Jim Jarmusch's 70th birthday
January 22, 1953 in Cuyahoga Falls, a suburb of Akron, Ohio, in the family of Robert Thomas Jarmusch and his wife Ruth Elizabeth, a son was born, who was named James Roberto. The father of James, or simply Jim, who had Czech-German roots, worked in a tire company. The surname "Jarmusch" is of Czech origin. Jim's mother, who had German-Irish roots, worked as a film and theater columnist for the local newspaper before marrying Jim's father. After the birth of her first child, she devoted herself to home and children. It was she who instilled in Jim a love of books and cinema in early childhood.
After graduating from high school in 1971, Jim Jarmusch moved to Chicago and enrolled at Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. However, he soon became disillusioned with journalism and, discovering a flair for versification, the following year he transferred to Columbia University with the intention of becoming a poet, where he studied English and American literature under the avant-garde poets of the New York School. There he began writing short "semi-narrative abstract pieces" and became editor of the student literary magazine The Columbia Review. During his senior year at Columbia University, Jarmusch entered an exchange program and moved to Paris, where he spent 10 months. In Paris, Jarmusch worked as a driver for an art gallery and spent most of his time at the French Cinematheque.
In 1975, Jim Jarmusch graduated from Columbia University with a Bachelor of Arts degree and entered the graduate School of the New York University School of Art. In his last year of graduate school, Jarmusch received an offer to work as an assistant to director Nicholas Ray, who, knowing that he was in the last stage of cancer, decided to make a film about his death. Ray's co-director on this film was Wim Wenders. A film called "Lightning over Water" was released in 1980, a year after Ray's death. Under the impression of working with Ray and Wenders in 1980, Jim Jarmusch shot his first full-length feature film "Permanent Vacation" as his thesis. The film did not impress the graduate school professors at all, and Jarmusch was left without a degree. But later, Jarmusch's first film received a lot of laudatory reviews from film critics and enjoyed success with moviegoers.
By his 70th birthday, Jim Jarmusch has shot 13 full-length feature films (in addition to numerous documentaries and videos) and one short story for the movie almanac. 3 films out of 13 shot by Jarmusch were included in the Golden Thousand, including "Down by Law", "Dead Man", "Night on Earth". Thanks to this indicator, Jim Jarmusch is included in the list of the 100 greatest film directors of world cinema compiled by FilmGourmand. Jim Jarmusch's film-making activity was awarded 35th film awards. Among the most prestigious Jarmusch film awards there are no American, but there are several European ones, including the Grand Prix of the Cannes Film Festival, the Golden Leopard of the Locarno International Film Festival, the European Film Academy Award, the Danish Bodil Award. And this circumstance confirms the validity of Jarmusch's attribution to the number of leaders of the so-called "independent cinema".
In commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the Master, I want to remind fans of his work of the frames from his best films included in the Golden Thousand.
