Jim Jarmusch is an American independent film director with a dominant characteristic of his cinema; marginality. The director’s movies focused on outsiders, people who wander with no destination, at odds with themselves and others, traveling through a wasteland of modern America. This study seeks to determine how Jarmusch creates marginality via the cinematography of a film
Down by Law. The primary source of this paper is the film. Secondary sources include existing interviews of the director and other related materials. The analysis part will briefly touch upon technicalities of implemented camera work and provide images from the film. The study proposed that marginality has its cycle that consists of four elements; stranger, interference stage, freedom, separation. Further analysis demonstrates the depiction of the cycle in the film. The results indicate that Jim Jarmusch employs specific camera techniques such as long shots, momentum, lighting, horizontal representation, static shots, and black and white choice of photography to underline the notion of marginality in the film
Down by Law.
