Dead Man

This film is half the reason I stopped being an investment banker and became a film-maker.

I have seen it at least ten times, and each time I discover more depth and beauty.

I have show this film to many people, and most unfortunately do not see in it what I see.

I feel sorry for them that I cannot give them my eyes, because I know that what I see in this film is really there.

For me this is one of the best films I have ever seen. Subtle in its beauty and magnificence.

If you see it and don't love it, I say see it again.

Dead Man is a unique piece of film. As this is my first taste of Jim Jarmusch, I had no idea of what to expect, but even if I had; I reckon that this film wouldn't have conformed to them. Dead Man is a surreal and trippy western that peels itself away from the staples of the genre and succeeds in creating something truly one-off and self-styled. Lead by a score written by Neil Young, Dead Man is continually satisfying and powerful; and you get the impression that every scene has been fully thought through, and is perfectly realised as the auteur intended. For this reason, Dead Man captivates it's viewer from the moment it starts until the moment it ends, and as it descends into full blown trippy weirdness, you can do nothing but stare in admiration of this strange gem of cult cinema. The plot is thin on the ground and it largely lacks meaning, but it doesn't matter because Dead Man is a purely aesthetic experience. Still, it follows William Blake (Johnny Depp), an accountant from Cleveland that arrives in a town to take a job offer, only to find that the vacancy has already been filled…

Dead Man is filmed in very stark black and white, which only adds to the surrealism of the story. Had this film have been done in colour, it would not have captured the same atmosphere that the black and white gives it; and so this decision was an inspired one indeed. One staple of the western genre that Jarmusch is keen to retain is the use of close-ups. The director spends a lot of time caressing Depp's facial features with his camera and, at times, even focuses on his lead actor when the action doesn't concern him. Aside from keeping in with the western tradition, this also allows Jarmusch to keep the focus on the main character, which keeps the viewer focused on his plight. For this film, Jarmusch has put together a cast of B-movie icons that will have B-movie fans foaming at the mouth. Crispin Glover, Robert Mitchum, Billy Bob Thornton, Lance Henriksen, Gabriel Byrne, John Hurt, Alfred Molina and even Iggy Pop feature and it's great to see so many faces in the same movie. The cast is, of course, lead by a man who is perhaps today's best actor; Johnny Depp. Depp's name on a credit list speaks for itself, and I don't need to tell you that his performance is great; nor do I need to point out the effortless cool that this movie exudes, largely thanks to the great man's presence. My only advice is see it...see it now.

During my late teens and early twenties, I was taken to see many films by a friend of mine who was the son of a Persian film director.

He was never interested in what I thought of a film until we were outside the cinema but told me how to watch the film, during the film.

One of the first films I saw was Jim Jarmusch's Down by Law in the Turkish quarter of Paris with French subtitles. We sat in the front row and roared. We were the only ones. It all seemed rather lost on the rest of the audience. All the way through he told me the things to see.

Here are a few. First, Robbie Muller's cinematography. Beautiful vistas moving to the pace of the film. Paris, Texas springs to mind.

Second, the recognition of amorality in the world; a world of "nature red in tooth and claw". All of Jarmusch's films that I've seen have a "rough diamond" edge running through them. An edge where the animal response is the correct one - the place that Hitchock always alluded to but never dared go to.

Third, "incompleteness" if there is such a word. Jarmusch always leaves questions dangling; Why was Carl Perkins better than Elvis (or vice versa)? Did Eva really go back to Hungary? Is Nobody already dead? In this sense, Jarmusch is more a novelist than a film maker - he leaves much for you to fill in with your mind's eye. Quite an achievement, considering how compelling the visuals of film are.

For me, Jarmusch's daring is that he allows the viewer to fill in a lot of the context for a scene. The context, naturally, defines the scene, yet Jarmusch is bold enough to let the viewer place it later. Perhaps much later, when you've worked it out.

