Abel Ferrara Talking Smack, Crack & The Silver Screen

Festival du Nouveau Cinema: Behind Jim Jarmusch

The French love Paul Auster and Jim Jarmusch. More than they love Umberto Eco and Italo Calvino, who are Italian and therefore beloved but not loved. Not in the gushy, Gallic fan-boy manner that Mr. Auster and Jarmusch are loved, at least. And that's fair - Paul Auster's post-Jungian mysticism is a lot cooler than Robertson Davies', and Jim Jarmusch has the right pedigree of Manhattan art-world cool, plus he's quiet. Still waters run deep. This is a nation that never turned its back on Mickey Rourke, and there's a consistency in that that must be admired. (This is also a nation that gave us Manu Chao, but I digress...)

French film director Léa Rinaldi shot Behind Jim Jarmusch over the course of three days, while Jarmusch was working in Seville on The Limits of Control, his most recent film, the poorly received and slow-moving absurdist crime film.

In this clip, Jim Jarmusch walks and talks about being lost, which when translated into French would be understood as "Lost. Being lost. What is this act of being lost? Are we ever truly lost? To be lost is... To be. To be lost is who we are."

Behind Jim Jarmusch is playing as part of the Festival du Nouveau Cinema on the following dates:

October 8th 1pm Cinema du Parc
October 15th 9:15pm Ex-Centris
October 18th 1pm Ex-Centris

If you miss it, the film will be featured as an extra on the DVD of Limits of Control when it's released in November.

Crazy People

Zenas Winsor Mackay's The Centaurs (1921)

Winsor Mackay, the possibly Canadian but entirely talented creator of the comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland, also might have been as crazy as his spiritual successor, Henry Darger, if one imagines what we aren't able to see from this baffling animated short from 1921. A family of centaurs in the forest, huh? Check out the rest of the footage and marvel at what once was and now will never be.