Format: DVD

Release date: 23 February 2009

Distributor: Network

Director: Herk Harvey

Writer: John Clifford

Cast: Candace Hilligoss, Frances Feist, Sidney Berger, Stan Levitt, Art Ellison

USA 1962

75 mins

Two cars, one black, the other white, wait at traffic lights. One of the passengers goads the other driver into a race. The lights change and both cars lurch forward. They jostle, pulling tightly together before crossing a bridge. Speeding toward the other side, one of the vehicles nudges the other, pushing it through the crash barrier and into the river. Three hours later a survivor, Mary Henry, drags herself out of the dirty water and up onto a sandbank. She can barely stand, still lost in the current she has just emerged from, the voices of those who have rushed to help her muffled by her catatonic state. So begins Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls (1962).

Self-financed and made with local talent, Harvey’s film is a true cinematic oddity: a one-off hit for its director, Carnival of Souls is not quite a fully-fledged horror film. Its imagery and style push it more toward art-house or underground cinema, albeit one tainted by too many episodes of The Twilight Zone. The narrative unfolds like a funereal dream, a bizarre juxtaposition of a mundane life splintered with moments of the uncanny. Such qualities have earned it seminal status in the horror canon, and its storyline and imagery have reverberated throughout the genre – George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1978), Adrian Lyne’s Jacob’s Ladder (1990), and the recent series of Final Destination films are just a few that borrow from Harvey’s film.

Following her emergence from the river, Mary becomes increasingly isolated from those around her. Her distance and, at times, antagonistic interaction with men suggests sexual repression whilst positioning the many male characters she encounters – her lecherous neighbour, the priest for whom she works, the doctor and other incidental characters – as either sexual predators or further suppressors of her fragile psychology. Out of these only one is truly suspect, the ominously named ‘The Man’: played by the director himself, this suited, pale-faced ghost haunts Mary throughout the film. As a figment of her imagination, this spectre manifests all of Mary’s repressed fears of the opposite sex, personifying them as a dark and malevolent force she cannot communicate with, touch or understand. This sense of repression is consolidated by the film’s saturation in water imagery: the lingering close-ups of the river, the bath which Mary takes and the water fountain she drinks from, salt-water bathing at the abandoned pavilion and finally an image of The Man submerged in filthy water, his eyes wide open and unblinking.

Originally distributed by Herts-Lion, Carnival of Souls was edited down in order for it to fit into their drive-in double-bill circuit. Scenes of character exposition and the background history of the film’s antagonistic location, the abandoned Pavilion, were all cut to reduce the running time. Network’s release restores these ‘lost’ scenes and, although not adding significantly to the experience of the film, they do lend a perverse sense of reality to this dream-like film and act as further signposts to Mary’s progressively delusional state.

In addition to these scenes, the DVD features a commentary from Kim Newman and Stephen Jones and a booklet, also written by Newman. The commentary is conversational and spiked with moments of erudite analysis as much as with production trivia and humour, making it a valuable insight into a film that has somehow managed to escape in-depth critical analysis.

From the very start to its unpredictable ending, Carnival of Souls is a startlingly dark and atmospheric film. As either horror cinema, art-house experiment or study of an increasingly deranged mind, its narrative has currents that run far deeper than the drive-in exploitation it was often double-billed with. Herein lays Harvey’s legacy, a template of plot, images, characters and subtexts for cinema’s rich and horrific dreams.

James Rose

Format: DVD

Release date: 16 March 2009

Distributor: Peccadillo Pictures

Director: Royston Tan

Writers: Royston Tan, Liam Yeo

Cast: Xiao Liu Yuan, Kim Young-jun

Singapore 2005

95 mins

In the opening scene of 4:30, Royston Tan’s 2005 feature, a boy wearing little more than a white vest and shorts sits alone on a stairwell at night, cradling a CD player in his lap. The sense of heat and humidity is palpable, while the lyrics we hear on the soundtrack set the tone for the rest of the film: ‘sadness and sorrow surround me… everyday I’m praying for the loneliness to be chased away’.

Fans of Tan’s previous movie, 15 – a stylised, violent look at teenage gangs in the Singapore suburbs – may be surprised by the direction that the filmmaker took for his follow-up feature. Gone are the video game aesthetics, the frenetic pacing, jump cuts and heavy use of distorted angles; Tan instead uses long scenes, single takes and carefully composed cinematography to convey the powerful sense of emotional distance that pervades this near-wordless film. The result is a haunting meditation on solitude that is at times achingly heartbreaking to watch.

