Author's Voice:

          Dead Man, Mystery Train, now Down by Law, director Jim Jarmusch definitely has a style to his films. Overall his films are similar in the style of cinematography, two in black and white, loves to follow characters walking through the environment, and staying on characters for uncomfortable amounts of time. He never hurries the story along and tend to be pretty minimalistic in set and design. There never seems to really be a clear plot, but all the stories are about a journey, but not a specific destination be the end. Dead Man, the lead guy is an accountant and goes to this tiny town for work, doesn't get the job, kills a guy, and is now on the run.

          Mystery Train has two Japanese  teenagers wanting to see the sights of Tennessee for they love rock and roll, but no set destination or goal in mind. Down by Law, the guys escape jail, but have no idea where they are going, just that they got to go. His films feel like the audience jumped into these peoples lives and are watching them in real time, no montages to condense time. Music seems to have an importance in his films as well, all playing music from the time or mentioning artists from the time. Mystery Train has a parallel narrative, three successive stories that take place in a small Memphis hotel on the same night. All of his characters tend to be loners, losers, low on money, petty, con men, yet they are all likable to a point. I would never want to know them or have any association with them, but as a viewer you don't hate them for most are not the best people but they are framed by others to be viewed as worse.

          Jarmusch seems to enjoy diving into different cultures in these films, Dead Man being the old west, Mystery Train showing the difference between Japanese and old American Culture, and with Down by Law shows a low class americans and an Italian immigrant. There is no female development, not a lot of screen time, and have no power, which I didn't enjoy about these three films. The main characters seem to be brought together through circumstances and that alone for they would never have been together otherwise, and this is the same for loyalty, everyone was out for themselves. He loves throwing in a foreign character who doesn't understand the culture they have been thrown into, and that way the audience gets to see an interesting point of view. The character development throughout the film is mainly accomplished through action and dialogue. They all are outsiders and it gives us a different point of view with a dry sense of humor and unexpected obstacles popping up everywhere. Yet, in the films it feels very empty in all the landscapes, the west and the cities all feel empty.

          Meshes of the Afternoon, Ritual in Transfigured Time, and Meditation on Violence are three films directed by Maya Deren , born Eleanora Derenkowskaia (Russian) was one of the most important American experimental filmmakers and entrepreneurial promoters of the avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s. Deren was also a choreographer, dancer, film theorist, poet, lecturer, writer and photographer.

          In 1943, Deren purchased a used 16 mm Bolex camera with some of the inheritance money after her father's death from a heart attack. This camera captured her first and best-known film, Meshes of the Afternoon, in Los Angeles in collaboration with Hammid. Meshes of the Afternoon is recognized as a seminal American avant-garde film. It is the first narrative film in avant-garde American film, which critics have said took on an autobiographical tone - for women and the individual. The loose repetition and rhythm cuts short any expectation of a conventional narrative, heightening the dream-like qualities. The camera initially avoids her face, which precludes identification with a particular woman's face. Multiple selves appear, shifting between the first and third person, suggesting that the super-ego is at play, which is in line with the psychoanalytic Freudian staircase and flower motifs. Very aware of the "personal film," her first piece explores a woman's subjectivity and her relation to the external world.

          By her fourth film, Deren discussed in An Anagram that she felt special attention should be given to unique possibilities of time and that the form should be ritualistic as a whole. Ritual in Transfigured Time began in August and was completed in 1946. It explored the fear of rejection and the freedom of expression in abandoning ritual, looking at the details as well as the bigger ideas of the nature and process of change. Deren's Meditation on Violence was made in 1948. Chao-Li Chi's performance obscures the distinction between violence and beauty. It was an attempt to "abstract the principle of ongoing metamorphosis," found in Ritual in Transfigured Time, though Deren felt it was not as successful in the clarity of that idea, brought down by its philosophical weight. Halfway through the film, the sequence is rewound, producing a film loop.