accorded the director a certain iconic status within arthouse cinema, as an idiosyncratic and uncompromising auteur exuding the aura of urban cool embodied by downtown Manhattan. Such perceptions were compounded with the release of his subsequent features in the late 1980s, establishing him as one of the generation's most prominent and influential independent filmmakers. In a 1989 review of his work, Vincent Canby of The New York Times called Jarmusch "the most adventurous and arresting film maker to surface in the American cinema in this decade".

Jarmusch was recognized with the Filmmaker on the Edge award at the 2004 Provincetown Film Festival.[54] A retrospective of the director's films was hosted at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during February 1994, and another, "The Sad and Beautiful World of Jim Jarmusch", by the American Film Institute in August 2005.

Source:
Wikipedia