The Seward Park Branch Library is pleased to announce the second of its 2012 Lower East Side Heritage Film Series: the Eighties...
Tuesday, June 19 at 6:30 p.m.
In this installment of our FREE monthly series we will be showing Jim Jarmusch's first feature film:
Permanent Vacation (1980, 75 min., 16mm)
Jim Jarmusch direct his first feature: 16-year-old Aloysious Christopher Parker searches for meaning as he wanders a Lower East Side landscape of blind alleys, rubble-filled lots, and abandoned buildings. Along the way he meets his schizophrenic mother, a possibly psychotic war veteran, an hysterical Spanish-speaking Ophelia, and a junkie who recounts the sad life of Charlie Parker. Starring Chris Parker, Leila Gastil and John Lurie. With music by John Lurie.
Seward Park Branch Library
192 East Broadway
There's an essay by "Low Low" author Luc Sante in the booklet that accompanies the "Stranger Than Paradise" Criterion Collection, which includes "Permanent Vacation."
An excerpt:
"Permanent Vacation" sharply brings back the physical experience of the city then, both its serenity (a cobbled street lined with 19th-Century loft buildings possibly as empty as Egyptian temples) and its squalor (tenement rooms last painted during one of the Roosevelt administrations and pungent with the indelible odor of cockroaches).
Note the seemingly absolute darkness of the nighttime scenes. Note the devastation of the streets off Avenue C, looking like war ruins. We were right on the verge of owning the place, we thought — nobody else seemed to want it.
