Why I’m Screening Down By Law To Mark The Completion Of Noirish Project

Why I’m Screening Down By Law To Mark The Completion Of Noirish Project

I discovered Down By Law while I was teenager living in a bleak and obscure South Wales coastal town during the mid-1990s. Flipping channels on the TV one night at about 2am, I stumbled upon Ellen Barkin and Tom Waits having an almighty bust-up in monochrome. I didn’t know what the hell I was watching but I liked it. And I kept watching, and I kept watching and I kept watching, until the film ended. I was stunned. I had never seen anything like it. The rhythm was completely new to me, slow and flat as it was, with pared back editing. Up til that point,  my only exposure to black and white cinematography had been old British movies which I watched in the day-time whenever I was home sick from school. It was the first film where I remember being conscious of the cinematography, I contemplated it long and hard after the film’s end. I was piqued by the characters too. Naturally, I had seen low-lifes in movies before but these guys were cool but not supermen. I became hooked on Jarmusch’s self-conscious dialogue, this is not something I had seen before, dialogue was something filmmaker’s always seemed to try to hide but here it was celebrated. Down By Law was the first film I ever saw which paid a lot of attention to small details. This was no high falutin’ kings n queens going to war, in fact, there is little drama after the opening third of the picture. The famous jail cell scene, is almost literally that; Tom Waits, John Lurie and Roberto Benigni hanging around marking time, in a jail cell. Sure there were moments of conflict but they were only fleeting. Jarmusch had in effect turned cinema inside out: usually filmmakers concentrated on the big stuff with only the occasional quiet moment, Jarmusch created quiet moments with only the occasional outburst.

Down By Law was the film which signalled to me that cinema was a great deal more diverse than our local movie theatre would have had us believe, dominated as it was by Hollywood fare. Jarmusch’s film piqued me to seek out and find other films which I had never heard of. This was not such an easy task back in the 1990s, the internet was only in it’s infancy and you’d pay about £20 for a VHS of a European arthouse film (of which, Kieslowski’s Three Colours: Blue was my first purchase) but it could be done though.

So, nearly 20 years later, after completing my own first feature film, it seems fitting to mark the occasion by screening the picture which, quite possibly, started my cinematic journey.

Drifting Clouds Cinema will doing a free screening of Down By Law on Saturday 7th September, at The Chapel Cinema in Bethnal Green, E2 9PL.