Eleven-year-old Xiao Wu (played by the impressive Xiao Liu Wan) has been left behind in his Singapore home with a Korean relative (Kim Young-jun), while his mother is in Beijing on a seemingly endless business trip. On the cusp of adolescence, Xiao Wu is fascinated by his depressed, suicidal uncle. Every morning, the boy’s alarm goes off at 4:30 (the loneliest hour, according to Tan), and every morning he prowls around his uncle’s room, spying on him while he sleeps sprawled across his bed. Wu fantasises about having a father figure, but unable to speak the same language, his wordless overtures go mostly unnoticed in the face of his uncle’s overwhelming, mysterious sorrow. Gradually, the boy’s playfulness is eroded, leaving him immersed in his own painful loneliness.

While there are moments of humour throughout the film, Tan’s focus on distance is all-consuming. The formal cinematography emphasises Wu’s sense of alienation, with the nephew and uncle often seen reflected in mirrored surfaces, giving a physical dimension to their solitude. Even the 70s-era furniture and colours (a green hue bathes much of the film) evoke a nostalgia for the past, distancing the film from brash, modern-day Singapore. While 4:30 shares some stylistic and thematic elements with films such as Tsai Ming-liang’s I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (2006), this is a far more accessible and engaging work, thanks in large part to the successful combination of remarkable characters and a style based on long takes.

Tan has teased powerful performances from his two leads, who were mostly kept apart during the making of the film to avoid any real-life intimacy creeping into their on-screen relationship. The emotional depth and intensity embodied by Xiao and Kim, expressed almost entirely in their eyes and body language, make a fairly slight plot compelling. There’s no happy ending: the mother doesn’t return, and in the end Xiao Wu is left completely alone. All he has learnt from his uncle about adulthood is sorrow and loneliness.

Sarah Cronin

Format: DVD

Release date: 23 February 2009

Distributor: Momentum Pictures

Director: Liu Chia-liang

Writer: Ni Kuang

Original title: Shao Lin san shi liu fang

Cast: Gordon Liu (aka Liu Chia-hui), Lo Lieh

Hong Kong 1978

115 mins

The majority of martial arts flicks that came to Western shores during the 70s and 80s were brutally kung fu chopped and edited to within an inch of their lives. Audiences wanted a load of punches and kicks for their buck, and that’s exactly what they got. When it was released in 1978, The 36th Chamber of Shaolin was one of the lucky few that slipped through the cracks, presenting a more accurate portrayal of the various traditions behind king fu combat. But many years and plenty of bootleg versions (in all their pan and scan glory) undermined the unique qualities of the Shaw Brothers’ martial arts classic. After such ruthless treatment the film has now been given a much deserved restoration.

On quick examination, you would be forgiven for thinking you had seen this film before: an oppressed village ruled by a tyrannical regime, a young man (played by 23-year-old Gordon Liu) who escapes with the intention of eventually returning to rid it of its evil rulers… The archetypical revenge plot is in full motion until Liu’s character reaches the Shaolin Temple to practise the ancient techniques of Shaolin kung fu. There he is renamed ‘San Te’ and learns that the art is not taught as a tool of vengeance.

Where many kung fu films feature a few obligatory scenes of schooling, The 36th Chamber evades the usual genre trappings. By dedicating the whole of the second part to the training San Te endures at the varying chambers, it forges a new template in which there is a greater reflection on the honing of all skills, from the physical to the intellectual and spiritual. Through the series of trials San Te undergoes a rebirth and refinement of the soul, rather than becoming the kind of barbaric assassin that the inappropriate American title Master Killer suggested.

Under the direction of Liu Chia-liang (aka Lau Kar-Leung, an expert martial artist himself), a potentially tedious second act instead highlights the artistry of kung fu. Using wide shots for the fight scenes and with a refreshing lack of quick cuts, the film constructs a faithful representation of kung fu, including the culture that surrounds it. Filming primarily on the Shaw Brothers’ soundstage, Liu captures a real sense of authenticity unrivalled by other productions of the time. The restored print reveals a surprisingly beautiful and detailed film that was hiding behind years of neglect, a grand vision inspired by Hollywood film design of the 40s and 50s.