So when I watched dead man, I was ready. The last Johnny Depp film I'd seen was Chocolat, superb. I understood and appreciated Robbie Muller's approach and I had most of Jarmusch to date under my belt.

Two things sprang to mind with Dead Man. The first was a Sci-fi novel, written because the author was 20 something and needed the money. The second was the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

The first occurred to me because of the way I encountered it. I was researching and building eLearning systems at the time and the eLearning crowd hailed Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card as the eLearner's sci-fi novel. I read it and the basic lesson is that the training has to be so real that the student doesn't know when it's really real and, even then half thinks it's training.

The second occurred to me as a consequence of the first. The Tibetan Book of the Dead is a manual for dying and being reborn. It has options such as getting out of the wheel of incarnation altogether or doing a damage limitation exercise on how limited your capabilities are going to be in the next life - and everything in between.

One of the central premises of this yoga is that life as we know it is a simulation of the real life - a kind of Ender's game, if you will. When one sees the finite from the position of the eternal, the question of where one ends and the other begins inevitably arises and it's this that Jarmusch captures so wonderfully in Dead Man.

William Blake (the real one) had none of this knowledge that we have today but what he did have is opium. Survey the poetry of the opium-heads. They all had a sense of eternal spirit - it comes with the drug. It gives the connectedness and empathy of E with the hallucinations of A but the chilled response to it all of weed.

Like Jarmusch, Blake, Coleridge and the rest recognise the harsh reality of the nature we live in, yet are still able to celebrate its beauty and the lessons that it has to teach us.

The pace of Dead Man is that of an opium hit, one only has to take the stuff or read the Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz's Adrift on the Nile to see that. The Neil Young sound track is naturally irritating if one cannot settle down into the pace of the film. For those who understand it, it is the hypnotic metronome that keeps time for days after the film has ended.

Magical.

Jim Jarmusch is one of my favorite directors, and Dead Man is probably the greatest work he has ever done. Very rarely does a film come alive with a sense of poetry. The only other film I can compare it to would be Wim Wenders' Wings Of Desire. The film moves like a dream, floating and spinning around you. Neil Young's electric score churns like a ghost train and pushes the film farther. There isn't one performance that is wrong, nor is there ever a false moment. From start to finish this film pulls you into it's dream land, and carries you along on clouds until the finish.

Originally from Cleveland, William Blake gets a job as an accountant in a place called "Machine Town". Already in the train that takes him to the Dickinson wood factory an "unknown guy" warn him against the place he is going to. It is not fortune that awaits him but Death. Indeed the first night in "Machine Town", Blake is shot at and wounded. From this point on start a long journey of wandering in company of Nobody, an Indian and a philosopher.

This black and white film is mesmerizing. Obviously the black and white marks a rupture between what you are used to…So in essence this rupture is between let say classic Western and Jim Jarmush western as he re-visit the genre. It is also a way to keep the audience to what is essential…Color is a filter that can distract you, the sobriety of black and white will not.

But what exactly is essential in that movie? Beside the fact that Mr. Jarmush depict a brutal and impulsive America, the movie opposes a new born civilization that is already collapsing and a dying one that is still shining…But more than that the journey of William Blake is a metaphoric and circular voyage from misunderstanding to certitude. The guide Nobody, himself trapped between the two civilizations can not provide a cure to the passing man but may very well provide a path to a curing one. This journey from Machine Town, the "anti chamber" of hell to the sea, first step to Heaven is tremendously poetic and emotional. Also emotional is the evolution from misunderstanding to comprehension between Nobody and William Blake who eventually settles on what is essential reaching a common ground, clarity…

Help by a haunting and beautiful score from Neil Young and an extraordinary cast the film succeed in transforming the wood wagon of hell in which William Blake embarks to the wooden vessel to heaven in which he will lie.

One of the best films from Mr. Jarmush, Dead Man manages to take the audience in one of cinema most poetic journey