Jim Jarmusch has been making films since the 1980s, but his creative interests span across the arts. He initially aimed to be a poet and studied under avant-garde writers such as Kenneth Koch at Columbia University in the 1970s. Since that period, he has also been part of multiple musical groups including The Del-Byzanteens and Sqürl, which are again classified as ‘avant-garde’. As I’ve explored in the past (O’Meara 2018), these interests in diverse art practices have consistently shaped his film style, as with his experiments with formalist structures in works like Stranger Than Paradise (1984) and Coffee and Cigarettes (2003). Now in his early 70s, Jarmusch has continued to embrace other media forms and formats. Since December 2018 he has made regular use of Instagram, with nearly three hundred posts at the time of writing. In 2021 he also released his first book, Some Collages, a collection of some of the hundreds of tiny collages he’s been making for decades, by layering newsprint cuttings on notecards. 

Unlike many filmmakers who have taken to Instagram as another channel through which to promote their films, or as a way to deepen para-social relationships with their fans by sharing more of their personal life, Jarmusch’s content aptly feels like another collage; of his creative interests and inspiration. This means that even though Jarmusch’s longstanding interests in (making) counterculture can feel at odds with Instagram’s status as a heavily commercialised mainstream platform, the content that he shares there is congruent both with the iconography of his films and his collage work. Alongside images of the kinds of urban façades and graphically bold signage (‘Unfuck the world’, ‘Danger’, ‘Gorilla playing saxophone’) characteristic of his mise-en-scène, he shares pictures of political signs and slogans (‘Anti-Fascist’ ‘END GUN VIOLENCE’ ‘Certified Plant Based’). He also posts imagery, often black-and-white, of historic performers and artists he admires or who have recently died. All this is interspersed with the occasional photo of one of his own newsprint collages, which can act like a synecdoche for the collage-like nature of his Instagram feed in general. As Jarmusch explains in an article on his collages for Art News (2021), “Whether it’s writing a script, making a piece of music, or shooting a film, I’m always drawn toward variations and repetitions. Very often with all of these forms, I try to place seemingly disparate elements beside one another. I always start by gathering materials for quite a long time that relate to some idea that I’m starting to form.” In a similar way, Instagram serves as a public mood board where he gathers seemingly disparate elements related to creative projects, past and present.

Citations: 

Jim Jarmusch, “Jim Jarmusch on Creative Process, Early Influences, and Pandemic Inspirations.” Art News, September 15 2021, https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/interviews/jim-jarmusch-interview-sightlines-creative-process-early-influences-pandemic-inspirations-1234603911/. 

Jennifer O'Meara, Engaging Dialogue: Cinematic Verbalism in American Independent Cinema, Edinburgh University Press, 2018.