The restoration gives The 36th Chamber a new lease of life. But this writer couldn’t help feeling a certain nostalgia for the familiar deterioration of the footage that made each shot different from the last, and for the scenes that started somewhere in the middle, adding to the confusion caused by the already incomprehensible plot. These flaws have been ironed out, and with them some of the joys of bunging a beat up video cassette into your VCR and asking for nothing more than to see some random, kick-ass kung fu fight scenes. To get some of this back, forget about your cinephile principles and switch on the English language option. The kung fu dub transports you to a time when these films were like nothing you had ever seen before: a true culture clash.

Alexander Godfrey

Also available on DVD on 23 February 2009: King Boxer (1972). The 36th Chamber of Shaolin and King Boxer are both drawn from the catalogue of Hong Kong’s legendary producers the Shaw Brothers. They are the first two releases on Dragon Dynasty, the DVD label founded (at the suggestion of Quentin Tarantino) by Bob and Harvey Weinstein specifically to release the very best of Asian cinema and newly launched in the UK by Momentum Pictures.

Format: DVD

Release date: 2 February 2009

Distributor: Contender Home Entertainment

Director: Takashi Miike

Writers: Takashi Miike, Masa Nakamura

Cast: Hideaki Ito, Koichi Sato, Yusuke Iseya, Kaori Momoi, Quentin Tarantino

Japan 2007

98 mins

Quentin Tarantino introduces this… wait, come back! OK, Tarantino may not have a great track record when it comes to acting but Miike’s offbeat Western is the perfect place for QT’s heavy-handed style. In fact, it’s a film that celebrates it. What will irritate/delight audiences first is that the Japanese cast also speak English, or at least attempt to. They gurn, lisp and sneer but it’s all part of Miike’s in-joke about Italian spaghetti Westerns, themselves always dubbed after filming – particularly badly in the English version of Sergio Corbucci’s Django (1966).

That the dialogue is largely incomprehensible is of little consequence. Characters deadpan the usual ‘a man’s gotta do’ clichés but Westerns aren’t about meaningful declamations, actions speak louder than words. The basic plot is Sergio Leone’s Fistful of Dollars (1964), Miike making a point of reclaiming Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961) for Japan: a lone nameless Gunman (Hideaki Ito) drifts into town in the middle of a war between two clans, the white-clad Genjis led by sword-wielding Yoshitsune (Yusuke Iseya) and the red-wearing Heikes under paranoid Kiyomori (Koichi Sato). Inevitably, much brawlin’ and shootin’ ensues but the fun’s to be had in Miike’s warped use of the genre’s iconography.

It’s a prequel of sorts to Django, and in a nod to the original film, the destructive Gatling gun that’s put to good use in the second half of the film is housed in a coffin. In the first part, which is somewhat mired by lengthy flashbacks explaining the town’s sorry state, the Gunman helps a mute boy whose father was murdered during the feud. Meanwhile, Kiyomori decides he should be addressed as Henry in tribute to Shakespeare and Yoshitsune dismisses the way of the samurai for a life of dirty combat. Throw in a schizophrenic sheriff who is hopeless at choosing sides and Kaori Momoi’s croaking old lady who transforms into a ruthless gunslinger – possibly the most bad-ass grandmother put to film – and you’ve got Miike’s usual brand of self-indulgent strangeness.

Viewers after more straightforward fun may prefer the old-fashioned sense of adventure and clearer archetypes of South Korea’s The Good, the Bad and the Weird (also released this month), but Miike isn’t interested in straightforward fun. Like Tarantino’s Kill Bill, Sukiyaki Western Django is about a fusion of styles, the mix of Wild West frontier law with Eastern historical traditions and interest in the natural cycle. The DVD has subtitles to aid comprehension of the story but viewers should watch the film as it is to take in the contrast of colours, the dirty, mud-caked town and the change of seasons that ends with a bleak, wintry finale.

Sukiyaki is a beef dish that represents a foreign influence on Japanese culture as this meat was not common in the country before its introduction. Sukiyaki Western Django is Miike’s demonstration of the many cultural boundaries film has crossed and re-crossed and how this has blurred any clear, predetermined notions of genre and national identity. At times it’s a challenging, impenetrable film, and Tarantino’s Grindhouse may be responsible for Miike’s sometimes misjudged ‘coolness’; yet, there’s no denying that it pushes genre conventions as far as they will go in this unique blend of surrealist cartoon and adult violence.

