Permanent Vacation (1980)

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General		Extras
Category	Drama	Main Menu Audio
Rating
Year Of Production	1980
Running Time	71:56
RSDL / Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	1,2,3,4,5,6	Directed By	Jim Jarmusch
Studio Distributor	Madman Madman Entertainment	Starring	Jim Jarmusch Richard Boes Ruth Bolton Sara Driver Marķa Duval Frankie Faison Jane Fire Suzanne Fletcher Leila Gastil Chris Hameon John Lurie Eric Mitchell Chris Parker
Case	Amaray-Transparent
RPI	$29.95	Music	Jim Jarmusch John Lurie

Jim Jarmusch's first feature film Permanent Vacation (1980) features all the hallmarks which the director would be renowned for later in his directorial and writing career. The film is the culmination of Jarmusch dropping out of the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and using his tuition scholarship funds to finance a feature film which he wrote, produced and would direct featuring friends with no acting experience in lead roles. While at the prominent department of film studies at NYU Jarmusch met auteur Nicholas Ray (Jarmusch later became his teaching assistant), Wim Wenders and Tom DiCillio and honed his production skills as a production assistant and observer on Lightning Over Water (1980), Wenders' tribute to Ray. Combined with Jarmusch's extensive knowledge and enthusiasm for film history which was developed at the Cinematheque Francaise in Paris and his brief stint as a musician in a post-punk new wave band called Del-Bzyanteens, Permanent Vacation exists somewhere between American and European sensibilities and is further incidental of the Jarmusch protagonist who is a foreigner in their own environment.

"It's a film I made based on the main actor, or partly on his life - this friend of mine, Chris Parker. We just abstracted - we took a lot of things that happened to me and happened to accumulate the scenes and made a story out of them. It's a very loose narrative about a kid who just sort of wanders around. He doesn't go to school. He's sixteen. He doesn't live at home. He doesn't have a job. He just drifts around the city and encounters other sort of marginal people." (Jim Jarmusch in The Underground Film Bulletin Number: 4 September 1985 pp 21-22)

Knowing the background of Jarmusch one can't help but see Permanent Vacation as displaying Jarmusch's sense of isolation in the wide land of America. Jarmusch grew up in the industrialised city of Akron in Ohio and found an escape through avant-garde poetry, American literature, Japanese Horror films, James Bond and the films of actor Robert Mitchum. Subsequently Permanent Vacation is centred on Allie (Chris Parker), an insomniac sixteen year-old who dreams while awake. Allie is a character who drifts through life, but despite his youth he has some avid passions - from jazz music to cinema and literature. Through Jarmusch's signature stationary camera we experience moments with Allie; reading a passage out of a book aloud to his girlfriend, listening to a saxophone player in the midst of the night on a street corner, visiting his mother in a psychiatric institution, returning to his childhood home which lies in ruins and stealing a car in broad daylight. For Jarmusch life has no plot and neither should fiction and through Allie we see a character who needs to escape his bleak and grim environment to find some sense of reality.

This is an interesting art film which is best suited to fans of Jarmusch. Permanent Vacation is best described as a series of moments with a character who lives within us all; Allie is the dreamer within us all who refuses to be confined to the superficiality of the mainstream and wants to be passionate about everything and everyone who surrounds them. Allie does make that journey in the hope of a better existence and like all of Jarmusch's later protagonists he will make his inner consciousness an external reality, enabling oneself to find truth and hope.

Video

Permanent Vacation was shot on 16mm film and the 1.33:1 transfer is unfortunately riddled with defects. Objects on the film and heavy grain are existent throughout the feature and the colour is overly bright. The picture quality is relatively average in regards to sharpness but in respects to the low budget, independent picture which is over twenty years old, the transfer is adequate. It is also unfortunate that aliasing and comet trails occur in some scenes due to being filmed with analogue equipment. The transfer has been encoded at an average high bit rate of 7.69Mbps. There are no subtitles available.

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Audio

The soundtrack is a major accompaniment to the visuals. It was originally recorded in mono and reproduced on this DVD as an English Dolby Digital 1.0 Mono soundtrack. Many scenes are still and composer John Lurie and Jarmusch, who is also credited as helping with the music, create a tense atmosphere with sounds of war and repetitive music built on the sounds and rhythms of church bells which further demonstrates the character's mundane existence. Lurie also makes an improvisational cameo in the film as a saxophone player on a darkened street corner.

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Main Menu Audio

Less is more on a Jarmusch DVD and the still menu is accompanied by Lurie's saxophone soundtrack. Both the menu and the cover art are well themed to the concerns of the feature film. There are 12 chapter selections.

Germany (R2): This title is only available as part of the "Jim Jarmusch Collection" consisting of 9 DVDs packed in slimcases in a cardboard slipcase. Besides "Permanent Vacation", the collection includes: "Stranger Than Paradise", "Down By Law", "Mystery Train", "Night on Earth", "Dead Man", "Year of the Horse", "Ghost Dog", and "Coffee and Cigarettes"

The R2 (Germany) Permanent Vacation DVD includes the following extras:
• "Kino 84 - Jim Jarmusch" - 1984 documentary by Martina Müller in German (41:52)
• Jim Jarmusch Biography/Filmography
• Bonus trailers: "Down by Law", "Coffee and Cigarettes", "Stranger than Paradise", "Land of Plenty", "Warnung vor einer heiligen Nutte", "Million Dollar Baby" and "Das Schweigen"
• German subtitles

This is an interesting art film which is best suited to fans of Jarmusch. The picture and sound quality are relatively average and unfortunately the disc is bare-bones.

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