Jim Jarmusch

Stranger Than Paradise is largely people sitting in rooms in New York and Cleveland while a fixed camera stays on them past the point of comfort. That timing is the constant. A bus driver writes poems on his route and nothing disturbs it in Paterson; two vampires in Only Lovers Left Alive have been alive so long they are mainly bored. The films are comedies about foreigners, literal or otherwise, working out how a place operates.

Signature

• Static long takes held well past the end of the exchange.
• Deadpan delivery and comic pauses.
• Outsiders arriving somewhere they do not read fluently.
• Episodic structure, often black and white.