By Erik Morse
Poster for Jim Jarmusch’s latest film, The Limits of Control.
San Francisco Bay Guardian: I was trying to think how to go about this interview and present something slightly different to you than the same old questions you’ve been asked a hundred times over. I kept going back to various anthropology texts I’ve been reading recently. Have you heard of James Clifford’s essay “Traveling Cultures”?
Jim Jarmusch: No.
SFBG: Would you mind if I read a bit of it to you? I think it could be very relevant to our discussion.
JJ: Sure.
SFBG: “To begin, a quotation from C.L.R. James in Beyond a Boundary: ‘Time would pass, old empires would fall and new ones take their place. The relations of classes had to change before I discovered that it’s not quality of goods and utility that matter, but movement, not where you are or what you have, but where you come from, where you are going and the rate at which you are getting there.’”
“Or begin again with hotels: Joseph Conrad, in the pages of Victory: ‘The age in which we are encamped like bewildered travelers in a garish, unrestful hotel.’ In Tristes Tropiques, Levi-Strauss evokes an out-of-scale concrete cube sitting in the midst of the new Brazillian city of Goiania in 1937. It’s his symbol of civilization’s barbarity, ‘a place of transit, not of residence.’ The hotel as station, airport terminal, hospital: a place ou pass through, where the encouters are fleeting, arbitrary.”
It’s a very long and incredible essay and I thought of it immediately after seeing your latest film.