week 6 DOWN BY LAW

Down By Law (1986) directed by Jim Jarmusch - also know for films such as Coffee & Cigarettes and Broken Flowers - is a  combo escape-from-prison/buddy movie filmed in 1986 on location in New Orleans.  It stars two musicians, Tom Waits and John Lurie who play sleazy, small-time criminals who are set up and go to jail where they meet as cell mates.

This film is more of a character sketch then a typical plot-driven narrative. Jarmusch said he chose to shoot New Orleans neighborhoods showing shotgun houses, porch life, and poverty as opposed to the iconic images of New Orleans, because he was trying to portray a specific landscape that is only apparent in the details – this helps to put the focus on the characters and how they interact with their environment.  The use of black & white places the environment and the characters in high contrast and makes the characters a part of the environment.  Also reinforcing this idea is how the camera never focuses specifically on a character or on the environment – both character and architecture are equally represented.  This whole world is integrated, one thing is not different from the another.

Throughout the film, there is no fast editing - it has a really slow pace and yet our attention is held by our curiosity of the characters and the quality of the photography.  There is time in each shot to really investigate the entire composition.  And what we notice in these opening neighborhood shots is that despite our knowledge that New Orleans is an older culture represented by its aging architecture, these images still don’t really represent any specific era, it’s neutral.  The characters in this film exist only in the present.  When I first watched this film, I didn’t know it was made in 1986 and I couldn't decide if it was from the 70s, 80s, 90s or now.

In order to further discuss the relationship of the film to the built environment, I'm going to discuss a few key scenes, the first one being the scene where Zach (played by Tom Waits) is thrown out by his girlfriend (played by Ellen Barkin).  And in it we see the first example of a spatial typology that will be consistently replicated throughout the rest of the film consisting of: bare white walls with writing on them, very high ceilings (so high in fact that you don’t see them in most of the shots), and the foreground frequently established by windows, doors, or bars (and even the lites in these French doors recalls the imagery of prison bars).  The purpose of using this same spatial typology throughout the film is to show these characters moving through the events of their life without any relative change.  Their station in life remains unaffected.  They've always been in prison and they'll never leave it.

The two men meet in prison and it's through the set design that we are given clues about the status of their relationship.  When we first see these two men in the same shot, they have not yet begun to talk to each other and are suspicious of one another.  They are filmed from outside the prison cell with the bars in the foreground, dominating our attention.  Once they begin talking with one another, albeit disrespectfully, they are filmed from inside the prison cell but the bars are still in the background.  When they finally begin to reveal information about themselves to each other establishing a friendship, they are filmed next to each other without the bars in the frame.  Later on they fight and as they start to get physically aggressive the camera again shows the bars in the frame.  The built environment throughout this whole film is used to tell the story of the characters

Also in this scene Zach says “The walls don’t exist, the floor doesn’t exist, this prison’s not here, these bunks aren’t here, the bars aren’t here, none of  this is really here…none of this is really here at all.”  Zach exists in the present irregardless of his current environment.

The repetition of the same spatial typology continues when, after escaping from jail, they find a shack that looks identical to their prison cell.  Jarmusch also exploits a lot of prison bar imagery as they run through the swamps and are surrounded by tall trees highly contrasted in black & white. Eventually they find their way out of the swamp to a restaurant which become the final iteration of the same prison cell typology.  This restaurant is their salvation from the swamp yet it still looks like a prison cell and this is because, regardless of their "being free," nothing has really changed in their life.  They are still the same small-time criminals they were at the beginning of the movie.  This movie is an example of how to film architecture in a way that sets up and defines the characters or culture of the narrative.