Dead Man

by Jonathan Rosenbaum

Overview

When it was released in 1995, Dead Man puzzled many audiences and critics. Jim Jarmusch's reputation was for directing slick, hip contemporary films. And Dead Man was a black-and-white Western. As time has passed, though, the number of its admirers has grown rapidly. Indeed Dead Man, with its dark and unconventional treatment of violence, racism and capitalism, may be Jarmusch's finest work to date.

This is Jonathan Rosenbaum's view. For him, Dead Man is both a quantum leap and a logical next step in Jarmusch's career. Starring Johnny Depp as the uprooted accountant William Blake and Gary Farmer as his enigmatic Native American companion, Nobody, and with startling cameos from Robert Mitchum, John Hurt and Iggy Pop, Dead Man is by turns shocking, comic and deeply moving. This book explorers and celebrates a masterpiece of 1990s American cinema.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781838715212
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	07/25/2019
Series:	BFI Film Classics
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

Jonathan Rosenbaum is the film critic of the Chicago Reader. Among his books are Placing Movies (1995); Movies as Politics (1997); and a study of Greed (1993) in the BFI Film Classics series.
Jonathan Rosenbaum is film critic for the Chicago Reader and author of Movie Wars (2002) and Dead Man (BFI Modern Classics, 2000), among many other books.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
1. Jim Jarmusch as American Independent, Dead Man as Deal-breaker
2. The Story
3. On Tobacco
4. On Violence
5. On Music
6. On the Acid Western
7. Frontier Poetry
8. Closure
Appendix: Aside on Authorship and Methods of Composition
Notes
Credits
Bibliography

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

The book follows the narrative and picks out some of the stand-out cameos as well as some of the choice of dialogue, music, style and violence within. Just another good choice from the BFI/Palgrave on another solid film with heavy content.' - Filmwerk