Richard Badley

View the trailer

Format: DVD

Release date: 26 January 2009

Distributor: Second Run

Directors: Kim Longinotto, Ziba Mir-Hosseini

Writer: Ziba Mir-Hosseini

Iran/UK 1998

80 mins

Also on this DVD: Runaway

Directors: Kim Longinotto, Ziba Mir-Hosseini

Writers: Kim Longinotto, Ziba Mir-Hosseini

UK 2001

87 mins

For the last 15 years, British documentarian Kim Longinotto’s work has focused on controversial issues concerning women from around world – from female circumcision in Kenya in The Day I Will Never Forget (2003) to cross-dressing in Japan in Shinjuku Boys (1995). Divorce Iranian Style was co-directed with ‘twice-divorced’ Iranian anthropologist Ziba Mir-Hosseini. Filmed inside an Iranian divorce court – after an 18-month wait to obtain permission – the film explores five cases and five fascinating and strong but very different women.

Rather than the exposé of ‘barbaric’ Iranian law the title seems to promise, we get a film that attempts to show the reality of how the legal system affects people’s lives. We meet Judge Deldar (which means ‘sweetheart’), a cleric and expert in Islamic law, who gradually becomes the film’s human centre. Delivering such hilarious statements (to Western ears) as ‘You must make yourself attractive so that he returns to your marriage’, he also displays endless patience in dealing with the near-hysterical Maryam who is fighting to keep her children. We see him sometimes torn but more often treading carefully between the written law and its practical implications.

Although the law seems hopelessly biased towards men we see how women use the few grounds for divorce they are allowed, such as insanity or impotence, to extricate themselves from unhappy marriages. Sixteen-year-old Ziba (not Mir-Hosseini) demands a sanity test for her husband although she also rails against his more prosaic faults – ‘everything stinks of cigarettes’ – at the same time openly bargaining with him to agree to a divorce by mutual consent – ‘for God’s sake, agree, then I’ll withdraw the complaint’, she whispers. However, in most cases it is the legal requirement that a man pays compensation to the wife he is divorcing that seems to be at the centre of all negotiations.

At times, the warring families seem like guests from Jerry Springer – perhaps this is evidence of how universal these issues are. But this is as far from reality TV as it is from the ‘documentarian-as-star’ films of Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock. This, like all Longinotto’s films, harks back to an earlier, less compromised era of documentary filmmaking, to films such as the Maysles Brothers’ Salesman (1969) – which give a greater understanding of their subjects by allowing them to show their humanity.

In interviews, Albert Maysles is consistently adamant that he was recording something very close to objective reality in his films – the presence of the camera and film crew was quickly ignored by the subjects, he argues. It seems to be the case here too: the protagonists are certainly more interested in the legal proceedings, and if they are ‘performing’ in any way, it’s in an attempt to influence the judge. But there are also great moments when this appearance of objectivity breaks down. At one point Maryam, who is denying tearing up a court order, asks the ‘film women’ to corroborate her story. A voice, presumably Mir-Hosseini’s, bends the truth very slightly by only stating what she saw and not what she knows. Despite the objectivity of the camera the filmmakers are clear in their sympathies – at one point a voice from behind the camera says to a dismayed husband: ‘It serves you right for marrying a 14-year-old girl.’ A great natural moment occurs when, with court room empty, the secretary’s seven-year-old daughter Paniz takes the judge’s seat and starts admonishing an imaginary husband. The result is something possibly more honest than the Maysles’s ‘fly-on-the-wall’; it should perhaps simply be called ‘camera-in-the-room’.

With the minimal voice-over stating facts rather than passing judgements, the film is something of an antidote to the ‘fanatical angry culture’ prevalent in news films. But perhaps most importantly, it refuses to show Middle-Eastern women as subservient and powerless. The strength of character of all five women are unmatched by their male counterparts. Massi’s calm determination in the face of court bureaucracy (they lose her file) and her humiliated husband crying, ‘Sir, I can’t live like this’ is contrasted with Ziba’s mixture of emotional tears and whispered deal-making. Saddest of all is Maryam, who, in a desperate bid to keep her children, tries bargaining (‘can I just keep one’), crying and openly lying. For all this, Divorce Iranian Style is an honest, truthful and most importantly human film.

Paul Huckerby

Format: DVD

Release date: 23 February 2009

Distributor: Third Window Films

Director: Im Sang-soo

Writer: Im Sang-soo

Cast: Song Jae-ho, Han Suk-kyu, Baek Yun-shik, Jeong Won-jung

South Korea 2005

102 mins

‘When the film was distributed in Korea it caused massive controversy, similar to the effects of a bomb within the Korean community. It was because the central figure in this movie was untouchable’, said writer/director Im Sang-soo on the occasion of a screening of his 2005 film The President’s Last Bang at the Tiger Film Festival in June 2008. Im is no stranger to controversy, his previous films Girl’s Night Out (1998) and A Good Lawyer’s Wife (2003) having received their fair share of criticism because of their frank sexuality, but in The President’s Last Bang he bravely takes on the revered South Korean president Park Chung-hee.

