Limited Control

The official website for The Limits of Control has changed the date of the film's premiere. It seems we won't have to wait until May 22, as announced before, as the release date is now set to May 1 - i.e. just a month from now!

(It's possible that the change of date could have something to do with the film unexpectedly not entering the Cannes film festival May 13-24, though that remains a purerly hypothetical speculation.)

Peter Bowen at Film in Focus shares some light on the music used in the trailer for The Limits of Control – in the blog post "Setting the Soundtrack Straight":

"As soon as the trailer for Jim Jarmusch’s new film The Limits of Control was released, the Internet lit up with questions and excitement. At Yahoo Answers, Dave C. wanted to know about the trailer’s 'grifty music ! anyone knows what it is???Pleez Help !'  Many jumped in to help Dave C.  Some bloggers pointed to the Playlist post which notes 'according to the trailer credits for The Limits Of Control, Japanese all-embracing metal band Boris have written music for the film. Or at least the credit says, 'with music by Boris,' which suggests the film does more than use their old songs, but stops short of saying they wrote the score.'

While the Japanese trip Boris wrote and performed much of the music in the film, the trailer music (which is also in the film) was actually written by the director Jim Jarmusch himself. And it was performed by a band composed of Jarmusch (electric guitars, baritone guitar), Carter Logan (drums, percussion) and Shane Stoneback (carillon, organ)."

 

 

In the trailer to The Limits of Control, there's a shot of Isaach de Bankolé sitting in an art gallery, in front of a painting of a white veil covering the white canvas (the veil might be an actual sheet, whether it's painted or not is next to impossible to tell; it's slightly reminiscent of the 17th century painter Domenico Fetti's early trompe-l'œil "Veil of Veronica", or rather like a minimalist, conceptual – secular? – version of it.)

Thanks to a friendly contact in Spain, who's also a Jim Jarmusch scholar, I've found out that the painting in question is called "Gran sábana" (roughly Grand Sheet, or Great Veil), and was made in 1968 by the Catalan artist Antoni Tàpies. The gallery holding the painting (and many others by Tàpies) is the Museo Nacional Centro de arte Reina, Sofìa in Madrid, Spain, where, of course, some of the film was shot.

More on Tàpies (in Spanish):
http://www.artelista.com/biografia/9055383618353783-Antoni-Tapies.html

After a long time with only minimal information about Jim Jarmusch's upcoming film, The Limits of Control, the recent release of the trailer and the official Focus Features site brings us a lot to dive into.

The synopsis sounds roughly the same as in the first press release:

The release date has been confirmed as May 22, "in select theatres".

The tagline, on the official site, is:

For every way in, there is another way out.

The credits reveal that it features music by Boris (Wikipedia / MySpace), also heard in the trailer. Ideologic.org, a website devoted to artist Stephen O'Malley, who's a member of another drone metal band, Sunn O)), reports that the movie's soundtrack contains music by SUNN O))) & Boris, Boris and Earth.

The cast contains no surprises compared to what's been revealed earlier: Isaach De Bankolé, Alex Descas, Jean-François Stévenin, Luis Tosar, Paz De La Huerta, Tilda Swinton, Youki Kudoh, John Hurt, Gael García Bernal, Hiam Abbass, Bill Murray.

The trailer contains these floating titles:

 

and contains these snippets of dialogue:

- Go to the towers, go to the café. Wait a couple of days, and watch for the violin.

- No guns, no sex. How can you stand it?

- It's like a game. Deception. Suspicion.

- How did you get in here?
- I used my imagination.

- Among us, there are those that are not among us.
- I'm among noone.

- Is this your twisted idea of revenge?
- Avenge is useless.
- Everything's imagined.
- Sometimes the reflection is far more present than the thing being reflected

is up!

is up:

The Playlist on Blogspot.com brings news of the first official stills from The Limits of Control, via a link to a Spanish site where 13 images have been posted (included below). The resolution isn't very high, and they come with a Universal watermark, though they certainly give a good indication of the look of the film, still slated for release on May 22.

"They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, but when a movie travels from one country to another, the first thing it accumulates is a bunch of them. Words. They appear at the bottom of the picture like mold on cheese, and although they open the world of foreign film to a vastly wider audience, their presence is a constant reminder of our differences, the accent that an expatriate can't seem to shake. 
For the past decade, New York-based artist Stefana McClure has been inspired by that very text to create what she calls "films on paper," a seemingly obsessive art project in which she laboriously traces all of the subtitles that appear in a film, on top of each other in layers, and then transfers them to a piece of plain, colored paper. The result is an abstract work, roughly the size of a computer monitor, that captures not the story or cinematography of a film but the shape and placement of its text, the part of the picture you're normally supposed to see right through.  
Along the bottom of one of her pieces—a tracing from a film with English subtitles—is an indecipherable, blurry white smear that, when examined closely, shows fragments of letters leaking through. In a piece that's based on a film with Japanese subtitles, the white marks appear not as a stripe across the bottom but as two rows of squares, like the tire tread of a BMX bike, revealing the invisible grid used for Kanji characters.
/---/
She doesn't say exactly how she selects the films to work with, but her choices often seem to echo her apparent fascination with language and culture. In Mystery Train, Jim Jarmusch tells three stories set in Memphis, one of which involves a young Japanese couple visiting the legendary hometown of Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins. Even those of us who don't speak the couple's language understand the gist of their constant argument about which musician is better, but for the rest of their story, we need the subtitles. For her transfer of Mystery Train, however, McClure playfully used a version intended for a Japanese audience, a version with Japanese subtitles in every story but that one, reversing everything."

From PasteMagazine.com, "Life Camera Action: Films on Paper" by Robert Davis (January 22, 2009)

Read the whole article here.

Stefana McClure at the josée bienvenu gallery.

Last week, Jim Jarmusch attended the Küstendorf film & music festival in Serbia, hosted by Emir Kusturica (see earlier post). The festival site has now been updated to include a piece about "Jim Jarmusch's Workshop" (10-01 2009), along with a photo gallery (a few of these images attached below – © Küstendorf Film and Music Festival 2009). For the whole shenanigans, visit the festival site.