During the 60s and 70s, Park’s dictatorship modernised the country, but his methods were authoritarian and liberal ideals were brutally suppressed by his KCIA. His 18-year rule came to a bloody end in 1979 when he was assassinated and it’s that night that is the focus of Im’s film. The director is the first one to admit that the film is largely made up of material that comes from his own research and from his imagination, but the courts didn’t want their great leader tainted, so they censored the use of several minutes of documentary footage of Park’s funeral. However, international audiences can see the film uncut, with Im’s biting satire of the president alongside the emotional public outpouring that followed his death.

The film sees KCIA Director Kim (Baek Yun-shik) growing as tired of Park’s orders to get tough on student protestors as of the president’s decadent parties. It’s at one of these get-togethers that Kim decides enough is enough and he conspires with Chief Ju (Han Suk-kyu’s nonchalant, gum-chewing agent) to kill Park and his cronies. The impulsive deed itself is chaotic, Kim’s attempt to make it look like a terrorist attack is almost an afterthought, and it’s in the blind panic of the aftermath that Im really shines. As ministers run around like headless chickens and bicker about what to do next, Im uses darkly comic touches to mock the ineffectuality of the government. In the dead of night, as cut off from society as the leaders in Dr Strangelove‘s infamous war room, they’re exposed as a collection of competing egos and fragile, frightened ones at that. Im isn’t out to cause controversy in South Korea only but in any country where power is abused, admitting global powers like the US were a target too.

There’s a richness to Im’s devilish style that owes much to Coppola’s epic Godfather movies but there’s also something much edgier. Perhaps it has something to do with his tribute to Scorcese’s Taxi Driver in the scene where the camera floats slowly across the bloodbath at the president’s palace; but mainly it’s Im’s fusion of Korea’s sly humour with international politics that will earn him global attention. He won’t be content with being labelled merely a ‘Korean director’, and The President’s Last Bang demonstrates that he has the guts and talent to make it on the world stage, where he’ll no doubt soon rattle a few more cages.

Richard Badley

Format: DVD

Release date: 26 January 2009

Distributor: Third Window Films

Director: Tetsuya Nakashima

Writer: Tetsuya Nakashima

Based on the novel by: Muneki Yamada

Original title: Kiraware Matsuko no isshô

Cast: Miki Nakatani, Eita, Yusuke Iseya, Teruyuki Kagawa, Mikako Ichikawa

Japan 2006

130 mins

On paper, a quick scramble through the most memorable moments in the life of Matsuko would make for an unredeemably bleak read. Matsuko is unfairly sacked from her job as teacher, shacks up with a series of abusive lovers, ends up a massage parlour girl, completes an eight-year stint in prison for murder and descends into lonely madness, before her untimely end as a murder victim, at the age of 53.

It sounds dark and then some. But director Tetsuya Nakashima (of Kamikaze Girls fame) has a neon-bright vision, and his love of super-saturated colour, moody lighting and musicals gives this self-aware melodramatic weepy a slick, inventive cartoon dreaminess that is luminously arresting.

The film opens with 20-year-old Sho, played with slacker aplomb by Eita, being dumped by his girlfriend with the brutal announcement: ‘Life with you is a terrible bore.’ Direction-less Sho with mordant nihilism mumbles that ‘at any rate the future’s hopeless’ and heads for a fast-paced video life of clubbing, beer and porn.

His dad, who he hasn’t seen for two years, turns up at his place with a casket of ashes and the surprising news that his estranged and strange elder sister (Sho’s aunt) has been found dead. And Sho has been assigned the job of heading to her apartment to clear up the detritus of her ‘meaningless life’. Discovering a photo of his young aunt, dressed in a kimono, and pulling an absurd face, Sho gradually begins to unravel the mysteries of Matsuko’s life – the tragi-comic tale of a woman who went looking for love in all the wrong places.

Miki Nakatani is given the hard task of playing out the masochistic Matsuko, who seems to have adopted The Crystals’ song, ‘He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)’, as her romantic mantra. Chameleon-like in appearance – changing from a trimly besuited teacher with a prim hat to a bobbed-haired barber’s girlfriend to a cloudy-haired yakuza’s moll, Nakatani is surprisingly convincing, despite the outré-ness of the plot. She seems full of an uncontrollable needy passion, crying out, ‘with him I’d gladly go to hell or anywhere. That’s my happiness’, as she’s punched, yet again, in the eye by her latest (fucked up) beloved.

Nakashima continually ramps up the emotion, and then slyly twists it with a canny visual joke, or a quirky musical interlude. There’s a hip-hop prison song, where the inmates sing the jailhouse blues, or the absurdly perky ‘Happy Wednesday’, a whimsical skip of a song that infects everyone in the scene with a viral chirpiness, as Matsuko plays house for her married lover. The film is full of these kinds of visual delights – Lynchian swathes of hyper-real flowers, glittery Disney-ish birds, the black rubbish bags that turn into a murder of crows, wings beating frantically in Matsuko’s gloomy riverside apartment as her madness takes hold.

The film has its flaws: it’s overly long (130 minutes) and occasionally self-indulgent with its Hollywood ‘weepy’ references – there’s a truly cringe-worthy scene with a Bing Crosby-style priest – and the acting sometimes veers from the dramatic into teeth-clenching hysteria. But overall, Memories of Matsuko is funny and sad, and hugely inventive. It is bonkers, but mostly in a good way.

Eithne Farry

Format: DVD

Release date: 5 January 2009

Distributor: Optimum Releasing

Director: Jim Jarmusch

Writer: Jim Jarmusch

Cast: Johnny Depp, Gary Farmer, Crispin Glover

USA/Germany/Japan 1995

121 mins
Part of the Jim Jarmusch Collection Vol 2

Titles: Mystery Train, Night on Earth, Dead Man

As its title implies, Jim Jarmusch’s existential Western is preoccupied with death, an event which a Native-American character describes as ‘passing through the mirror’. Although it is the director’s most ambitious film to date in terms of its period recreation, Dead Man is, like Stranger than Paradise (1982) and Down by Law (1986), another film about social outsiders, their travels, and the people that they encounter before arriving at their destination. Beautifully shot in black and white by the great Robby Mí¼ller, and accompanied by a jangling guitar score by Neil Young, this is perhaps the film that most perfectly encapsulates Jarmusch’s directorial persona, aligning his credentials as the New York ‘hipster’ who put American independent cinema on the map in the early 1980s with his personal fascinations with foreign cultures and the erosion of the American dream.

William Blake (Johnny Depp) is a recently orphaned accountant from Cleveland, who travels West by rail to take a position at a metal works in a town called Machine, a nightmarish melting pot of environmental pollution and moral corruption, which is appropriately located at ‘the end of the line’. Upon arrival, he is informed by the proprietor of the works, Dickerson (Robert Mitchum), that the position has been filled, and that his services are not required. Finding solace in a bottle of whisky, Blake encounters former prostitute Thiel (Mili Avital) when she stumbles out of a saloon, and ends up in bed with her, only to be interrupted by her lover Charlie (Gabriel Byrne), who also happens to be Dickerson’s son. Charlie murders Thiel, and wounds Blake, but the accountant fires back with Thiel’s pistol and kills Charlie with a shot to the neck.

After making an amusingly inept getaway by falling out of the window and riding away on Charlie’s horse, Blake awakens in the woods to find Nobody (Gary Farmer), a Native-American outcast, trying to remove the bullet that is lodged close to his heart. Nobody points out that, because the bullet cannot be removed, Blake is already a ‘dead man’, as the wound will eventually prove to be fatal. The two men become riding companions, and Blake accepts his situation whilst wandering through the wilderness, while Dickerson dispatches three bounty hunters to bring his son’s killer to ‘justice’.

Jarmusch adopts the genre of the Western to comment on the state of contemporary America, and it’s often intertwined obsessions of violence, fame and money. ‘Why do you have this?’ Blake asks Thiel after discovering that she has a gun beside her bed. ‘Cause this is America’, is her reply. Most of the white characters are opportunistic hired killers, or want to attach themselves to the ‘celebrity’ of the outlaw that Blake unwittingly becomes, while Dickerson demands revenge for the murder of his son, but is more concerned about the return of his horse. Deadpan humour abounds, from a running joke about tobacco, to Mitchum delivering a speech to a stuffed bear, and Jarmusch achieves a haunting coda in which narrative trajectory meets spiritual transcendence. Buried by Miramax on its theatrical release in 1995 when Jarmusch refused to succumb to the editorial demands of Harvey Weinstein, Dead Man is a sublime experience that rewards repeat viewings.

John Berra